I tried the fix also, no luck. Although I'm happy it fixed yours for you!! ;)

There is a work around that a player by the name of Blasticus on PEQ recently discovered and told us about. At one point I thought accessing a webpage while simultanously logging in would prevent an SSSE but couldn't get it to work the majority of the time. Blasticus tried using a speed test and found it worked very well and so have I. Here is what works for me, open the EQ client and type in your username and password in windowed mode so it is ready to go. Now find any speed test website with your webbrowser (I've been using performance.toast.com or infospeed.verizon.net) and get ready to start the speed test. Start the speed test then switch to the EQ client and quickly log in.

What's important is you 1) start the EQEmu authentication process and 2) get past the server select screen _while_ the speed test is downloading its sample.

It also apparently works if you do the speed test on another system that uses the same router as your EQEmu system.

Hair brained? It sure is... but it works so well for me during a meteor shower of SSSEs that it's more than just dumb luck. I suppose if I want to figure out why it works I'll need to put my nose back into packet sniffing.

Speedtest fix doesn't work for me, but deleting the client files does, very tedious to reset my key sets and resolution though.

First of all I'm sort of a newb, so this probably doesnt mean anything...

But I noticed after I deleted my client data (as described above) and tried to log in, it gives me a VERY brief error message before crashing. The only reason I was able to see it is by doing a print screen:

"Sorry %3, you already have the maximum number of active tasks"

Any ideas?

*P.S. Almost positive that this has something to do with me deleting the wrong file, but I thought I'd post it anyway just in case. Going to reinstall EQ and see if I get the same thing.

Uggh... and it begins. As I mentioned before in this thread please do not post if your symptoms do not match the original post 100%. Already the other crash type posts are starting.

Are there any devs that happen to be reading this thread? I'd very much like to hear their input on the survey packets being sent theory.

I'm guessing that people are having luck with the speed test trick because it uses a lot of bandwidth and is probably delaying the survey packet long enough for you to login.

Did anyone trying this also do a packet capture?

i cannot belive that speed test worked for me... had about 20 SSSE, and then tried with speed test, and worked at first shot, you need only to log just when test is runing.

... Its fairly a solution, but worth a try when you need more ... more ... more ... more ... you know :O

I think packet collecting isnt useful enough on this problem... as you can't packet collect the loggin server itself, and no idea if it is possible.

maybe the ISP... dunno.

I'm not sure what you mean by this... packet collecting what the login server is sending is how this problem was diagnosed in the first place (see the first post in the thread)

i already did, but if it isnt posible finding the corrupt opcode by using this packet collector, then maybe isnt a tracing error, SSSE came up after loggin moved... host maybe corrupt... no idea...

im a fool in all of this, the post you queued was intended for letting know that speed test works, the next text i added was just a think... someting from a person that has not much knowledge with how trackers/hosts work, but lived long time with the monitor on my nose ^^ and breathing eqemu...

Sry my interruption... please devs, programmers, You Rock !! its time to destroy that SSSE !!

you are our last hope ...

Does this so called survey packet refer to that pop up in the character select screen from sony asking if they can gather anonymous data? If it is, I may have a fix..

Once in game, hit alt-o for options and look where it says "Allow sysinfo send" and turn that on. Let me know if that works.

If this is not what the survey packet is, than I'm not sure I've ever seen it before while logging in....

Regards,
Sonic

Not sure if anything has changed recently, but yesterday 3 of my accounts got the "is this thing on?" survey... to which I (obviously) said yes. Now those accounts no longer crash. The remaining accounts continue to crash at the server select screen.

No, Sonic. This is not the data collection option in the client. Occasionally during login (before the server select screen) SOE would dish out news bulletins or mini surveys (very rarely) to users to select before arriving at the server selects.

This thread is brilliant. Excellent detective work.

4 of my accounts yesterday got a successful survey. The survey pack contains the question Is this thing on? and 4 possible answers. With responses of submit and skip. So, when I stated before that you always got a survey packet of one size, then list of servers, then 1 or more additional survey packets I was incorrect. The actual transmission is a survey packet, then the list of servers, then zero or more additional survey packets less an 8 byte custom udp header. If no bogus survey packets follow then you get the survey displayed, if 1 or more bogus ones arrive then you crash.

I answered all 4 the same way, as above. One of them crashed again several hours later when I went to log it back in. So, answering the survey does not guarantee the login server will not ask again.

As to the other poster about cannot packet sniff the login server, all of the survey packets are identified as coming from the login server IP and Port with appropriate sequence numbers to suggest they really did.

Of all my accounts (9 active now) only 1 got prompted with the survey. (Is this thing on) and I answered "Yes" too. The account still drops though.

I hope that the surveys were sent out as an attempted response by the devs to this thread. I'd be happy just to know someone is aware and looking into it, even if the first attempt didn't work. If the survey pops up again I might try answering something else and see what happens.

Good work to all the non-dev people for providing useful information.

after altering the eqlsPlayerData file to be exactly the same as Gopdar, it didn't stop the error from occuring. However, it doesn't do it nearly as often, and i can generally get in after 2 or 3 tries...