There is in fact a workaround that will give solo-explorers a fair chance to explore and discourage (mostly) all forms of OOC cheating. I suspect you've thought of it already and haven't brought it up because, frankly, it is going to require more work on your part. Zulghinlour called it out further in the thread - it has to be Imm-controlled and one more thing to manage.

Morph the Silent Tower into an Imm-controlled world event. On some random day when enough Imms feel up to the coordination, one or several chambers of the Silent Tower become open for exploration. There is little barrier to enter, there is a set time limit to complete the event, and players accrue credits for reaching checkpoints and solving puzzles. At the end of the event, Imms tally up the credits and through their own discretion provide the rewards. Some people will lose out, and some people will gain. In some respects, this will dissuade DIKU1 from IM'ing DIKU2 to share information during the event because now it becomes a competition instead of cooperation.

Every future iteration of the event has new challenges so previous knowledge means nothing, only current ambition, cleverness, and luck.

At the surface I suspect this comes off as a major time suckage for you and may eat away at the original goal of ST, but maybe it's possible to code a sort of randomness engine for rooms, keywords, mob difficulty at the onset, so that when you have future iterations of this event it doesn't require a whole mess of replanning but simply a 'randomize' command.

Actually, as I write this I become a bit depressed because now I've left the whole territory of 'anyone can do this at any time they want' to 'staff policing is necessary for exploration fun,' but based on my own thoughts and what I've read so far in the thread it does seem like there is no concrete solution that will bring your original idea to CF in a fair way. Bummer. I never explored the Tower.

And now that I've re-read what I wrote, I become even more depressed by the realization that you guys have already been doing this for some time and have recognized it's probably the fairest way for these types of things. Super bummer. Start charging for CF, give yourselves a salary, and staff up some quest runners.

Sigh. Exit out.