I Hate You, School!

[Sheba]

So, Here I am, in my room and I learn that my old roommate can play World of Warcraft on campus, yet I can't even get past the Log-In screan on City of Heroes! This Port thing is killing me! AND I'm going to miss Double XP weekend AGAIN!

:mad: :mad:

If people can play WoW, why shouldn't I be able to play CoX? Should I complain at the risk of getting rid of WoW on campus, too? Then again, it's not like I have anything to lose...

ARGH!

[thebluecanary]

So, Here I am, in my room and I learn that my old roommate can play World of Warcraft on campus, yet I can't even get past the Log-In screan on City of Heroes! This Port thing is killing me! AND I'm going to miss Double XP weekend AGAIN!

:mad: :mad:

If people can play WoW, why shouldn't I be able to play CoX? Should I complain at the risk of getting rid of WoW on campus, too? Then again, it's not like I have anything to lose...

ARGH!

I say you do it. You might get lucky. Where do you goto school anyway? You could always grab a wireless card, and drag your PC to Boarders or Bread Co. =P

[Sheba]

Well, I do have wireless, this is on my laptop. I just sent them an e-mail asking the to open the ports I need opened to play the game. If they tell me no... I'll have to pay a little visit to the technology office...

[Knightward]

I had the same problem. The guys running the school network also happened to all be addicted to WoW so you can imagine how successful I was in getting it fixed. If I can find the answer they gave me I'll put it up in here.

[Noble]

So, Here I am, in my room and I learn that my old roommate can play World of Warcraft on campus, yet I can't even get past the Log-In screan on City of Heroes! This Port thing is killing me! AND I'm going to miss Double XP weekend AGAIN!

:mad: :mad:

If people can play WoW, why shouldn't I be able to play CoX? Should I complain at the risk of getting rid of WoW on campus, too? Then again, it's not like I have anything to lose...

ARGH!

That is only one of the reasons why you don't live on campus.

[Sheba]

So I go to the tech office to find out why my game isn't working. Turns out that all the ports are not blocked?! So why can I not connect to the damn game here and yet, I can connect at home?! Madness!:mad:

[Knightward]

Ok, here's the problem they had at my school. Dunno how well it applies to yours, or if the tech guys at mine were half-assing it.

here's no block in place to restrict anyone from playing City of Villains/Heroes or any other game for that matter. Unfortunately these particular games require that local ports (2104,2106,6994,7000-7100) be available on the client PC (your computer) and directly reachable by their servers. Due to the design of our network, this is impossible without tediously setting up specific exceptions for each user.

I'm not sure how to explain without getting a little technical. We use private non-routable IP addresses on campus for a number of justifiable reasons, and when you access the internet each connection attempt is translated over to a external routable IP. When the game server attempts to establish a direct connection back to your computer, it's unable to do so because your actual local IP is non-routable and you have no permanent external address.

Most online games don't work like this, since so many users are using home routers and NAT (network address translation). I'm honestly a bit surprised that a modern game would require open ports to be available on the client PC in order for the game to work. In most other games, a persistent connection is established from the client to the server.

Why I've never had a problem conntecting to it at home with our local network but the school network was different, I don't know.

[Sheba]

Aw man. Wellm if that may be the case... I'll probably end up investing in WoW. Or some other MMO that might work. :cry:

[Apollinaris]

here's no block in place to restrict anyone from playing City of Villains/Heroes or any other game for that matter. Unfortunately these particular games require that local ports (2104,2106,6994,7000-7100) be available on the client PC (your computer) and directly reachable by their servers. Due to the design of our network, this is impossible without tediously setting up specific exceptions for each user.

I'm not sure how to explain without getting a little technical. We use private non-routable IP addresses on campus for a number of justifiable reasons, and when you access the internet each connection attempt is translated over to a external routable IP. When the game server attempts to establish a direct connection back to your computer, it's unable to do so because your actual local IP is non-routable and you have no permanent external address.

Most online games don't work like this, since so many users are using home routers and NAT (network address translation). I'm honestly a bit surprised that a modern game would require open ports to be available on the client PC in order for the game to work. In most other games, a persistent connection is established from the client to the server.

This shouldn't be the problem. I'm behind a router with NAT as well and I don't have to forward any ports to my PC to play the game. He is telling you accurately how their network at the school is setup though. (Mine is just on a smaller scale.)

The school's hub acts as a gateway that connects the internet (WAN) to the school's network (LAN). Every computer on your LAN has an IP. It connects to their hub server to go out onto the WAN. The router has a LAN IP and a WAN IP, the WAN IP is how your school's entire network appears to the rest of the internet. When data comes in it goes to the router, decides which IP on the LAN it goes to and sends it there.

Port forwarding is what happens when you tenn the router to automatically send data incoming through one specific port to goto a computer. (HTTP uses port 80, for example.) You usually do this when you want to host a server. But you usually don't need to specifically forward many programs requesting for data, such as CoH, web browsers, etc.

This still doesn't rule out CoH needing ports that are blocked, however. Best bet I can think of would be to maybe get someone in the tech dept to look through the requirements of the program and see if they can figure it out. If WoW's working CoH might. Besides, I doubt people using the connection they paid for to use an online game is really a violation of some sort anyway.

[Knightward]

Doesn't matter to me anymore cause I've been out of school since May. :P

Thanks for the info though!