I was thinking on this and came up with something that might be even easier to implement. How about just requiring a valid E-Mail address to patch with 1 patch allowed per email address. I'm not sure of the EQemu account struture and what work has been done around it, but keeping a simple list of legit emails to test against seems fairly trivial. This would allow people to patch more than once since almost everyone has multiple email addresses, but it would put a limit on how many times people patched.

It seems this would keep people from doing the Live -> Emu -> Live shuffle knowing that they only got one patch per email address.

Yeah, but then you might have people going and signing up for a bunch of free e-mail accounts to keep patching.
No, it doesn't make sense, but some idiots think that's a good idea.

True, they might just do that...but each one of those signups takes time and it is time that the USER has to spend to patch and not time the DEVS need to spend coding "patch allowance" code.

I don't know what the main bandwidth hog is, but if it's people who patch from live to emu 5 or 6 times a day as they jump back and forth then the time to sign up for each one of those email accounts would build up. I would think that the annoyance of having to do the signin for each of those would become more of a pain than doing a CTRL-C/CTRL-V on their Everquest directory and burning the 2GB and 3-4minutes once.

You cant register using a free e-mail service.. if you know of one that we have not banned yet, please send a
PM to me or to hogie so we can ban it.

... dunno, maybe you should just ban AOL too?

Hmm, didn't think about that one considering I didn't try my hotmail account. Although I guess that one isn't free anymore.
hmm......
the main ones that come to mind are yahoo and mailcity. I know I've seen some other ones around but the best thing to do for that is get on google and just type in free e-mail or something similar. You guys probably have a good list going already though.

Patcher bad idea lol
 

:lol: i just got back into this lol and i lost old copy of eq but im not gonna runaround cryin cause it was my own fault
patcher is bad for these guys cause they gotta pay for that bandwith that people leach from
just ogtta wait for recient EQ support and i am right now making a 4th of july backup copy of eq with all expansions and the veksar zone
that way when the emu catches up ill be ready then
you guys are doin a good job up there helpin us run our own servers for a lan party ect.
keep it rockin and keep america free :)



DEATH TO VOX

ps. anyone want to help me creat a db to put vox and naggy both in freeport:) and have then not able to boot ya out if your over lvl 52 :)
i wanna solo them when i get my server up lol

LOL it is nearly impossible to ban all the possible free E-Mail places out there, because there are so mind-numbingly many that it's insane. I could right now, without thinking hard, post a hundred different E-Mail addresses all free that would undoubtably work fine in registering to these forums.

For example, I myself use http://wi.zzn.com for web-based E-Mail, it's free, I highly doubt it's been banned here, etc etc etc.

Not to mention all the ones I could use mail forwarding with... make a free website at Virtualave.net and suddenly I have as many E-Mails as I want. Anything@mysite.virtualave.net and AnythingElse@mysite.virutalave.net all would forward to anything I wanted it to, including hotmail or yahoo or zzn. And virtualave is definately not the only site like this out there.

Then again, now that I think about it, you guys can just stay up-to-date with people that sign up with your forums. Just every so often look through the E-Mail addresses people sign up with, find a few you've never heard of before, and go to the site to see if they are free or forwarding or what... then add that mail provider to the ban list.

- Icon

free e-mail addresses
 

i'm sorry for being a newbie and not knowing a lot about eqemu, but i think the reason free e-mail addresses were banned was because they didn't want tons of people making multiple accounts right? (i could be wrong)

The problem with contacting your ISP and making a "free" account with them (i dont think you pay extra but you still have to pay for the internet), and then you give your e-mail address to eqemu, there's a large possibility that if eqemu gets sued, they can hand over this list of e-mail addresses provided by ISP's that sony can track. Once sony finds out who leeched off thier game and servers, they will also sue the individual gamers.

That's why I TRY to keep all my info confidential so i don't get caught :lol: So i was just wondering how we can keep our confidentiality with these rules.

Hogie would never give away a list of e-mail addresses lol.. the second there was a CHANCE sony was about to ask for them hogie would ditch the hard drive into the fireplace (if he has one lol).

The main reason to require a legit e-mail address is so people dont make 20 accounts per person (to limit EQEmu logins, and to prevent banned people from "EASILY" getting back on).

We know it wont stop everyone but its a step in the right direction.

Any loser can signup to hotmail or yahoo.

ok, so what happens if you decide to ban all e-mail addresses from www.uknowwho.com (it's just an example). will all the people who currently use an e-mail address from that website be cancelled? or will there be no more new accounts made with that website?

ack! it turned into a link! don't go there!!!!! I don't know what lies behind it :oops:

No, existing users are ok. it just prevents new users from signing up with that e-mail providor.

I think a simple solution exists...
limit the patch server to 10 connections and 3kb/sec for each.

in this way, people may wait one time the queue and download time, but certainly they will not do it a second time...

and you will have free bandwidth for your site :)

sorry for my english

The simple solution is for people to not be morons. This would entail a few possible things.

1) Have 2 EQ directories
2) Patch ONCE for eqemu from live, when you run live stop it from auto downloading.. look at list and backup the files
Then backup the live files.. switch as needed