From CIT Wiki
Contents |
Are Multiplayer Games allowed on the Network?
Sure. Games don't seem to take up too much network bandwidth, nor do they appear to be a significant security risk. And we know you live here, so why not? But please recognize our time is spent making sure "official" traffic gets through. Gaming is not ever a high priority project for us. But as we have time, we might be able to help out.
But why is my game being blocked?
It's not. But you may be having trouble getting it to work, anyway. Unfortunately, if you ask the game developers how to make it work, they usually give an unhelpful answer. It seems they assume all their users are playing games while they're supposed to be at work (of course, that doesn't apply to OC students, does it?). The standard answer seems to be, "tell your Network Administrators to open port 12345 through your firewall." This is unfortunate, because we don't actually block many ports in that way at all. The problem on Oberlin's network usually is that some more aggressive application is abusing the bandwidth and your game traffic can't get through. Let's see what we can do to help things along...
First, check to see if you're not causing your own problem. Is BitTorrent running while you're trying to conquer World of Warcraft? How about Limewire? This might not be the best time to multitask. Try turning off other applications running on your computer during gameplay, and see if performance improves.
At the moment, our Packetlogic recognizes several dozen game networks. Not all of these classes are equally well-defined, nor are all among the most-played on campus, but if your game is really brand new, we probably don't have a definition for it yet. If game play is really, really bad, and you think this is such a new game we need to create a definition, we might be able to help. We'll need to capture a sample of your traffic to send to the developers for analysis. Give the Help Desk a call and we'll see if we can arrange a time to get that done.
My Game's not in that list!
OK, if you're still having troubles playing the game, here's what we will need to try to help it out a bit: Server address(es) and port(s) used. Go to the game's tech support site, or ask around in the forum, for as detailed information you can get for the game server's IP address or hostname, any login server or other secondary server that's also used, and what TCP/IP ports are used during game play, both TCP ports and UDP ports, if possible. Don't worry if you don't know what I'm talking about; just search the FAQs for information on 'firewall ports,' or 'network ports' or 'TCPIP' and the information may be in there. In a forum or email, just ask, "What server addresses and IP ports are used by <your game name here>?" Please note: we need both addresses and ports to make this work. A traffic class can't be made on a port number alone. If we need to, there are ways to determine which addresses are used.
Email the Help Desk with as many details as you can obtain, or a request for help, and we can try to create a class for the game you want to play. We can't promise it will work, but when we can get around to it, we'll see what we can do. After all, Colossal Cave was nearly the first network application some of us ever saw.
The Troll hits you delicately on the head with his axe...
Now, it's possible that someone else in your building is pulling down a Torrent, along with a couple dozen others on campus. Under some circumstances, they could overwhelm an entire residence hall's network connection, but this shouldn't last a long time.
Finally, it might not be anything we can influence. The game server might be bogging down, or the network link somewhere in between Oberlin and the game server might be saturating. Check out the game forum or blogs to see if this is something that happens from time to time. Just 'cause we're a college doesn't mean we have a magically huge connection with every other server on the planet -- that's AOL's job ;-)
