Chapter Four.

Registering, installing and the first hour

Step 4 of 5

What a sign-up actually asks for

Registration for a game of this kind is short, and that shortness is worth noticing: you are generally asked for an email address, a password and a display name, and occasionally a date of birth or a country. Anything beyond that is unusual for a game account and worth pausing over. There is no reason a game needs your residential address, your telephone number or a document scan in order to let you begin the tutorial.

The display name is public to other players in most of these games, including in any ranking table, so it should not be your full name or anything that identifies where you live or work. A date of birth, where it is asked for, is usually used to decide what the account may do; answering it honestly is the sensible course, particularly where a person under sixteen is involved.

The flow the affiliate link on this site is paid for is the ordinary one for the category: a reader opens the landing page, registers there, installs the game and launches the tutorial. That is the whole of what the network states, and it is also a useful description of the sequence any game in this genre will put you through. Each of those four moments is a point where something can be decided rather than clicked past, and this step is about slowing each one down.

The email address and the password

Two small decisions here save a great deal of trouble later.

Which email address. A game account is a login that will receive marketing, that may be caught up in a future data breach somewhere, and that you may want to abandon. Many people use a secondary address for accounts like these, and that is a reasonable habit. What matters more is that the address is one you can still get into in two years, because it is almost always the only way to recover an account whose password has been lost.

What password. A unique one, used nowhere else, long rather than clever. If you use a password manager, this is what it is for. If you do not, a written note in a drawer at home is better than reusing the password from your email account. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes general, free guidance on passwords and on multi-factor authentication, and it is worth ten minutes before you create the account rather than after.

If the game offers a second factor — a code from an app, or a confirmation sent to your email — turn it on during sign-up. In this genre accounts accumulate real value over months, and account theft is a known nuisance.

Reading the terms before you tick the box

Nobody reads the whole of a terms of service document, and this course is not going to pretend otherwise. What is realistic is reading four specific things, which takes about five minutes with the browser's find function.

1. Search for "terminate" or "suspend". This tells you on what grounds the publisher may close your account, and what happens to anything you have paid for if they do.
2. Search for "refund". This is the policy you located in Step 3; confirm the version you read is the one attached to the account you are creating.
3. Search for "licence". Almost all of these documents say you are licensed to use the game and its contents rather than owning them. Knowing that before you spend money is the point.
4. Open the privacy notice and search for "third" and for "transfer". This is where you learn who else receives information about you and whether it leaves the country. The OAIC publishes plain explanations of what Australian privacy law requires of organisations, which makes a useful yardstick to read a notice against.

If any of the four cannot be found, that is itself a finding, and worth writing on your sheet next to the two cells you marked "not stated" in Step 2.

Where an installer may come from

This is the single most important paragraph in the course. An installer for a desktop game should come from the publisher's own website, or from an established distribution platform the publisher lists, and from nowhere else. Not from a search advertisement that resembles the publisher. Not from a video description. Not from a file-hosting site offering a "full version". Not from a friend's copy on a memory stick.

The reason is simple and does not require any alarm: an installer is a program you are giving permission to make changes to your computer, and the only sensible basis for giving that permission is knowing who wrote it. Scamwatch publishes descriptions of how impersonation of well-known brands is used in online scams, and software downloads are one of the familiar settings for it.

Three habits make this nearly automatic:

• Read the address bar before you click a download, and read the whole domain rather than the first few letters of it. The part immediately before the first single slash is the part that identifies the site.
• Arrive at the vendor by typing the address or following a link you have checked, rather than by clicking the first advertisement in a search result.
• Keep your operating system's own protections switched on and up to date, and let them do their work rather than adding a second product on top of them.

The link that follows is a paid affiliate link: if you register, install and launch the tutorial through it, Hidden Assets s.r.o. receives a commission, and nothing about your price changes. When you are ready to see the vendor's own landing page and apply the checks above to it, visit the Raid: Shadow Legends website. Remember that it is promoted for desktop computers only — Windows, macOS or Linux.

The install itself

Game installers in this genre are usually small files that then download the bulk of the game themselves, so the installer finishing is not the same as the game being ready. Expect a wait, and expect it to be longer than the progress indicator initially suggests.

Two things to actually watch for while it runs. The first is any additional item offered alongside the game — a browser extension, a toolbar, a separate utility — which should be declined unless you specifically want it; these are usually presented as pre-ticked options on a screen most people click through. The second is the install location, which matters only if your main drive is short of space; a second drive is a perfectly good home for a game and is usually selectable at this screen.

Your operating system will ask for permission before an installer makes changes. That prompt is the normal, expected one, and the correct response is to check that the publisher name shown in it is the one you expected before agreeing.

The first hour, in order

• Minutes 0 to 10The tutorial. It is guided, it usually cannot be skipped, and it hands you your first characters. Let it run; fighting it wastes more time than following it.
• Minutes 10 to 20The first reward screens. New accounts in this genre are given a generous opening series of gifts. Collect them, and notice how the game presents them, because that presentation is the shop's language too.
• Minutes 20 to 30Settings. Before going further, open the options and make the changes listed below. Doing it now is far easier than doing it after a habit has formed.
• Minutes 30 to 50The early campaign. This is the loop from Step 1 in its simplest form, and it is where you find out whether you actually enjoy the thing.
• Minutes 50 to 60Stop, on purpose, whether or not energy remains. Write one line in your notebook about whether you want to come back tomorrow. That line is worth more than the next ten fights.

Settings worth changing on day one

• Notifications. Turn off anything that will summon you back to the computer when your energy refills, unless you genuinely want to be summoned.
• Purchase confirmation. If the game offers a confirmation prompt or a password on purchases, switch it on.
• Chat and social features. Decide what is on, particularly if the account belongs to a younger player.
• Graphics quality and frame rate. Turning these down is the first remedy for a laptop that becomes hot or loud, as described in Step 2.
• Marketing email. If there is a setting for promotional messages, set it now rather than unsubscribing from each one later.

If something looks wrong

Three situations come up often enough to be worth naming, none of which is cause for alarm and all of which have ordinary answers. If the game will not start after installing, the usual cause is an operating system version below the minimum, which Step 2 should have caught; the vendor's support pages are the right next stop. If you receive an email about your new account that you did not expect, go to the game's site by typing the address rather than clicking the link in the message, and check from inside the account. And if a message asks you to confirm payment details to "keep" something you have been given, treat it as something to verify independently; Scamwatch is where to report it if it turns out to be what it looks like.

The example household, at the end of Step 4

The hypothetical pair in Adelaide register with a secondary email address, use a password neither of them uses anywhere else, and turn on the second factor the sign-up offers. They find three of their four search terms in the terms of service and note that they could not locate a clear refund clause, which goes on the sheet. They decline an additional item offered during install, choose the second drive because of the space figure they wrote down in Step 2, and stop at the hour. Neither of them has spent anything, which is what their own limit said.

Before you move on

You should now have an account created with a unique password and, if offered, a second factor; an installer obtained from the vendor's own site and from nowhere else; notifications, purchase confirmation and chat settings deliberately set; and one written line about whether you want to come back tomorrow. You should also have a note of anything in the terms you could not find.

Step 5 is about everything after the first hour: the shape of a month, the money, the account, and how to stop.