Another fan of World of Warcraft. I totally understand! :-)

However, as with any other Internet game, World of Warcraft requires that you have specific communications channels -- or 'ports' -- open on your system or firewall for the game to be able to communicate back with the WoW servers.

World of Warcraft uses a range of ports, but the most important is TCP on port 3724.

The Blizzard Downloader is used by the software to download patches to the game, and that uses a much more complex configuration: TCP port 6112 and all ports in the range 6881-6999.

For walkthroughs on router and firewall configuration you should check out the Networking Help for the Blizzard Downloader page.

To open up your Mac firewall, you'll want to choose Sharing from the Apple --> System Configuration... then you can tweak the Firewall settings to allow these ports.

But that's not what you're facing: you have a VPN set up from your university, and you need to figure out how to reconfigure that to work with World of Warcraft. Unfortunately though, even if you can configure your end of the VPN to support these specific ports, the other end of the VPN that interfaces with the Internet would need to allow these specific ports too, which you probably cannot change.

There are some interesting ideas online about how you might circumvent things, however. Check out Playing games over blocked ports. Also make sure you have the very latest version of the World of Warcraft software too.

Hope that helps you with some good ideas: perhaps someone else can also add their own suggestions about how you might get back into the game through your school connection.