University: No Online gaming!

[Sgt. Dante]

To be honest, their internet their rules, if they say no then you don't really get a say.

If you're desperate you could get your own internet connection, like a £G dongle or something, not great i know but if you don't have the options what else can you do?

Also, I REALLY wouldn't recommend trying to manipulate any potential holes in the firewall, that kinda shit tends to lead to a pretty serious case of the expulsions.

 

[Nickolai77]

Get some like minded friends and perhaps go to the student union about it and see if they can get the university to change it's policy.

 

[Not-here-anymore]

Best thing I could think of is getting a smartphone with an internet package, tethering it to a laptop and using that laptop as a wireless bridge for your console. It's a convoluted as hell solution and I have no idea how well it would work, but it's the best I've got.

Works surprisingly well - a friend of mine did that for his PS3 and for various MMO's via his iPhone.

Or you could try getting into PC gaming by upgrading whatever you have. Because like single-player gamers, PC gamers totally aren't fucked over most of the time these days! Nope, not at all!

Given the increasing reliance on Steam for PC gaming, you're actually more fucked. So many games I couldn't activate, update, download, or play online due to Steam being blocked at my university (though I think they've since unblocked it). To play offline, you had to disconnect your computer from the internet, activate Steam, and wait for it to let you go into offline mode.
Somehow still managed to link consoles over the network as a giant LAN thing though. Much Halo 3 was played.

 

[JAGMASK08]

Deal with it. Thats what I do.

 

[Disaster Button]

Do they block PC gaming also? If not you could try that, and get a refund for Xbox live... if that's even possible.

What university do you go to anyway, is this a standard practice of British Universities?

Yes, British university in hall internet connections are brutally moderated with draconian firewalls. At my old uni you could't pc game or torrent (legal torrents before I get a ban), the problem is the network admins they usually employ are well an truly in the games are bad mindset and you can't convince them of a positive reason for them to allow it. In a way it's understandable though, even if only 1 in 10 have an xbox it'd slaughter bandwidth when you have a uni with 12k students.

Hmm, looks like I'll be trying to find my own place when I leave for University... if possible. I have friends in America I want to stay close to when I leave and we play games every day.

 

[alexb111]

I don't know anything about it but apparently its possible to use a tunnelling program or something similar on your connection.
For idiots like me it encrypts whatever your sending/receiving and bypasses the firewall (or something like that anyway).

Apparently it worked for a friend of mine at Manchester Uni when he was torrenting, best part is its illegal to break the encryption so if they send you an e-mail/threat you can tell them where to stick their threats (politely obviously)

Heres the techno stuff for those who care/understand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_protocol



Theres also a handy free program called Hamachi (log me in product) which creates a virtual lan network over the internet, not sure if it will bypass the firewall but very useful if you do go into pc gaming.

 

[ThePeaceFrog]

I'm at bristol and it was the total reverse when I was in halls. The internet was superfast and I have never had a better connection when online gaming. Now I'm in rented accomodation I genuinely miss it!

 

[Knusper]

Is this the case with all universities in Britain. If taht's the case I am not lookngi forward to it s much as I thought I was.

 

[Jonluw]

My guess is the university doesn't supply you with internet with the intention of letting you take up broadband playing games.

 

[lord.jeff]

Truthfully I'm with the university you have hundreds of people using the internet for studies, now add on top of that the bandwidth hog that is online gaming and you'll see any network slow to a crawl. If you really want to play online get a satallite connection or something similiar like Clear and you could play on your own internet.

 

[Hipsy_Gypsy]

Snipped

Huh. I don't see why a university would bother blocking the internet from gaming consoles.

Seeing as you've already paid for it, you could do a number of things:

-Suck it up and just play single player or offline multi-player like the good ol' days and wait til you're off University to play online multi-player at someone else's house;

-Be persistent with the IT crowd to fix it just as suggested here

I would just keep contacting them until they file a restraining order against you or they cave and give you your connection.

;

-Find other people who share like views and take it from there which will probably be more effective combined with the previous point;

-Move back with your parents/in with your buddies/out on your own, similarly suggested here:

Couldn't you just move off-campus and commute to University?

;

-Follow this guy's advice:

Don't know if it'll work for you, but i tricked my ISP at uni into thinking my Xbox was my laptop via changing the Xbox's alternate MAC address... Actually i'll just give you this

http://www.unofficialguidetolive.co.uk/faqs/103-how-to-connect-to-xbox-live-at-uni-or-college

Though at the end of the day:

To be honest, their internet their rules, if they say no then you don't really get a say.

If you're desperate you could get your own internet connection, like a £G dongle or something, not great i know but if you don't have the options what else can you do?

Also, I REALLY wouldn't recommend trying to manipulate any potential holes in the firewall, that kinda shit tends to lead to a pretty serious case of the expulsions.

So be wary of what I quoted before the very last quote just in case they somehow manage to figure out what you've done. Somehow!


x

 

[weirdsoup]

Sorry, but I have to agree with the people who say get your own internet.

If you're getting free internet from the uni, then everyone else is using that internet as well. Therefore, so everyone can have a decent connection speed, it's no wonder they say no bandwidth stealing. If you really, really, really MUST play online, don't be dick and steal everyone else's bandwidth. Buy you're own private internet or stop whinging.

Oh and just to sound like your dad, "you're at uni to learn, not play games"

 

[Casimir_Effect]

There is no reason why they should stop me from enjoying my hobby especially as the internet seed is rediculously fast here.

That's the reason right there: the internet is incredibly fast because they don't all online gaming. If they did there would suddenly be a whole lot more traffic going through. Probably not enough to be detrimental but universities are cheap, hate-filled bastards who see you as a walking money pináta whose entitled to as little as they can give.

The way I got around this when I was in a hall for a while and couldn't play Team Fortress online (via PC, no Xbox I'm afraid) was a bunch of little internet programs and proxies that I ended up paying about ?5 a month for. It worked most of the time but was a really crappy solution. For XBox, I have no idea

 

[Irridium]

Given the increasing reliance on Steam for PC gaming, you're actually more fucked. So many games I couldn't activate, update, download, or play online due to Steam being blocked at my university (though I think they've since unblocked it). To play offline, you had to disconnect your computer from the internet, activate Steam, and wait for it to let you go into offline mode.
Somehow still managed to link consoles over the network as a giant LAN thing though. Much Halo 3 was played.

That... was kind of my point. All this online crap is pretty much just adding plenty more problems to the whole thing.

And I hate starting Steam in offline mode, because it never works for me.

When I tell it to start in offline mode when my connection is dead, it gives me this lovely error message:

"Steam cannot complete the requested function because Steam can't connect to the internet. Please connect to the internet and try again."

It's at this point I yell incoherently at my PC screen and cursing Steam for being so god damn stupid. And if it does work, which is rare, half my games get the "game is currently unavailable" option.

Oh boy, that sure is a fun time.

 

[Shockolate]

They did that at my friends university.

He had to move out of residency and into a house with a few friends.

 

[El Luck]

Let me guess....your university uses Cisco or some other access control that requires system verification before you can get online, right?

Yeah, something like that. It's not like I'm going to drop out because of this but it's just a needless annoyance. Also I'm studying Journalism, and specifically games Journalism, there are also people who studying Game Design and we are denied a service that would be very beneficial to our work.

How exactly does not being able to play a round of TF2 or L4D or going to affect somebodys games design or journalism course?

Just wondering is all.

 

[razer17]

I'm pissed. You want to know why I'm pissed. Well that doesn't matter because your still reading this so I'm going to tell you anyway. I moved into University this week and by all accounts I am enjoying my time here very much, I've made tons of new friends and my course is really interesting. The only problem? The university's firewalls block any games consoles from connecting to the internet.

What. The. Fuck.

I've contacted the ICT helpdesk to ask if they could sort it outso I could connect but they said they're not changing it just for me so they politley told me to go fuck myself. I'm sure that gaming online means more to me than most because aside from just playing it for fun, it is also the first way I can talk to my friends from home, I also write about gaming which is impossible if I do not have access to the online features of my consoles. On top of all this I have already paid for a year's worth of Xbox Live Gold subscription which will all go to waste. There is no reason why they should stop me from enjoying my hobby especially as the internet seed is rediculously fast here.

Does anybody know a way of getting around the firewall or any way I could connect the internet in ome other way? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

TL;DR: My university won't let me play online games. This sucks and isthere anything I can do to still game online?

Firstly, it's there internet, their rules, so you're pretty much stuck.

However, you could try connecting your xbox to your PC via an ethernet cable and sharing your internet connection. That should get past the firewall. http://support.xbox.com/en-us/xbox-360/troubleshoot/kb/connect-xbox-360-console-xbox-live-with-computer-978618

It will be a bit slower, and your NAT wont be Open, though

 

[Twilight_guy]

Universities usually block a bunch of ports to avoid having people hack their network or get around firewalls. It's just network security. If you don't like it then find a coffee shop or something and use their wireless. (practically every university seem to have a coffee shop somewhere near it) or go to someplace on campus that has public wifi.

 

[ramboondiea]

if your on campus then its bloody right you dont have unlimited access to internet. theres probably thousands of students trying to use the internet at any given time, and the amount of bandwidth that online gaming takes up then it would mean loads of people wouldnt be able to use the internet. my uni does the same and they even warn people about it, despite it being obvious

 

[HellRaid]

Yes, British university in hall internet connections are brutally moderated with draconian firewalls. At my old uni you could't pc game or torrent (legal torrents before I get a ban), the problem is the network admins they usually employ are well an truly in the games are bad mindset and you can't convince them of a positive reason for them to allow it. In a way it's understandable though, even if only 1 in 10 have an xbox it'd slaughter bandwidth when you have a uni with 12k students.

My university explicitly stated "no gaming or torrents" in the terms of use for its internet, but I have never in 5 years heard of anyone getting caught or punished for either - despite them saying they were monitoring the connections all the time. Perhaps they had the internet police on the case

Although I do recall one of my PC games not being able to connect to the Internet... but the rest were all fine though.

Hell, our computing building had a group of students in playing starcraft and warcraft 3 using the university's servers on a daily basis