Online multiplayer war games: a five-step course for people starting from scratch
This course explains what a large online war game asks of you before you play one — the account, the email confirmation, the classification rating, the computer it runs on and the money it can quietly cost — and it is written for readers in Australia who have never set one up.
Each of the five steps takes about eight to twelve minutes to read. If you read one step a day you will be through the course in a week, and you can stop after any step without losing the thread.
How this course is paid for
Some pages here link to the website of Enlisted, a large online war game. Those links are paid affiliate links: if you register an account through one of them, LOKGROUP s.r.o. receives a commission from the affiliate network that operates the link. You pay nothing extra, and no part of this course changes because of that commission — the steps were written before the links were added, and the checklists work for any game in this category. The full explanation sits on our Affiliate Disclosure page.
The five steps
- Step 1 — What these games are, and
what they cost
Why a game with no purchase price still has a price, and the vocabulary you need before anything else makes sense. - Step 2 — Ratings, age guidance
and whether your computer can run it
Reading an Australian classification, deciding whether a game suits the household, and checking the hardware. - Step 3 — The account and the email
confirmation
What a sign-up form really asks for, why a confirmation email arrives, and how to tell the real one from a fake. - Step 4 — Your first session
Settings worth changing before you play, who can talk to you, and what a first hour normally looks like. - Step 5 — Spending, randomised items
and staying in control
Where the money goes, what randomised rewards are, and how to put limits in place that hold.
Every step finishes with a checklist you can work through on your own. All five checklists are gathered on the checklists page, which prints on a couple of pages if you would rather tick them off with a pen.
Who this course is for, and who it is not for
This course is written for an adult in Australia who is about to set up an account for a large multiplayer game, either for themselves or for someone in the household, and who has never done it before. It assumes no technical background. Every term is explained the first time it appears, including the ones that regular players use without thinking — free-to-play, client, double opt-in, battle pass, loot box.
It is not for you if you already play these games regularly; you will find the pace slow. It is also not a buying guide. There is no table of recommended games, no scoring, no ranking, and nothing here tells you which game to install. The aim is narrower: that you can look at any game in this category and work out for yourself what it will ask of you.
One more thing this course is not: it is not training, and finishing it earns you nothing. There is no sign-up, no account, no certificate and no record that you were here. Nothing on this site asks for your name or your email address.
What you will be able to do after each step
After Step 1 you will be able to read a game's own description and tell which parts describe the game and which describe the shop attached to it. After Step 2 you will be able to look up a title's Australian classification, read the consumer advice that comes with it, and match the game's stated system requirements against the computer you own.
After Step 3 you will be able to complete a sign-up without handing over more than the sign-up needs, and you will recognise the confirmation email that follows — and the imitations of it. After Step 4 you will be able to set up a first session so that voice chat, friend requests and messages from strangers behave the way you want. After Step 5 you will be able to see every way a game in this category can take money from you, and put a ceiling on it before anyone plays.
The one checklist to do before anything else
Before you install anything
- Write down which computer the game will run on, and who else uses it.
- Decide which email address the account will use, and whether anyone else can read that mailbox.
- Check whether a payment card is already saved in the shop or launcher on that computer.
- Agree with everyone in the household what, if anything, may be spent, and in what period.
- Look up the game's Australian classification and read the consumer advice lines, not only the letters.
Those five lines take about ten minutes and they prevent most of the problems the rest of this course describes. If you do nothing else here, do those.
A worked example, carried through the course
Hypothetical example
To keep the steps concrete, the course follows one invented household: two adults sharing a desktop computer in the living room, and a fourteen-year-old who wants to play a war game that friends at school are already playing. The household is a made-up example written for this course. It is not a reader, not a customer and not an account of anyone's results, and it never reports whether a game was good or bad.
The example reappears in every step, each time facing the decision that step is about: which computer, which rating, which mailbox, which chat settings, which spending limit. Where the household's situation would not match yours, the step says so.
What you can do without spending anything
Most of this course costs nothing to act on. Checking a classification is free and public. Reading a game's system requirements is free. Creating an account is normally free in this category, though whether a particular game charges is something only that game's own site can tell you. Changing chat and privacy settings is free. Setting a spending limit on a payment card or a platform account is free.
You can finish all five steps and never install a game at all, and that is a reasonable outcome of the course rather than a failure of it.
Where Enlisted appears in this course, and why
Enlisted is a large multiplayer online first-person shooter set in battles of the Second World War, with infantry, tanks, aircraft and naval vessels. It appears in this course as the worked example of a sign-up flow, because its registration follows the pattern Step 3 describes: you register, you confirm your email address, then you launch the game for the first time. Its own site covers desktop computers running Windows, macOS or Linux.
The links to it are paid affiliate links. We say so beside every one of them, and the reason it is Enlisted rather than another title is commercial — that is the arrangement LOKGROUP s.r.o. has. It is not a recommendation, not a ranking and not a statement that the game suits you. What the game costs, what it contains and what it requires are questions for its own website.
Visit the Enlisted website — opens in a new tab.
Paid affiliate link: we earn a commission if you register through it, at no extra cost to you.
Australian organisations that publish help
Several Australian bodies publish free material that covers parts of this ground, and the steps link to them where they help. The Australian Classification Board publishes the classification and consumer advice for games classified in Australia. The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance on online safety, including gaming and chat. Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, collects reports of scams and describes current methods. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes advice on passwords and account security. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission administers the Australian Consumer Law, and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner oversees privacy. Those descriptions are all this course claims about them.
How this course is written and kept current
The course is written by the editorial team at LOKGROUP s.r.o. There is no named author, because the pages are maintained as a set rather than owned by a person. General claims either link to the body that publishes the material or are written as general guidance. Claims about Enlisted come only from the material the vendor supplies to the affiliate network; where that material is silent, this course says so rather than filling the gap. The About page sets out the method in full, including the commercial relationship behind the links.
Short answers to common questions
Do I have to read the steps in order?
No, but Step 1 defines the words the later steps use, so starting there saves time.
Does this site save my progress?
No. The checklists are printed lists with empty boxes; ticking one changes nothing and nothing is remembered between visits. The site sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser.
Is any of this legal or financial advice?
No. It is general information about a category of software. The Terms and Conditions say what that means.
How do I ask a question or report a mistake?
Email info@evenformat.online. There is no form on this site and no mailing list to join.