I'd always thought eMule would have been much more successful if it answered the queue randomly, but weighting people who had uploaded with a much greater likel

I'd always thought eMule would have been much more successful if it answered the queue randomly, but weighting people who had uploaded with a much greater likelihood of going first. As it was written eMule had a soft-cap of 10x "line speed" for someone who's uploaded 5x as much data to you as you have to them. This was far too little to get through a queue quickly. Worse, place in line wasn't remembered, so even a massive seeder on the eMule network might end up with zero files if he turned on the client for only half a day or so -- this is why eMule sharing typically consisted of having a computer run 24/7 and not expecting the file you wanted until a few days later. Bittorrent changed that. While both clients were working with the same amount of underlying bandwidth, bittorrent made the connection between uploading and downloading much more immediate without an upper limit on tit-for-tat, and the incentive was clearly stronger.