Esports setup for classroom use

[robk]

I have been asked to look at setting up "eSports" for classroom use. Potentially using Rocket League.

 

Does anyone have any experience at doing this? Shared machine installs etc are all going to be difficult I suspect.

 

Any suggestions would be great!

[thimon]

We held a Minecraft session last week, also used it to trial Rocket League. Worked fine over network, even if we did have to bring graphics right down (per user setting). You can install the game per machine, however the students need an Epic games account to play it. Was a bit of a pain and took time to get the accounts set up per students. Going to have a look at the T&C’s for Epic, can maybe use generic service account logins?

[free780]

I set this up for a college many moons ago.

 

Due to Rocket leagues nature you need it to be able to update. Which meant either IT updating it or giving a staff member local admin rights for the generic account used.

 

The Epic account thing is annoying. We let students use their own. It’s a shame epic haven’t put the effort in unlike Minecraft for education where Microsoft have built in AAD account use.

 

Fundamentally gaming presumes everyone has local admin and each device is 1:1.

 

We had to make some firewall changes.

[paulkerton]

Epic are a long way back on their eSports / Share setups compared to Steam with their "PC Cafe" offering.

[RLR]

It's a shame they moved Rocket League from Steam to Epic games store. At least with steam you can setup an internet cafe like workshop that helps with account control. Epic games doesn't have anything like this.

[robk]

I set this up for a college many moons ago.

 

Due to Rocket leagues nature you need it to be able to update. Which meant either IT updating it or giving a staff member local admin rights for the generic account used.

 

The Epic account thing is annoying. We let students use their own. It’s a shame epic haven’t put the effort in unlike Minecraft for education where Microsoft have built in AAD account use.

 

Fundamentally gaming presumes everyone has local admin and each device is 1:1.

 

We had to make some firewall changes.

 

@free780 Do you happen to know what the firewall changes were? I know we are blocking something, but can't work out what!

[JFagan]

I found the following to be useful.

 

A full list of the Rocket League IP’s can be found on the Valve network

(AS32590)

If your firewall is blocking connection, open Rocket League and resource

monitor simultaneously.

In the resource monitor, Open the network tab and scroll down to find

RocketLeague.exe. Create a custom exception in your firewall using the IP

displayed.

Alternatively, you can find the server IP’s by searching your logfile. Its located

at %userprofile%\documents\my games\rocket league\TA game\logs\

launch.log.

You can search for ‘:7’ to quickly find the IP addresses. Note: Many school/

college networks and proxies block required ports for Steam operation.

Ports required for Steam

cannot be re-mapped to HTTP or reconfigured

to a custom port range.

[RedwayNetworks_Michael]

Esports for Classrooms wow, this would have been so good when i was at school. oh how things have changed over the years, interesting post

[DaveMc]

Hi, sorry for the necropost but I am looking at doing this for our College in the Summer. I wondered if you had any tips for us.

thanks

Dave

[PotNoodleTech]

Two things you are going to struggle with.

 

1. filtering and firewalling - schools in my LEA have been waiting a year to get ports etc unblocked and are still not able to run the course.

 

2. Installing / File Permissions / Shared accounts - gonna take a fair bit of fiddling to get most games working on domain PCs.

[DaveMc]

1. Is this with the ISP or the networking/infrastructure team?

2. I think all the games we need are on the steam platform and I was looking at steam cafe but haven't had a change to register for it.

[RLR]

Hi, sorry for the necropost but I am looking at doing this for our College in the Summer. I wondered if you had any tips for us.

thanks

Dave

 

There is an event for esports in education next week. You can sign up here: https://anme.co.uk/events-meetings/events/item/power-of-play

[Brax]

Hi all,

 

Resurrecting this post once again. Has anyone successfully rolled this out in a secondary? Some members of staff would like to setup an ESports team but link parts of it into our existing curriculum. Issues I can see with setting up an esports room are:

1. Getting good enough machines, we run some semi decent i5's but not great graphics cards. How much do you estimate a semi-decent build would cost per unit?

2. Accounts, how do you handle this? Firstly logging onto the machine itself and then logins for epic/steam etc?

3. Filtering, how easy has it been for those who are successful getting it through their firewalls? (We use Smoothwall for reference).

4. Limited to certain games, Whilst we have a sixth form the games that could be played would be limited due to age restrictions. (Uni's play CS2 for example)

 

 

The only real game I've had to setup in a school was when I worked in a small SEND school and we had Minecraft Edu which was easy enough to work with so this is new to me so all your advice on this would be very welcome.

[Dos_Box]

@Brax, did you catch the webinar we did with British Esports last year? Some of your questions may be answered in there:

 

[DaveMc]

We went live with our e-Sports classroom in the summer and it has went reasonably well.

The only problem I have is with the games/launchers/anti-cheat software updates. All of which require an admin account to authorise if the student launches the game before the system account has had a chance to update it.

I purchased Microsoft Intune Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) and set that up to allow each of the games and their child files to be authorised but this stopped working within days as the MD5 Hash keeps changing for the executables.

 

We now plan to create a local admin account limited to these devices which really goes against our security best practices but needs must at the moment.

[Brax]

@Brax, did you catch the webinar we did with British Esports last year? Some of your questions may be answered in there:

 

No I missed that but thank you very much really appreciated. I'll go over this with the other staff involved.

[jamesrhart]

We've set-up a new eSports suite with 14 Legion PCs in a dedicated space, it's working well for us, we haven't had to worry about admin accounts yet, IT run the updates as required.

 

Happy to chat it through.

[Brax]

We've set-up a new eSports suite with 14 Legion PCs in a dedicated space, it's working well for us, we haven't had to worry about admin accounts yet, IT run the updates as required.

 

Happy to chat it through.

Could you share where you got the legion PC's from please?

[jamesrhart]

Yes, we purchased via Insight, they were great in helping us.

 

Some pictures below:

[PotNoodleTech]

Some serious money invested there! Fair play.

[Brax]

Yes, we purchased via Insight, they were great in helping us.

 

Some pictures below:

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That is incredible.

[Disease]

Yes, we purchased via Insight, they were great in helping us.

 

Some pictures below:

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]71045[/ATTACH]

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Looks amazing, out of interest roughly how much did that setup cost and how did you get the Head to support it?

[Olliedawg]

Yes, we purchased via Insight, they were great in helping us.

 

Some pictures below:

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]71045[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]71046[/ATTACH]

 

Wow looks great. You'd catch me in there playing Counter Strike!

[jamesrhart]

Yes, I presented it at SLT and the head supported it. It wasn't cheap as the whole room needed work (it looked very different before!), I'm really proud of the space.

 

Happy to talk through any of it if that would help anyone else, just PM me.

[PotNoodleTech]

Out of interest did you and the site team do the room asthetics DIY style or did you get someone in? It looks fab.