The legal issues surrounding the ban against my self and others are not complicated. This dicussion has be polluted with absurd amounts of irrelevant information, and no one seems interested in addressing the basic legal questions. I have explained a fraction of the Kafkaesque series of bizarree and seemingly unrelated admin interventions here, and I think that was worth doing, but the legal discussion is not as complicated as the possible convoluted sets of reasoning that might be used to justify all the interventions that occured. Firstly I would like to explain how we found the flaw in the vault.

How we found the flaw in the vault:

The players involved for the initial finding were Yakman1(me), Richard_T, and TravisSupreme. Anyone else having made claims about how this occured were not present and had not been given the information about how we did it because we were very secretive about the whole thing for weeks. No one else making claims about this actually knows what they are talking about.

We used world downloader and not x-ray. We could have just has easily explored the vault with an older download that was publicly distributed here. The same vulnerability existed then too, go download it and try to find it yourself! Several others commenting in that thread explored the vault in single player at the time, so people claiming that our use is novel on the server are mistaken. (This player was not banned for example. But by the new standard invented by Tactful, he was "X-raying".)

We found the flaw where no one else did for months and months by doing several pratice attempts against the vault in order to understand the problem. No one used x-ray during this time and I have no idea why one would even think that x-ray would help find the path we found. There are plently of crevices of dirt and stone around the bedrock and making out a continuous path like the one we found would be near impossible with X-ray. You would just see a bunch of lines and random patterns everywhere. We found the tunnel by digging around in a downloaded version of the map in a different server.(We were also trying to get vault design ideas for our own design, a method several regulars had suggested.) By my calculation the vault was weaker from the sides due to the fact that it is thinner on the sides. You have to dig two blocks to walk through, but this is countered by the fact that a large number of people can keep a much higher percent of the total break path in their range, leaving a smaller path for the final 1 person stretch. Because of this, we began checking the sides and quickly saw that the outermost rim of the obsidian overlapped unprotected dirt and bedrock in varios places. The natural course from there was to find the optimal crevice in the dirt and stone that would give us a good head start. We dug out all around, and the head start we found was quite a head start. We found it not when no one else did for 6 months or more not because we did anything unfair or unprecedented, but because we were naive enough to try, and because we actually worked on it rather than accepting defeat.

The legality:(please read along here)

on cheating:

These actions are definitely outside of the definition of cheating provided by ttk2 in 1. and 2. above.

There are second hand reports of ttk2 personally allowing the use of world downloader here and here.

on precedent: No relevant precedent exists in the thread above about banning for use of world downloader in the manner we used it, nor has anyone listed any relevant precedent in the discussions I have seen. There is precedent for the legality of the use of the world download mod is here and here. Of course this may not imply that all uses are legal. It seems that anyone using it is overwhelmingly likely to have gained some information that they could not have gained given where they actually stood in game while the downloading occured. Also the nature of our use was very typical of what the mod tends to be used for on the server as far as I can tell from discussing with several people.(anyone reading please post more specific examples of past uses if possible) Tactful has claimed that use of world downloader to see any blocks that one was not in a position to see is by definition equivalent to x-ray.

First note that because these methods are not real time, nor do they allow one to "see through the map" other than in the very weak sense of breaking blocks that are not broken on the actual server, they are not actually against the rules regardless of whether he classifies them as "equivalent to x-ray" or not.

Further, the method we used is far from being "equivalent to x-ray" for the following reasons:

1.) X-ray allows one to make a determination about the existence of some occluded condition of interest without any active search.(I think this is not actually true in our case as explained above) Our motivation to dig around came from a conscious exploratory effort, and given the conditions we saw, most players would not have been motived enough to try this in the first place.

2.) X-ray allows one to greatly reduce the search time to find some occluded object of interest, when one is engaged in a search for it.(I my view it wouldn't have helped in this case anyway) Our method did not do this, we had the exact same search problem we would have faced on the server.

3.) If breaking downloaded blocks is the nonrealtime "functional equivalent" of X-ray, then rendering screenshots from viewing positions not achievable in-game should be considered the nonrealtime "functional equivalent" of free cam, and should also be bannable.(i.e. ban all the people making renders for cheating to peak into their neighbors back yards.)

I do accept the point that in a sense we circumvented snitches by gaining information about the map while avoiding the snitch networks that would have tracked us given we had done the same thing in game.(We did not circumvent citadel in a similar way because the blocks we needed to break to find the tunnel were not actually enforced at all in game.) This is a good point, basically we gathered information about the map through a process that is equivalent to the ingame process except for the fact that snitches are not triggered in the process. I agree with this point, but by now we are so far from the letter of the rules or their spirit that it really isn't worth talking about in respect to the ban. This same issue is also involved in all the other well known world downloader use precedents listed above.

Maybe one could make a new rule that normal information gathering while avoiding snitches in this way is against the rules, although I think that would be a horrible rule, and would be against a mountain of usage precedent.

To summarize the legality points:

1.) What we did was not cheating under the rules and had no relevant ban precedent.

2.) There is precendent for several legal uses of world downloader, all of which are overwhelmingly likely to have given the players involved some information that they could not have gained given where they actually stood in game while the downloading occured.

3.) Tactful's legal reasoning for a new rule against using world downloader in this way, if accepted, should not be applied retroactively.

4.) Tactful's simplistic case for functional equivalence to X-ray for producing this new rule does not hold up to scrutiny.

What we did to find what we found was legal. No one found what we found for all these months because no one tried like we tried. We came at the problem without accepting the collective defeatist delusion that the vault can not be broken and the world police cannot be beaten. X-ray would not have solved the problem, and we can all be pretty certain that many people have approached that particular problem with X-ray and failed. What we did is a perfect model of a legitimate success by an underdog, and that is the reason that the community is behind us.

Also please remember that breaking the vault took about 7 hours during which we had to fight off several "world police" between 3-4 of us guarding the surface. What we found reduced the required time, but it was still no small feat to survive and complete the 7 hour task.