A five-step course for Australians who are new to online vehicle combat games

This course is written for an adult in Australia who has heard of free-to-play online games where people drive tanks, fly aircraft and sail ships against each other, and who wants to understand what signing up actually involves before doing it. Each of the five steps takes about eight to twelve minutes to read, so the whole course is roughly an hour if you read it in one sitting, and it is designed to be read across five short sittings instead.

The five steps

1. Step 1 — What an online vehicle combat game is, and what it is not
   The shape of the genre, the words you will meet, and the difference between buying a game and registering for one.
2. Step 2 — Working out whether your desktop computer can run it
   How to find out what is inside your own machine, and how to read a requirements list without guessing.
3. Step 3 — Classification, account terms and what you hand over
   Where Australian classification information comes from, and which parts of a sign-up page are worth slowing down for.
4. Step 4 — Making an account and working through the tutorial
   The ordinary sequence of registering, confirming an email address, installing and starting the training mode.
5. Step 5 — Spending, updates and keeping it a hobby
   How optional purchases are usually structured, what to decide in advance, and where to complain if something goes wrong.

Every step ends with a checklist of the practical things to do before you move on. The All checklists page gathers the five checklists in one place and prints cleanly on paper, which is useful if the computer you are setting up is not the one you are reading this on.

Who this course is for, and who it is not for

It is for someone who is comfortable using a desktop or laptop computer for ordinary tasks — email, documents, a web browser — but who has never installed a large online game and is not sure what the sign-up process asks for. It assumes no knowledge of graphics hardware, game launchers, or the vocabulary that players use with each other.

It is also for a parent or carer who wants to understand a game a younger person in the household has asked about, and who would like to know where Australian classification information comes from before making a decision.

It is not for an experienced player looking for tactics or vehicle comparisons, and it is not technical support: when something goes wrong with a particular account, the publisher of that game is the only party who can fix it.

And it is not advice about whether you should play at all. That is your decision. The course exists so that the decision is made with the ordinary facts in front of you rather than after the fact.

The one checklist to work through before anything else

Before you read Step 1, there are four things worth settling, because they shape everything that follows.

What you will be able to do when you finish

After Step 1 you will be able to describe, in your own words, what kind of game this is and what "free to play" does and does not mean in practice. After Step 2 you will be able to open a system information panel on your own computer, read off the processor, memory and graphics details, and compare them to a published requirements list without needing anyone to translate.

After Step 3 you will know where to look up an Australian classification and which parts of a terms document to read. After Step 4 you will have a clear picture of the registration, confirmation, installation and tutorial sequence, including the points where people most often get stuck. After Step 5 you will have a spending position you decided in advance, and you will know which Australian body handles which kind of complaint.

A worked example you can follow through the steps

What you can do without spending anything

A good deal of this course costs nothing to act on. Checking your own hardware costs nothing. Looking up a classification costs nothing. Reading a privacy policy and a set of terms costs nothing. Creating an account and installing a free-to-play game costs nothing, which is the basic proposition of the genre described in Step 1.

What is not free is time: the download is large, the tutorial takes a while, and learning the controls takes longer still. Treating that time as the real price is a more honest way to think about it than treating the game as costless.

Where War Thunder appears in this course, and why

War Thunder appears as the worked reference point in Steps 3, 4 and 5, because the course needs a concrete example of the registration-and-tutorial sequence and because it is the product this site has a commercial relationship with. The network that supplies our link describes it as an online game that is a world hit and a well-known brand, and states that a commission is paid for registration, confirmation of the email address and then logging into the game. It is published by Gaijin Entertainment, and it is a multiplayer vehicle simulator covering aircraft, helicopters, tanks and ships. It runs on desktop computers — Windows, macOS and Linux.

Everything else we say about it is either sourced from its own website or clearly flagged as general guidance about the category. Where we do not know something, the course says that we do not know it rather than filling the gap. This site is not War Thunder's official site, is not operated by its publisher, and is not authorised, endorsed or sponsored by anyone named on it.

Official Australian help

Several Australian bodies publish free, authoritative material that is more useful than anything a commercial site can tell you, and the steps link to them where they are relevant.

• Australian Classification Board — the body that classifies films, computer games and certain publications in Australia, with a public database of classification decisions.
• eSafety Commissioner — the national independent regulator for online safety, publishing guidance for adults, parents and young people.
• Scamwatch — run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, collecting information about scams and how to report them.
• ACCC — the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which administers the Australian Consumer Law.
• OAIC — the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the national privacy regulator.
• Australian Cyber Security Centre — the Australian Signals Directorate's centre for cyber security advice.

How this course is written and kept current

The course was drafted in order, from the questions an adult in Australia tends to ask in the first hour of looking at a game like this. Each step relies on three kinds of source: published material from the vendor concerned, published material from Australian government bodies, and plain description of how the category generally works. Where a claim would need a figure or a test result to be meaningful, we leave it out instead of inventing one.

It is reviewed at least every six months. The About page sets out the method in full, including the commercial relationship behind the links.

Short answers to common questions

Do I need an account on this site?

No. There is nothing to register for here, no form of any kind, and no way to save your progress. The checklists are printed lists; they do not remember which boxes you ticked, because the site stores nothing on your computer.

Do I have to do the steps in order?

No, but they are written to build on each other, and Step 2 in particular is much more useful before you have downloaded anything than after.

Will this course work on a phone?

The course reads fine on a phone, but the game it uses as its example is distributed for desktop and laptop computers only.

Is anything on this page sponsored content?

The links to the War Thunder website are paid affiliate links, disclosed above, beside each link, and in full on the Affiliate Disclosure. No one pays for coverage, placement or wording.