|
I'm living in university accommodation in England and I have a few flat mates who share the 1st floor with me. Anyway, I've tried to make one of them play StarCraft 2 (he is a WoW user). The guy is knowledgeable enough to know how to get the game "properly", so he went straight to the Blizzard's official website to download StarCraft2's starter edition.
As you might guess, universities are really strict with downloading stuff, so mine isn't an exception either. Well, my flat mate got his Internet access rejected last night because of downloading SC2 from... the official website of Blizzard. Needless to say, he had to meet one of university's guys to talk about the issue and he explained what he had done. I asked him what had happened, but he said responsible guys were investigating the case.
Nevertheless, I'm both really angry with my university's Internet policy and feel terrible that his first SC2 experience wasn't great. I do hope involved guys apoligise for their mistake because it's really wrong.
Well, that's all for now. Will see how it goes after their investigation.
 
|
I'm not really surprised. After including patches isn't SC2 like 10 gigs? You're sharing that connection with so many people. That is a little selfish.
Just gogo BW LAN, problems solved 
|
I might be able to help with some insight on the matter that you experienced.
I recently graduated college and one of my PT jobs was working at the University for their Residential Network Helpdesk. Basically removing spyware for stupid girls at the university. I don't know how things are done in England however my university was really big against downloading anything labeled as a Torrent or P2P. Not sure of the methods he downloaded it from the Blizzard site but it could have gotten flagged for many things just as its .exe extension (or whatever it was) or just the size of the file was probably high in GB.
My university actually had SC2 blocked because it connects its to the patch server or something by Torrent. I got lucky and actually moved into my GFs place by the time the game was released or I wouldn't even have been able to play at that time. It would have really pissed me off.
It's not uncommon for students to meet with 'university network people' about stuff they download. Most university's usually have levels. Level 1/first violation is just a warning. When you get to 4 you basically get cut off for the whole semester.
FURTHERMORE, I know University's policies really suck. However you have to realize (you might) it's really not up to them. Every single time, literally every single time, that freshman girl downloads finding nemo or her retarded vampire movie, DMCA and even Movie Corporations will email the school and threaten them with violations that are very expensive. I'm actually kind of surprised students get off so easy for basically getting caught stealing copyrighted material. 4 times in a semester to only get kicked off the internet on campus for your personal laptop? You should probably be fined after 4 times, but whatever..
Everything is probably going to be fine for your friend. One thing that did always piss me off was Sundays were always a big gaming night for my at my university, that's when WC3-DotA was at it's highest too. Fucking the whole school came back from the weekend and got on facebook and I lagged like shit for a whole semester. Fuck getting girls, I needed to dota son!!
|
I guess you're right Nizzy. I'm not sure if he's exactly accused of piracy or just the big size of download, but I'll make sure to see what the deal is. However, if it's the former, those guys are wrong because everything was done legally from the official website. I'm also not sure if our inet speed is shared, but I've never felt any lag or weaker download speed. I guess it's independent, but that's just my guess. 
|
Well I know for a fact that for SC2 when you download a patch its connects by Torrent and schools now will flag all Torrent usages. Did he just download the game or actually connect and get all the patches too?
Either way if your university is big enough it should know about all the popular online games and might have a way to allow that port in the future. Not sure though as an outsider.
|
Blizzard downloader thing is torrent based is it not.. it's common sense to block torrents on a university network, unless you want the whole thing to be slow as shit because of a few people 24/7.
|
I wonder if turning off the option to download from mutliple users will help? because there is the option to just download off their servers instead of P2P, not sure if that would help in this case or how the option works but there is one. At my school we dont have limits or restrictions. I have downloaded visual studios at school at times, and seen people on porn sites ( not very cool at university in public places) but seems your school is more strict. Ask around someone in your group of friends must have the CD still. Just let him install with that and then use his account to log in. should work. GL
Edit: i know my friends at Uni also always torent at work because of how fast it is.
|
@kanada
porn isn't illegal in college as most students are 18 or older.
However now that I think about it I did know a super smart student that started college at 16, so I'm not sure what the agreement policies are.
|
well i just meant watching it or looking at in in lecture or public spaces, i know my friends thought a porn star looked like a person that went to our school so they were looking at it.
|
10GB overnight is definitely acceptable imo... I have a pretty standard connection for a school in the states (90down/60up) and I don't understand why 10GB of anything would violate a policy unless you're downloading something with a cell phone. I think most universities have policies against P2P, but sometimes it becomes a blurred line e.g. when people are torrenting GNU/Linux iso's.
|
I got cut off our universitys 100 mb net for trying to download the 200 mb mysql setup. Kind of stupid when they encourage people to use their own laptops.. It's not like they have that many people using it constantly.
|
A bit unwise, maybe you could've transferred files locally. I don't know though.
My limit is annoying as well, but not as bad I guess - speeds are low enough so that I can bypass the limit simply because I just can't download/upload that much at a time.
8gb/day streaming, 10gb/day limit, so many warning emails.
Not like a rich university couldn't have the bandwidth to deal with that at 3am, oh man.
|
I feel your pain. I'm studying abroad ain London right now and my uni has bandwidth restrictions which heavily restricts P2P stuff. So now whenever I try to play Sc2 the screen just stops at "player found!". Really annoying
|
Couldn't you have just transferred your client to his with all the patches or does that not work?
|
On January 27 2012 06:02 Torte de Lini wrote:
Couldn't you have just transferred your client to his with all the patches or does that not work?
I suggested giving to him the whole original DVD, but after he realised that download was going to take too much. So yeah... too late.
Edit: Basically, he was accused of piracy because he didn't pay for the game which is kind of true. However, anyone is allowed to play the starter version which he got from the official website. Still stupid ban imho.
|
I'm both really angry with my university's Internet policy and feel terrible that his first SC2 experience wasn't great.
Boo. Hoo.
Your example is one of my favorite calls to get here. I actually work at a university and "you people" call up here raging, explaining how much you know, when in reality, you don't know squat about networking. If you wanted to learn, though, you could use the opportunity your university has provided and go ask them questions. They don't have to even answer your questions. It's a service to you. Take advantage of it.
Nizzy provided some insight into the story, and you could benefit from reading it, but that is actually only part of it.
edit: I realized I didn't really say much, so I'll add this tidbit. For example, if you download 7 gigs of sc2 at 20 mb/s, you'd be done in a little more than 45 mins. So, for 45 mins, you, alone, would be using as much as 1, to 5, up to 10% or more of your entire university's bandwidth, depending on how large, and wealthy, and urban, your university is. So, unless you only have 10 people enrolled there, you are killing a lot of folk's connections, just because you want to play a game. Did I play the heck out of pc games while I was in school? You bet. But, grow up, school ain't about video games.
|
On January 27 2012 07:01 danl9rm wrote:
up to 10% or more of your entire university's bandwidth
If the network is truly run so poorly as to allow one user to pin the connection from a single download, the responsibility should be squarely placed on the shoulders of the admins. in the late 90s perhaps this kind of thing was commonplace, but today it is trivial for any modern NOC to entirely automate such limiting. I can do so on my sub-$100 ASUS router.
|
Which uni do you go to out of interest, do you think all universities have such strict policies?
|
In Ireland our universities typically block torrent usage totally, as well as the ports needed for gaming, making it hard for me to waste study time playing SC2. I know it's good for me, but it is, as they say, bad medicine 
|
On January 27 2012 08:17 samw wrote:
Which uni do you go to out of interest, do you think all universities have such strict policies?
University of Liverpool, but I can't say all universities are *that* strict. It's something I've heard. In fact, I'm not even British, so you may know more than me on this matter.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
