ESports FAQ

We try to discourage this as much as possible for several reasons. Firstly, disk space. Even on the PCs specifically purposed for ESports, if everyone installed any games they wished, the machines would soon start to fill up. Secondly, is firewalling. Unlike a home firewall which typically has no restrictions on outbound traffic, we carefully filter internet traffic in both directions in order to maintain best security for all users at the University. This means every game that it is on the approved games list for a semester has to be carefully tested and allowed through our firewall. We cannot actively maintain firewall rules for every single game out there.

To understand this needs a slightly broader understanding of NAT in general. The internet as a whole is fast running out of IPv4 addresses, and as a result, typically only your home router has a public IP. This router will then forward some or all ports to your PC / XBox / Playstation etc, which are all on private IP addresses. This means that other people external to your home network can connect direct to your gaming machine on these ports, rather than there being confusion as to whether they're connecting to other devices, such as your phone or tablet for example. Sometimes port forwarding has to be set up manually on a router, sometimes this is set automatically via uPnP. If all ports are forwarded to your gaming machine, then that is typically considered "Open / Type 1 NAT", because the machine is free to listen on any port. If the router only forwards a specific list of ports to the gaming machine, then that is known as "Moderate / Type 2 NAT". If you have multiple devices behind your router, perhaps in a shared house for example, you may start to find issues with your NAT type, as machines effectively fight for who the port is forwarded to. This would mean there will be devices that are unable to listen publicly for incoming connections. This is known as "Strict / Type 3 NAT".

                At the University, this is no different. With 50+ ESports machines all behind the same router sharing a public IPv4 address, they can't all listen for incoming connections at once. The only way around this is to give each gaming PC its own publicly routable IP address, for which there are simply not enough available to do so.

                In the new year, the University is looking to deploy IPv6 across its workstation estate. We have been allocated 1 Septillion public facing IPv6 addresses for use, which should more than cover the number of machines used for gaming! This won't be a solution for all games, as not all games support IPv6, but moving forward it should allow more and more games to run Open / Type 1 NAT at the University.

At the University, we store folders such as My Documents, Desktop etc on a server, to ensure a consistent experience across computers.

However, some games (mainly games based on Unreal Engine) do not support this, causing them to crash. At present the only known games that have issues are MultiVersus and Rumbleverse.

To get these games working, launch the app "Disable My Documents Folder" from the start menu, and use the disable option. This will temporarily point your My Documents folder back to the local PC and let the game launch.