Your first sessions: settings, other players and knowing how to stop

The last step is about the first hour and the first month. Not about playing well — that is nobody's business but yours — but about setting the thing up so that it stays under your control, and about having a clean exit if it turns out not to suit you. It takes about eighteen minutes to read.

What the first twenty minutes actually look like

Expect four phases, in this order, and expect most of the time to be spent on the first one.

1. The download. Usually through a launcher, a small program that fetches the game and keeps it updated. Tens of gigabytes is normal for the genre. Start it when you are going to be doing something else.
2. The first launch. The game checks for updates, possibly downloads more, and asks you to sign in with the account from Step 3.
3. Setup prompts. Graphics quality, controls, sometimes a region. Many games now guess at settings for your hardware; the guess is usually reasonable and always adjustable.
4. A tutorial. Most games of this kind start with a guided introduction against computer-controlled opponents. Do it, even if it seems slow. It is the cheapest way to learn the controls before anyone is watching.

If the download stalls or the first launch fails, the ordinary first moves are to restart the launcher, check your free disk space against the figure from Step 2, and look at the vendor's own support pages. Resist the temptation to search for and install a “fix” from a stranger's site; the Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes general advice about obtaining software only from sources you can verify.

The settings to open before your first match

Five settings are worth deliberate attention. They exist in some form in nearly every online game, under names that vary.

These are general category settings. This course deliberately does not walk you through any one game's menus, because menus move; what does not move is the list of things worth finding.

Server region, and why it matters in Australia

Online matches are hosted on servers somewhere, and the time your input takes to travel there and back is latency. For a player in Australia, the distance to servers in Europe or North America is substantial and no amount of local equipment removes it. The resulting delay is the most common explanation for a competitive game feeling unresponsive here when it looks fine in videos made elsewhere.

If the game offers a region or server selection, choose the nearest one. If it offers Oceania, use it. If the only regions on offer are distant, that is a genuine fact about that game for an Australian player, and it is better to learn it in the first session than to spend a month assuming your computer is at fault.

Other players

An online game is a public place. Most people in it are unremarkable and some are not, and no classification covers what another player types into a chat box.

Three practical habits cover almost everything:

• Find the mute, block and report controls before you need them. Usually in the player list or the scoreboard. Knowing where they are turns an unpleasant match into a ten-second problem.
• Do not share personal details. Your real name, suburb, school, workplace or other accounts have no role in a match. A display name that is not your real name is a sensible default.
• Treat offers made in chat as scams until proven otherwise. Free items, account trades, external sites promising currency — Step 3's phishing habits apply inside the game exactly as they do in email, and Scamwatch is still the place to check and report.

If something crosses the line into serious online abuse, image-based abuse or cyberbullying of a child, the eSafety Commissioner is the national regulator and has formal complaint schemes. That is a far better destination than arguing in a chat window.

The time question

Step 1 made the point that time is what these games mostly ask for. Step 5 is where that becomes real, because the mechanisms are designed to be pleasant: daily rewards for signing in, streaks that break if you miss a day, events that run for a fixed window.

None of that is sinister, and none of it has to be obeyed. Two small practices keep it in proportion. The first is to set a finish time before you start, out loud or on paper, rather than deciding when to stop while you are enjoying yourself. The second is to let a streak break on purpose once, early. A streak you have already broken has no further hold over you, and discovering that the game continues exactly as before is worth more than whatever the reward was.

If gaming time is causing real difficulty — missed work or study, conflict at home, or distress when you cannot play — that is a health matter rather than a settings matter, and it is worth raising with a general practitioner. This course is a beginner's guide to a category of software and nothing more; it is not qualified to say anything else about it.

Sitting at a computer for hours

General, obvious and routinely ignored: a session of several hours at a desk benefits from standing up every so often, a screen at roughly eye level, a chair that supports your back, and eyes that occasionally look at something further away than the monitor. There is no rule here that is specific to games, which is precisely why it gets forgotten when a match is about to start. Set a timer if it helps.

Keeping the account healthy over a year

• Let the game update itself. Updates to online games frequently include security fixes, and running an outdated client is the one maintenance task worth being strict about.
• Re-read the privacy and chat settings every few months. New features sometimes arrive switched on, and a setting you chose a year ago may now mean something slightly different.
• Watch your sign-in notifications. If the service emails you about sign-ins from unfamiliar places, read those messages — in the dedicated game mailbox from Step 3, where they are easy to see.
• Review your spending notebook monthly. The line-per-purchase habit from Step 4 only pays off if somebody adds the column up.
• Check your free disk space before major updates. The number from Step 2 does not stay true forever.

Leaving cleanly

Deciding a game is not for you is a perfectly good outcome of this course, and it is worth doing properly rather than by neglect.

1. Uninstall the game through your operating system's usual software removal tool, or through the launcher it came with.
2. Check afterwards whether the launcher is still installed and whether you want it. Launchers often outlive the games they installed.
3. Look in your user folders for leftover settings or cache directories if you want the drive space back.
4. Decide whether to delete the account itself. If the company offers account deletion, that is cleaner than leaving a dormant account with your email attached to it; if it does not, at minimum turn off its marketing email.
5. Keep your notes from Step 2. The specifications sheet is reusable for the next game you consider, and it took you fifteen minutes to make.

After this course

There is nothing to finish, submit or collect. The course has no enrolment, no record and no completion marker of any kind; if you have read the five steps and done the checklists, you have had everything it has to offer.

The sensible next move is to put the checklists somewhere useful. The all checklists page gathers all six lists in one document that prints on plain paper, which is the form most people actually use them in.

If you want to see what a title in the vehicle-combat genre looks like from the vendor's own side, the example used throughout this course is below.

Paid affiliate link: Raw Segment receives a commission from the affiliate network that operates the link if you create an account through it. You pay nothing extra, and every word of this step applies equally to any other game in the category.

Visit the Crossout website

Checklist 5 — the first session and the first month