Step 4 of 5

Making an account and working through the tutorial

Five things happen in this step, and they happen in a fixed order: you register, you confirm the email address, the game installs, you sign in, and you complete the training mode. Each one has a predictable way of going wrong, and knowing which is which saves an evening.

How long each part takes

Treating the download as its own event rather than part of a sitting is the single scheduling decision that makes this pleasant instead of tedious. Start it, go and do something else, come back when it has finished.

The sequence, start to finish

What follows is written in general terms, because it describes how this category of game works rather than any one vendor's screens. The labels on the buttons differ; the order does not.

1. Register on the vendor's landing page. Reach the vendor's own site and open the registration form. Enter the email address, nickname and password you settled on in Step 3. Read the box you are ticking; it normally references both the terms and the privacy policy.

2. Confirm the email address. A message arrives with a confirmation link. Open it and follow the link. This is not a formality you can skip — in many services the account stays unconfirmed and partly unusable until you do, and in the arrangement described to us for the example product, confirming the address is part of what counts as a completed registration.

3. Install the game. Download the launcher from the vendor's own site. Run it, choose the drive you identified in Step 2 as having enough free space, and let it fetch the main game. Do not close the laptop lid or let the machine sleep part way through.

4. Sign in and secure the account. Start the game and sign in with the account you created. Before anything else, open the account settings and turn on two-factor authentication if it is available.

5. Work through the tutorial. Find the training or tutorial mode in the main menu and complete it before joining a live match. This is the step the whole course has been pointing at.

For the product used as the example here, the registration and tutorial sequence begins on the vendor's own landing page.

Visit the War Thunder website Paid affiliate link. Exact Ratio receives a commission from the affiliate network if you register through it. Nothing about your cost or the sign-up process changes, and this course works just as well if you go to the vendor directly.

Where people get stuck

The confirmation message does not arrive. Check the junk or spam folder first; automated mail from a new sender is frequently filtered. If it is genuinely absent after ten minutes, use the resend function rather than registering a second account, because a duplicate account with the same details causes more trouble than it solves. Confirm you typed the address correctly — a mistyped address is the most common cause by a wide margin.

The download stalls or restarts. Large downloads are interrupted by sleep settings, by a connection that drops briefly, and by a drive filling up part way through. Check the free space again; the installed size and the download size are not the same number, and some installers need room for both at once.

The game will not start after installing. The usual causes are an out-of-date graphics driver and a missing system component the installer normally supplies. Updating the driver from the hardware maker's own site is the first thing to try, as covered in Step 2.

Everything runs but looks wrong or stutters. Open the graphics settings and choose the lowest preset, then confirm the game is smooth before raising anything. Fixing this from the bottom up takes minutes; fixing it from the top down takes an evening.

You cannot sign in. If the password is correct and the account is confirmed, stop and consider whether you entered it on the vendor's own site. If there is any doubt, change the password from the vendor's site directly and read the Scamwatch guidance at scamwatch.gov.au.

What the tutorial is for

A training mode in this genre exists to teach three things: which keys do what, how the vehicle behaves when you ask it to do something, and what the screen is telling you. All three are genuinely hard to pick up from a live match, where other people are involved and nothing pauses.

It is worth doing properly rather than clicking through. The specific benefit is that the information shown around the edges of the screen — speed, direction, ammunition, the state of your vehicle — stops being decoration and starts being readable. That shift is the difference between a frustrating first hour and a reasonable one.

In some services, completing the tutorial also serves an administrative purpose: it is the point at which an account is treated as a real, active player rather than a registration. For the example product, the arrangement described to us is that registration, email confirmation and logging into the game together constitute a completed sign-up.

Controls, before you decide the game is impossible

Vehicle games have a lot of controls, and the default layout is a compromise aimed at nobody in particular. Two adjustments help more than anything else.

First, find the control settings and read the list once, slowly, before you need it. You are not memorising it; you are building a rough map so that when you need to do something you half-remember where it was.

Second, change the handful of keys that feel wrong under your fingers and leave the rest alone. Wholesale remapping on day one usually produces a layout you then have to relearn.

Whether you need a joystick or any other hardware depends on the mode you play and on your own preference, not on necessity. A keyboard and mouse is the ordinary starting point in this genre, and nothing in this course suggests you should buy anything.

The settings to look at on day one

Before the first live match, spend ten minutes in the settings menus looking for four things: how to mute another player, how to report one, what your privacy or profile visibility options are, and whether chat can be limited or turned off. Every mainstream online game provides some version of all four, and the time to find them is before an unpleasant interaction rather than during one.

If a young person in your household is playing, the eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for parents and carers on gaming, including conversations worth having in advance, at esafety.gov.au.

The worked example