Let me spend a few minutes clearing this up.

[The_Iron_Mudkip] [just make ur way to the estate. using xray mod for diamonds again

This got caught in our filter, Jawa went out and investigated, found the user had left diamond sniping holes in a mining tunnel, screenshots need to be dug out of the RT backup if you really insist on seeing them, we just migrated to the new server.

Mudkip messaged other players about using x-ray, this flagged them for investigation, and a quick ban to give a warning about banned player association as that's the most effective way to deliver warnings. Very standard procedure.

Sender: The_Iron_Mudkip receiver: Altairus Message: xray is working for redstone and quartz. start digging

He gets into modmail, someone sends him a Alts prompt because its useful to have records on that but probably more because they didn't see the email about him being banned and thought it was an alts case like most others.

Turns out he had created a modmail, waited a few hours, deleted the associated reddit account, and then made this modmail, we spend a little bit trying to figure that out and retrieve any data from the first modmail.

Now Jawa has arrived and asks about mods, this is sort of open ended, if people admit to cheating here we are generally very lenient, we also need to know about mod loadout due to the precedent that using hacked clients changes the way evidence is applied.

Nothing out of the ordinary on mods, so we go for a more direct approach, ask about x-ray.

He gives a short blurb, he has heard of people who use x-ray, we ask him if that's all and tell him that our logs say otherwise (he knows someone who uses it, specifically but has failed to report when asked in more and more detail, this is usually a sign the player is either cheating themselves or associated with banned players)

So finally we ask directly about the player, he gives another non-committal response. At this point I am just confused and send the final response mostly just to send somthing and bump the thread, I have other tickets to get to.

So now we are onto things not provided in his screenshots, he admits to having received the message immediately after we confront him with it and asks why its relevant, we ask why he went to such lengths to hide a simple message?

His final response is where he admits to using x-ray, not sure if this is true actually, but investigating it will be easy enough.

Welp, seems like you caught me. You imply evidence even I don't recall, and implicate someone else who was trying to help himself and me even though he risked his own account to do so. Yes, I used x-ray. No, it's not worth being banned over. But the fact of the matter is nothing would have changed had I even been innocent, because as I've mentioned people have been banned for less concrete 'evidence', in good standing with the rules or not. I can see this shit isn't going anywhere. As it is, it took several weeks to even send the modmail because I honestly can't see a reason to plead a case with mods who historically have not given a shit. There's your confession.

Now, provided investigation checks out, he is going to get a ban length of several months, standard non investigation cooperative x-ray ban and this case can finally be shut. Or perhaps somthing closer to the cooperative length, he did cooperate eventually.

So what really happened here? Modmail worked, we got a lead, found concrete evidence for mudkip, performed investigation into connections, following up with Altairus showed he was acting strange, we turned out to be right and we got another cheater.

All in a days work of investigation that is a good and fair mix of intuition and evidence. If Altairus had not pushed the issue the following would have probably have happened, in game investigation of his recent mining activities to see if they matched an x-ray's profile, if so we would record that evidence and push the case, if not then we would let him off with a warning like we would have in a couple of hours if he was not acting defensive and sketchy from the start of this thread.

What can we learn from this situation? People love to and are very willing to believe the admins are unfair, biased, and ban happy even when we do what is almost the most perfect open and shut detective case I can ever show you. Furthermore if this had to happen for every case then bans would take 4-10 times as long, like they did back in the day when none but the most blatant cheaters got banned because it was simply too much work and there was no room for following a lead.

Now I get about an hour to myself to read a book or otherwise relax every night, dealing with this has consumed this hour. so goodnight.