There is another option which a few of us have discussed.
- ET would still be free, but some group (either run by the community or evenbalance/id/activision) would allow you to register your GUID for a nominal fee.
- The purpose of the fee is to make getting a new GUID costly enough that people who got banned wouldn’t want to do it very often. I suspect that even $10 would be pretty effective. The system itself should be very cheap to run, so, if run by the community, any excess collected could be given to a worthy cause.
- A server option would be added so that server admins could (at their own option) require registered GUIDs. While this would be easier with support from evenbalance, it could probably be done with a mod or even an admin bot. Whenever someone joined, it would simply check their GUID against the registered list, and kick them with an informative message if they were not found.
- The fact that you can get a new GUID for free wouldn’t matter, because you would have to pay to register it. The GUID generation code would not have to change, nor would your GUID need to be associated with anything unreliable like a MAC or IP.
- adding nick registration to this would be trivial.
There are a few possible problems:
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Charging money might be against the commercial exploitation terms of the EULA, and so might require a commercial exploitation license from id/activision. If they didn’t like the idea, that could be hard to get. Having the money collected got to a charity might or might not help with this.
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If not enough people signed up, then the registered only servers would not have sufficient population.
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As with CD keys, there could be problems with people stealing etkey files or playing from other peoples machines.
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the system would almost certianly be subject to network attacks from cheaters/lamers. This could be a pain for whoever ran it.
