Step 4

Step 4 of 5

Registering, confirming your email address and the first launch

This step is the one people rush, and rushing it is what produces an account nobody can get back into six months later. Allow half an hour, including the install, and do the first four things in order.

Have these ready before you start

Four things, all decided in earlier steps: the email address the account will use, open in another window; a password you have not used anywhere else; the five numbers describing your computer; and the monthly spending figure you settled on, including zero.

Decide also, now rather than later, where the game will be installed. On a machine with a small fast drive and a large slow one, the game generally goes on the fast drive if there is room. If there is not, make room before you start rather than halfway through a long download.

The registration form, field by field

Registration forms differ between publishers, but they ask for the same handful of things. Here is what each field is actually for, so you can answer it deliberately.

Email address. Covered in Step 1. This is the recovery path, so it should be one you alone control and can read today.

Display name, nickname or callsign. This is public. Other players see it, and in many games it cannot be changed without paying or cannot be changed at all. Do not use your real name, your date of birth, your school, your suburb or the first half of your email address. A made-up word is best. If the household's player is young, choose this together — it is the single field with the most lasting consequence for privacy, and the eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for families on exactly this kind of choice.

Password. The next section.

Date of birth. Publishers ask so that they can apply age-related settings and comply with their obligations. Answer it honestly; an invented date can lock a young player out of protections that exist for them, and can make account recovery harder later because the answer has to be remembered.

Country. Australia. This may affect which servers you are offered and which store currency applies, so it is worth getting right.

Marketing consent tick-boxes. Usually optional and usually pre-set in the publisher's favour. Read them; untick what you do not want. Declining marketing never prevents an account from working.

The agreement tick-box. This is the one you looked at in Step 3. Tick it knowing what it says.

Choosing a password you will still have in a year

Three rules cover nearly everything, and all three are general security practice rather than anything specific to games.

Use it nowhere else. The commonest way a game account is taken is not a clever attack on the publisher; it is a password reused from a site that was breached years ago.

Make it long rather than clever. A passphrase of four or five unrelated words is easier to remember and harder to break than a short string of substituted characters. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes plain guidance on passphrases, and it is worth the five minutes.

Write it down somewhere sensible. A password manager is the tidy answer. A piece of paper in a drawer at home is an acceptable answer and is far better than a reused password. The threat you are guarding against is a stranger on the internet, not a visitor to your kitchen.

Confirming the email address

After the form is submitted, a message goes to the address you gave. Open it and act on it before you do anything else. Until you do, the account exists in a half-made state: many publishers will not let it play, and some discard unconfirmed registrations after a period.

This is the double opt-in pattern described in Step 1 — two actions, the form and the confirmation, and the registration is not finished until both have happened. Treat the confirmation as part of signing up, not as an optional extra.

Before clicking, glance at where the link goes. Hover over it and read the address in the status bar at the bottom of the window. It should be the publisher's own domain. This takes two seconds and is the habit that protects you from the look-alike messages described further down.

When nothing arrives

Work through these in order rather than registering a second time, which usually makes the situation worse.

1. Wait five minutes. Confirmation messages are often queued.
2. Check the junk or spam folder, and on some providers the Promotions or Updates tab.
3. Check the address you typed. A single wrong character is the most common cause, and the form may have accepted it without complaint.
4. Use the publisher's "resend confirmation" option if there is one, on the publisher's own site.
5. If your email is provided by an employer, a school or a small provider with aggressive filtering, the message may have been rejected before it reached you. This is the case for changing to a different address.
6. Only then contact the publisher's support, from a link on its own site.

Two-factor authentication

If the publisher offers two-factor authentication — a code from an app or a message in addition to your password — switch it on at this point, while you are already in the account settings. It is the single most effective thing you can do to keep an account, and it takes about three minutes.

Where an authenticator app is used, save the recovery codes it offers. Where a phone number is used, remember that changing numbers later means updating it. Not every publisher offers two-factor authentication; where one does not, the vendor simply does not provide it, and a long unique password carries the whole weight.

Installing from the right place

Get the client from the publisher's own site or from the official store the publisher names, and from nowhere else. Sites offering a faster version, a cracked version, a "free key" or a modified installer are either wasting your time or installing something you did not ask for.

Expect the install to take a while, and expect the first launch to add a further update on top of it. Leave the machine plugged in and awake. If the install offers to add extra software — a toolbar, an unrelated utility — decline it; this is ordinary bundling, not a sign anything is wrong, but you do not need it.

Remember the constraint from Step 2: a game published for desktop computers only will not have a phone or console version to fall back on. Enlisted, the title this course uses as its illustration, is published by the network's description for Mac, Windows and Linux computers; the network states registration, confirmation of the email address and logging in to the game as the actions that complete a sign-up, which is exactly the sequence this step describes.

Visit the Enlisted website
Paid affiliate link. Registering and confirming an email address after following it earns us a commission from the affiliate network. Your cost is the same either way, the commission had no influence on the advice above, and the whole of Step 4 works just as well with a game we have never heard of.

The first ten minutes

Before playing anything, spend ten minutes in the settings. It is more useful than it sounds, and almost nobody does it.

1. Sound. Turn the master volume down before the first loud sequence, then raise it.
2. Display. Set the resolution to match your screen. On a borderline machine, choose a lower visual quality preset first and raise it only if everything is smooth.
3. Controls. Find the key list and read it once. Ten seconds now saves a confused five minutes later.
4. Privacy and chat. Find out who can send you messages, who can see your profile and whether voice chat is on by default. In a household with a young player, set these together.
5. Account settings. Confirm that two-factor authentication is on and that the email address shown is the right one.
6. Payment. Confirm that no payment method is attached unless you decided in Step 3 that one should be.

Then play for twenty minutes and notice how the machine behaves — whether it stays smooth, whether the laptop gets hot, whether the connection holds. That is your real answer to Step 2's question, and it is better than any specification sheet.

Scams aimed at new players

New accounts attract a particular kind of message, and the patterns are worth recognising calmly. None of this means anything is currently wrong with your computer.

There are look-alike confirmation or "account at risk" emails with a link to a page that imitates the publisher's login screen. There are in-game messages offering free items in exchange for logging in on an outside site. There are "support staff" who ask for your password, which no legitimate support service does. And there are listings offering accounts or items for sale, which generally breach the agreement you read in Step 3 and leave you with no recourse.

The defence is a single habit: go to the publisher's site yourself rather than following a link someone sent you. Reports of scams can be made to the ACCC at scamwatch.gov.au, which also publishes descriptions of current patterns.

A worked example

The hypothetical Adelaide household registers on a Saturday morning. The parent's email address goes in the first field, a made-up display name in the second, and a four-word passphrase written on a card in the third. The confirmation message is in the junk folder, which nobody is surprised by because Step 1 told them where to look.

The install runs for most of an hour on the household's connection, and the first launch adds a further update. Settings take the full ten minutes because the chat and profile options are in two different menus. No payment method is attached. By lunchtime there is an account that works, that the adults can recover, and that nobody has spent anything on.

Before you move on

You should now have a confirmed account, two-factor authentication on if it was offered, a client installed from the publisher's own source, and six settings checked. If any of those is missing, it is worth finishing before the next step rather than after.

Step 5 is about the months that follow: updates, spending, storage and the Australian bodies to contact when something goes wrong.