SO just like with the Beta, I have never been able to login to the game. Apparently, every single person living on a college campus has this error and cannot play at all.

Seems like quite the oversight by Bungie considering the Beta acted the exact same way. Should I attempt to get a refund now or wait for comment from them?

@brich: Whoa... Colleges still run networks like that...?? (I worked in a University IT dept once. I know how messed up some games get especially in the Xbox 260 Cod 4 days)

It's your University not Bungie. On the plus side, if your school ever gets a DMCA lawsuit, they are screwed.

@cbyrne: Nope it's bungie.. http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/68994613/0/0

This is the first and only game to ever have a single connection issue. There is a list being compiled of universities in nearly every state. Apparently Bungie is using P2P, which large networks block due to torrent use.

I'm at home and can't figure out how to fix the issue.

Can't get online at my school. I just picked up the game after work and now I wish I hadn't. This is a bummer.

Yikes! I've previously commented about their crazy solid networking in this game. I experienced absolutely zero issues from the launch minute on (on an average residential cable connection). But if they don't have a plan in-place for college students living on campus, that's an insane oversight. I could be wildly mistaken, but I imagine college dorms made up at least half of Halo's core demographic.

Yeah, pretty crazy that they didn't fix this before launch.

Unfortunately, most of these network admins aren't going to care about opening up some ports just to allow people to play a video game. College networks (and @epicsteve's home network apparently) have always had issues with this sort of thing. They want to prevent massive amount of bandwidth being consumed for stuff like file sharing and some other more legitimate things end up getting blocked as well.

@chaser324: @brich:

(Sorry this got winded I was proud of the network we built, but TL;DR; We had issues like this and we fixed them, we serviced the students, it's our job. There are proper ways to run huge networks. I called my old co-worker last night, 173 students were playing a game with traffic like Destiny, zero call tickets)

It's not about opening ports, it's about running a network with 1000's of people with different needs properly. When COD: MW2 was released we had and issue where only 16 students could play multiplayer at once. At that time 40% of students had 360's in the dorms. (We allowed 3 devices per student in the dorm) after 4th week, they could request a 4th item). I know because at that time we had to manually add 360's because they didn't have a web browser to register the device with...

I still have nightmares about move in day....

Universities should never block internet traffic. We only did if it was on our known exploit page. which was mostly Russia and India IP's. We directed them to a page explaining why it was blocked and a petition page. As much as our administration wanted to restrict internet, Our faculty pushed that research is impossible with limitations. So, everything was accessible and possible.

What if you had a CS student that wants to set up a Linux server to solve a project, what good is it if no one can reach it due to network limitations?

What if a professor points to a torrent link for a Virtual PC image needed for a project?

Some P2P is valid and legit, so how can you discriminate it by blocking it across the board?

When the CoD issue hit us, we had meetings and then fixed it. A couple rule changes on the packet shapers and changing the way we assigned public IP's to students. (By assigning public IP's to a student in stead of NAT'ing students behind a couple, solves the torrent issue. If an IP is reported, it's passed directly to the student in question) The packet shapers examine ALL traffic going in and out of the dorms and classifies it, then throttles it as necessary. Dorm traffic was usually split up by P2P, Youtube(Flash), Music streaming, school services, and general http traffic.

Youtube was throttled to about 30% of traffic during the day and 60% at night. Otherwise it would eat 100% of the traffic. As for p2p which xbox 360 traffic and countless PC games would get flagged as, was our biggest rule set. Every Thursday, we checked the P2P traffic for unknown traffic, figure out what it was and assign it's throttling rate. Examples Limewire 3Kbps per instance, torrent traffic was 15% of available bandwidth. (As of now, netflix is the biggest offender of traffic there at 11pm it's using 175 MBps which is it's throttle limit. Once a packet type reaches it's limit then that limit is split by number of users.

Borderlands for the ps3 needed custom rule sets too. That one was a bitch...

I don't know, but we worked hard solving these issues and making an open adaptable network for students to use at their freewill. We also had many students lobby us with student council for stuff. We would be present and listen. All reasonable request should researched, students are paying your salary. Another great thing about our packet shapers was when a student complained about slow internet, we attached a detailed report of EVERYTHING they where doing for the past 30 days. Including list or URL's visited at 1:30 AM.

That's why I blame the university, we did it, so can they.

@cbyrne: Admirable that you would put in the effort to help provide proper service to the students, but unfortunately, there are a lot of schools out there that are guilty of just port blocking or major throttling without putting in the work to only block/throttle what's necessary to provide good service.

Network programming is incredibly difficult. Not only is that difficult but coding for different infrastructures (Xbox vs Sony) just adds even more layers to that complexity. Programming is not easy and sometimes fixing one thing can break 20 other things that are even more catastrophic. You can't just flick a switch or adjust a setting and make things work in environments like that without some sort of ramification.The biggest problem like @cbyrne said is that networks in schools and corporations are there to protect the entity but exceptions can be made. It's all about the amount of work Network Admins are willing to put in to fix the issue. For some schools this might be difficult if they have a small IT department or that IT is outsourced and for some the school might not care that a small percentage of their students can't play a particular game if it means their network security isn't compromised.

Well I finally played some Destiny by downloading a VPN designed to get people around the torrent blockade. Then I used the built-in Internet sharing on my Mac to send a wifi signal to the Xbox (I had no idea this was even a thing).

At least one great thing came of this, as I can now send a super fast wifi signal from my computer to all my other devices. The provided wifi from the university is slower than dial up in 1996. I was eating through tons of phone data to avoid ever turning it on.

If anyone else is having issues and wants more specifics on this workaround let me know.

@brich: I'd love more details about this, if you wouldn't mind sharing! I've been trying to play since release day and I've seen nothing but centipede errors.

Which VPN did you use?

@loophole: ibVPN, they had a 6 hour trial. I'm sure people with more know -how could solve this with a free VPN, but I ended up paying $5 for a month.

I went through so many different VPN clients before I found one that just worked like a charm.

Then if on a Mac, just go to settings-> sharing-> internet sharing and select from: ibVPN-L2TP and to: wifi. Set up your xbox to use this new wifi connection and you are good to go. If on a pc, you will need another program to put out a wifi signal such as connectify.

This might not actually be helpful to this conversation, but do you guys have an option to get off the school internet. We did that in our dorm split between like 6 people and it was great. We had better wireless in the dorm building that everyone else basically.

@brich: Thank you so much! I tried a few VPNs, but they seemed to block the traffic just as much as my university's network did and I kept hitting more centipedes. Gave it a try with ibVPN, and I'm able to play for the first time.

I really, really appreciate the help!