Playing at work

[Pirates10i]

I really want to play at work with my surface pro but I'm afraid that since I work for a big company that blocks lots of sites. Do you think that p99 could be blocked or tracked as a game

[Corpsed]

I really want to play at work with my surface pro but I'm afraid that since I work for a big company that blocks lots of sites. Do you think that p99 could be blocked or tracked as a game

Yes, yes it can be blocked and tracked. if you don't work in the IT department I wouldn't recommend it unless you bribe them.

[Pirates10i]

Well damn I was hoping it wasn't a very recognizable tracking id, or at least one that might have then think it was like a mobile game or something

[Corpsed]

Well damn I was hoping it wasn't a very recognizable tracking id, or at least one that might have then think it was like a mobile game or something

I'm not saying they will see it or care, but just that it is possible and if there is a question as to what you are doing at your desk, they will be able to see. I wouldn't recommend it if you need that job.

[Pseudosin]

What if you VPN'd out of your works network? All they would see is the VPN connection, correct?

[Morghulis]

This post got me to laugh.
<- Works in I.t..... Plays at work.

Hell my boss even saw it one day and laughed.

[Robbintha Hood]

I'm pretty sure that the VPN is all they will see.

[myriverse]

16 year old elf pixels don't use much bandwidth, so it might go unnoticed. I'll bet a cursory skim of a typical news site uses more bandwidth than a casual stroll through EC tunnel.

[Deadmantis]

The company I work for blocks access to most all game sites. Surprisingly P99 is one they don't. The forums anyway, not sure about the emulator itself, never tried that. Not sure I would chance it though.

One night I streamed a couple hours of Pandora at work and then got an email from IT with the times and the amount of data I was streaming with a nice little warning telling me to stop.

[Corpsed]

What if you VPN'd out of your works network? All they would see is the VPN connection, correct?

That is assuming VPN connections are allowed by the firewall. Of course they might question why you are running a VPN from a BOYD, assuming that is a personal Surface. I know it would raise a red flag if I saw that on my network, but who knows.

[-TK-]

Phone tether would work if you have a decent data plan. Not sure of your situation, but if I found an employee playing a game on my time, I'd fire them. So if you are worried about getting caught, I wouldn't do it.

[Honest]

EQ can run off a thumb drive, I have played from work. The company we use for IT matters is terrible though and the company itself is not that worried about it.

[Deliverator]

I used to play at work when I ran a family retail store. We were not particularly busy most of the day and I just camped AC most of the time that I was at work. Got my Jboots though!

[Pirates10i]

Would it make a difference if I'm playing on the guest network from my personal surface 3

[Pirates10i]

Phone tether would work if you have a decent data plan. Not sure of your situation, but if I found an employee playing a game on my time, I'd fire them. So if you are worried about getting caught, I wouldn't do it.

Any idea the amount of data that would eat up? I'm guessing the same amount of streaming a video?

[Swish]

Any idea the amount of data that would eat up? I'm guessing the same amount of streaming a video?

EQ was originally designed so it could be run off a 28.8k modem, it doesn't add up quickly. Would a 2GB plan be enough, I wonder?

[Corpsed]

You can very easily test this by just trying it from home. Play for an hour, see how much bandwidth it used.

[Crawdad]

I play from work all the time.. mostly because I work 12-15 hour days during the busy time of year (right now). A lot of people do, which is why lazy camps with 16-22min respawn times are so popular.

I wouldn't do it if you work for a faceless corporation or if your IT department has some kind of monthly quota or are sticklers, but if you can browse reddit/cnn/spotify at work, I doubt you'd have a problem with p99.

[Pirates10i]

EQ was originally designed so it could be run off a 28.8k modem, it doesn't add up quickly. Would a 2GB plan be enough, I wonder?

Right but with a data cap of 5 gigs I don't wanna run out in a day lol

[J. Jones]

you need to get your life together and rethink your priorities if you're going to risk your job for pixels.

[Pirates10i]

you need to get your life together and rethink your priorities if you're going to risk your job for pixels.

It was just a question, it's been a slow couple of weeks for me

[Itap]

Play using your phone as a hotspot. EQ uses barely any data

[Destron]

Use TeamViewer to remote into your home PC. Simple solution.

[Corpsed]

If you tether your phone, and make sure the wireless is turned off so its not going through the corporate wireless network then they cannot see you playing except by looking at your screen.

[Kengo]

you need to get your life together and rethink your priorities if you're going to risk your job for pixels.

Because getting paper currency is soooooo much better. Perhaps you put too much stock in your job? I'm sure he'll rethink his whole life because of your asinine comment.

[Corpsed]

Use TeamViewer to remote into your home PC. Simple solution.

They can easily see you using Teamviewer

[Itap]

you need to get your life together and rethink your priorities if you're going to risk your job for pixels.

One nerd calling another nerd, a nerd

[Tpar]

One option, if you have it, would be for you to get a hotspot, such as a net zero or verizon hot spot, or see if your cell phone allows tethering. That way you're not going through their network and the amount of bandwidth that EQ uses is negligible.

[Destron]

They can easily see you using Teamviewer

Right...but they can't see what you're doing on Teamviewer. Isn't that the goal here?

[Swish]

Right...but they can't see what you're doing on Teamviewer. Isn't that the goal here?

Yeah but is that a hand on the shoulder when you least expect it? Not worth getting fired over.

[Corpsed]

Right...but they can't see what you're doing on Teamviewer. Isn't that the goal here?

I think the goal was to play without attracting IT attention. Someone running Teamviewer will attract it and will most likely come and see what you are doing. Also, Teamviewer uses a lot of bandwidth, I know I noticed within the hour when someone on my network was using.

[Deadmantis]

Back in the early 90s I was playing a game off of a floppy disk on a company PC while working night shift, and our IT engineer happened to be staying late and caught me. He laughed it off but I wasn't sure how much trouble I was in. I thought we were friends.

The PC wasn't networked yet so we had to back up everything on a tape drive and send the tapes to corporate. So the engineer typed up a phony letter on our company letterhead, from the corporate IT department head to him, saying he was going through our backup tapes and noticed some "save game" files that don't belong there. Telling him that game playing on company PCs, let alone company time is unacceptable, and that it must be dealt with.

He showed it to me and I nearly shit my pants. I thought I was getting fired for playing Jeopardy? No, I think it was Bass fishing. Either way, best joke ever.

[drktmplr12]

has anyone ever tried using teamviewer to remotely play a game? in my experience its pretty much unplayable.

[myriverse]

Right but with a data cap of 5 gigs I don't wanna run out in a day lol
Not probable (don't even think possible). My typical P99 usage is on the order of 4MB per hour. One full day of constant use would be just less than 100MB. I've downloaded single books that were bigger than that. The information being sent back and forth isn't that big, since most of the work is done with the client and no large media is ever sent.

[J. Jones]

Because getting paper currency is soooooo much better. Perhaps you put too much stock in your job? I'm sure he'll rethink his whole life because of your asinine comment.

maybe you guys don't have a real job or still have mommy pay for your things, but if he's questioning whether IT is going to detect him playing games during work then that should be a red flag that maybe it's not a good idea. it's just risky in general and to be honest it's going to open up Pandora's box. forumquesting at work is one thing, but once you start actually playing, it's going to be a bad addiction and risking your career over it is just not a mature thing to do, but do what you like man. it's your life.

One nerd calling another nerd, irresponsible
fixed

[Caridry]

maybe you guys don't have a real job or still have mommy pay for your things, but if he's questioning whether IT is going to detect him playing games during work then that should be a red flag that maybe it's not a good idea. it's just risky in general and to be honest it's going to open up Pandora's box. forumquesting at work is one thing, but once you start actually playing, it's going to be a bad addiction and risking your career over it is just not a mature thing to do, but do what you like man. it's your life.


fixed

http://cdn.gurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/tumblr_m6pi19PV4m1qgwqw9o2_500.gif

[Corpsed]

Maybe, but everyone wastes time at work. Playing online games, browsing forums, shopping, facebook, standing around talking, etc. If you are able to do that and get your job done and you're not breaking company policy I don't see what the problem is. Just because you play outside your home doesn't mean you will become addicted and destroy your life. It does happen, but it's not inevitable or even likely.

[Destron]

has anyone ever tried using teamviewer to remotely play a game? in my experience its pretty much unplayable.

Killed vox this way a couple weeks ago, true 1999 experience.

It is laggy for sure. But it's also not going to show up on reports. Teamviewer will but I'd rather be caught using Teamviewer to "organize photos" during lunch than playing a video game. I work in IT so the risk is quite low for me, I have actual uses for Teamviewer outside of gaming.

[Crawdad]

maybe you guys don't have a real job or still have mommy pay for your things, but if he's questioning whether IT is going to detect him playing games during work then that should be a red flag that maybe it's not a good idea. it's just risky in general and to be honest it's going to open up Pandora's box. forumquesting at work is one thing, but once you start actually playing, it's going to be a bad addiction and risking your career over it is just not a mature thing to do, but do what you like man. it's your life.


Yeah, I wouldn't recommend playing at work for most people. Some jobs have a lot of leeway as far as browsing social media, goofing off at addictinggames.com or agar.io, or frequency of break times...but If you have to try and hide it then you shouldn't be doing it, as hackneyed as that sounds.

[Froakula]

This is funny I was just thinking how many people I run into during my day in game that are also playing from work!

[Frieza_Prexus]

As one of the chosen few, raiding from work is pretty sweet.

[surron]

1 hour of gaming on p99 takes less than 5 MB. IT department would never even blink at that. If they were monitoring network traffic all they would see is your IP connected to another IP and through a port. What are they going to do with that information? They could figure out what processes on your computer are connected to that port and find eqgame.exe. But that's a lot of work for a tcp connection thats producing virtually no traffic. Maybe they packet sniff every incoming packet, in that case holler at them to give you a dump of the current zone you're in to see if that named mob is up (but really that sounds like more work than usual, and may be a privacy violation in your company). If they are capable of visually monitoring your computer than that's a different story.

If you want to play at work you need a phone with 3G+ tethered to a personal laptop.

[Jimjam]

so rename eqgame.exe legitimatebusinessrelatedprocesses.exe :p

[Kreylyn]

If your afraid of using the work connection, use phone data. It's really not that much date used. You can see for yourself as most companies offer real time data usage info. Play for a night, see how much you use.

I play at work all the time. My job has very little productivity requirements that are not directly related to responding to a customer. So no customers, nothing to do.

[kate79]

I play while I work, but I work from home, so 1.) It's my own network and computer and 2.) no chance of anyone peaking over my shoulder. If I still worked in the office I wouldn't risk it.

[Nuggie]

The most data I've used by tethering to my phone was about 3 gigs. It was a pretty heavy use month.

But as previously mentioned, it's not worth your job.

[mach7]

I was talking to a guy last night camping hadden at work. The real issue is that your employer has loot rights :)

[murcielago200]

I play at work but I work at a small hospital and when the patients are all asleep and nothing is happening in the ER im good to play. IT knows I do and they just say dont use their computers. I normally play my necro at work since I have to be ready to FD if anything real happens. If i was a crappy nurse im sure they would use it as an excuse to fire me but I do my job well so no one says anything about it.

[Clark]

1 hour of gaming on p99 takes less than 5 MB. IT department would never even blink at that. If they were monitoring network traffic all they would see is your IP connected to another IP and through a port. What are they going to do with that information? They could figure out what processes on your computer are connected to that port and find eqgame.exe. But that's a lot of work for a tcp connection thats producing virtually no traffic. Maybe they packet sniff every incoming packet, in that case holler at them to give you a dump of the current zone you're in to see if that named mob is up (but really that sounds like more work than usual, and may be a privacy violation in your company). If they are capable of visually monitoring your computer than that's a different story.

If you want to play at work you need a phone with 3G+ tethered to a personal laptop.

Good info thx.

----

so rename eqgame.exe legitimatebusinessrelatedprocesses.exe :p

LOL

[Sixpence]

I do, but I use a clean link out.

Pirates. As has been said above, it can (& most likely will be tracked depending on your organisation). So it all depends on how strong your work position is fella.
If you feel it won't jeopardise or impact your output, crack on. If someone above is looking for a reason to sting you, that's a pretty easy win for them.

[webrunner5]

Ah hell, just quit your job and move back in with Mom. :p

[sacman08]

Install on surface and play with a VPN (HideMyA anyone?). If the IT uses software to track installs edit the registry for the control panel description to say something work related or ok to have (Office Toolbar 2). If their real jerks, you can run it off a USB, but you'll have to lower your graphics on the game and get a high quality USB drive or you will see game play lag. Also if your using the guest network that stuff is monitored way more than the physical LAN, plug up to a jack if at all possible.
But all of this is a non issue, if your playing P99 at work, the real problem is getting so involved that someone walks up to you and sees you playing a game when your working.

[milsorgen]

16 year old elf pixels don't use much bandwidth, so it might go unnoticed. I'll bet a cursory skim of a typical news site uses more bandwidth than a casual stroll through EC tunnel.

Probably depends more on what the ips the clients connecting to resolve to as to whether anyone notices.

[timeconsumer]

Like others said, a lot depends on your particular job. Bringing your own device and using a phone tether is easily the safest way to do it. But you also have to consider the location of your desk, how visible your screen would be, etc. Lastly, knowing your company HR policies (if applicable) is just as important as anything else. I know our company has a really hard time firing bad employees, and they can get away with crap for awhile.

I personally don't play at work, my desk is in way too high traffic of an area, and I have little self control so I would get nothing done.

[Tenlaar]

Find something productive to do instead of being a shitty employee.

[TarukShmaruk]

Find something productive to do instead of being a shitty employee.

[foldupmonk]

I play at work every time I work from home. Its not hard to sit and kill a mob every 7 minutes or so and work between. I told my team I play games during down time and I don't care if they do as well as long as we meet our goals daily and monthly. Id rather have my team play video games for 10-15 minutes of the hour between tasks than have people on my team that hate having to work. Our team actually has had the highest production rate with the least amount of issues over the last year since I implemented it.

EDIT: Note my team and myself are in IT. I know when they are at home they are playing games/watching Netflix on their other laptop/desktop system. I just give them the approval for it and it makes them function better by not having to sneak around and try not to accidentally say they do it during some meeting/gathering

[Kevris]

I am the Information Systems Manager for a company with about 200 users. I have a Helpdesk guy, and a Network Engineer under me. We do very well as I have most of this place automated with System Center.

The firewall content filter we use does not block the Project 1999 website. I use it all the time.

I have also excluded my AD login from all logging on the firewall as we (on a monthly basis) review the firewall logs to see who is doing what on the network. The firewall also logs the sites it has blocked, so it's kind of hilarious to see not only what people are doing, but what they are trying to do.

If I saw a computer with a constant connection to a specific IP address, you bet your ass I'd figure out what that IP address was, then I would rain righteous fire and vengeance upon them.

In short: RL > Pixels. Play at home.

To the people saying "Use Teamviewer! They'll never know!" you fail to understand that most forms of VNC don't alert the user that someone has connected, so something like that would play out like this:

Myself or my staff would see the constant TeamViewer traffic in the firewall logs
I'd have one of my guys "babysit" your desktop via VNC on their 2nd or 3rd monitor
We'd see you logging into your home PC and firing up EQ
We would ruin your day

Your results may vary.

[Champion_Standing]

Why work at all? Start working on that diabetes and you'll be on disability and playing EQ 18 hours a day in no time.

[capco]

I play at work every time I work from home. Its not hard to sit and kill a mob every 7 minutes or so and work between. I told my team I play games during down time and I don't care if they do as well as long as we meet our goals daily and monthly. Id rather have my team play video games for 10-15 minutes of the hour between tasks than have people on my team that hate having to work. Our team actually has had the highest production rate with the least amount of issues over the last year since I implemented it.

EDIT: Note my team and myself are in IT. I know when they are at home they are playing games/watching Netflix on their other laptop/desktop system. I just give them the approval for it and it makes them function better by not having to sneak around and try not to accidentally say they do it during some meeting/gathering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

EDIT: this isn't the right video I was looking for but it's still a good one. The one I was looking for said that workers who get 10 minutes of goof off time per hour are more productive than those who work the full 60 minutes.

[captnamazing]

playing at work.. this is the type of scummy addict behavior that gives all gamers a bad rep. that being said I do it as much as possible

[Jenithia]

This is funny I was just thinking how many people I run into during my day in game that are also playing from work!

For a bit I had a game on my phone called Ingress, where you choose a faction, find landmarks in real life, claim them for your team, equip your portal with shields, etc.

Anyway, I work at the world headquarters for GM in Detroit and we have this huge food court area. I was sitting at a table and got a notification that my portal nearby was under attack. Looking around I saw about 20-30 other people looking down at their phones, it was one of them. I had to wonder when I fired back at them if they'd ever think it was the girl in heels picking at her salad and probably browsing Pinterest.

I wish I could play EQ at work. There's just not really the time unless I have a slow boring camp. Not worth losing my job.