Severity of Exploit Usage and Proper Reactions [Non-staff] and/or Punishment [Staff]

[Teshno]

Your definition of an exploit is my definition of a glitch...
My way of explaining it:
Glitch: Unusual occurence, bug in code, can ruin gameplay for others and/or yourself.
Exploit: A hole in the system in which was not expected to ever happen. By "not expected", I mean as if you lived in a farm and some guy brought a shotgun and started shooting all of your animals.

This explanation is perfectly accurate if you ask me, because a lot of people do get the Glitch [Errors in coding] and the Exploit [Unintended abuse of bugs] mixed up, but both can be used for the same malicious purpose of giving yourself an unfair advantage.

However, you can turn a glitch into an exploit. The Unmodded/No Texture Pack X-Raying glitch with pistons is considered an exploit, but at its base could be a graphical glitch in Minecraft. Glitches and bugs being used as exploits is what causes the confusion if you ask me.

[Krittercon]

@Remi

Actually you can make it look like you were just extremely and stumbled upon diamonds when making your branches that continue on from that point. The only traces left is that there have been one block where multiple stone blocks have been broken, but no one placed. You may also find traces of pistons. If you do it the right way you can reduce the amount of traces left behind to maybe 8 blocks or less, depending on the size of the diamond ore. I could show you sometimes. It relies on the same trck I used when "X-rayed" with the Satori account, only that time I made it look like I had x-rayed when I hadn't.

There's an issue here though. With your case, you were hiding a placement, which is not something staff would look into on a normal case. But if you're planning to bring home diamonds, you would need to eventually break them which would leave a log and plenty of traces from that point on. While I do know a few ways to use what you did to turn it into making an x-rayed vein look naturally, it's extremely time consuming to properly cover up to the point that standard strip mining would probably give you a better diamond to time ratio... The entire point of x-raying in the first place is pretty much lost.

[Remilia Scarlet]

Basically what kritter said. The reason why we punish xraying is because it lets the xrayer collect a large sum of diamonds in a time normally impossible. This is detrimental as it takes a lot of diamonds away from other users who would be finding them at a slower, legitimate pace. If you're spending so much time to cover up your tracks xraying and end up taking enough time to almost nullify the speed advantage you get in finding the diamonds... well, you're not really causing any detriment to the players, granted this doesn't mean we won't punish you if we catch you.

Also for coverup, worst case scenario we can just look at the time stamps on when blocks were placed and do a block by block check on exactly how an area was mined/covered up and figure out how "xray-ey" it is.


As for definition of exploit, if you're purposely abusing any sort of bug or hack that gives you an unfair advantage, you're exploiting. Done deal.