What a free-to-play online battle game actually is

Everything else in the course is built on these. Read them once now; each is used in context later, so there is nothing to memorise.

Free-to-play

A game you can install and play without paying an up-front price, where the publisher earns money from optional purchases inside it instead. "Free to start" is a more honest label, and some publishers use it.

Client

The program that runs on your own computer. You install it once, it is updated regularly, and it is usually the largest single thing you will download for the hobby.

Account

The record the publisher keeps of you: a login name or email address, a password, and whatever progress and purchases belong to you. The client is on your machine; the account lives on the publisher's servers.

Activation, in most of these systems, simply means confirming a verification email so the account becomes usable.

Server

The publisher's computer that your client talks to while you play. Publishers usually run several, grouped by region, so that players are connected to one geographically near them.

Match

One round of play, with a start and an end, usually between two teams. In this category a match is typically short — minutes rather than hours — and you play many of them.

Matchmaking

The system that decides which players are put into the same match. It works from whatever the publisher chooses to weigh: experience, the equipment you have, the region you connect from.

In-game currency

Points or tokens that exist only inside the game. Some kinds are earned by playing; some are bought with real money. The two are usually named differently, and telling them apart is the single most useful habit you can build early.

Progression

The structure that makes new equipment or abilities available as you play. It is what gives a free-to-play game its shape, and it is also where optional spending usually attaches itself.

A game with no price tag still has to pay for itself. Understanding how is not cynicism; it is the thing that lets you predict what the game will ask of you in month three.

The usual answer is time. A free-to-play game is designed so that progress is available to anyone willing to play, and optional purchases shorten the distance. That might be a premium currency that converts into equipment, a subscription-style account upgrade that increases what each match earns you, or cosmetic items that change nothing except appearance.

None of that is inherently a problem. It becomes a problem in two situations. The first is when you cannot tell, in the moment, whether you are spending earned currency or purchased currency — which is why the vocabulary above matters. The second is when the item on offer is randomised: you pay a known amount for an unknown result. Step 3 deals with randomised items in detail, including what Australian consumer and classification arrangements have to say about them, because that is where the money questions get sharpest.

For now, hold one sentence: in this category, the download is free and the attention is the product. Deciding in advance how much attention you want to give is the whole of Step 5.

Three things have to line up before a match can happen, and they fail in different ways, so it helps to picture them separately.

The client is installed software. It occupies disk space, needs processing power and graphics capability to run smoothly, and is patched often. When something on your screen looks wrong, stutters, or will not start, the client and your computer are the usual suspects. Step 2 is entirely about whether your machine can carry one.

The account is a record on the publisher's side. It is what you log into, what holds your progress, and what you lose access to if you forget the password or if somebody else gets it. Accounts are the thing worth protecting properly, and Step 4 is about creating one carefully the first time rather than repairing it later.

The server is the connection question. If your client runs beautifully but the game feels delayed — you act, and the result arrives a beat late — that is usually the distance and quality of the path between you and the server, not your computer. For players in Australia this matters more than it does for players in Europe or North America, simply because of where the hardware sits. Step 2 covers how to form a rough judgement about your own connection without buying or installing anything.

This course is about games that run as an installed client on a desktop operating system: Windows, macOS or Linux. That is a deliberate boundary, not an oversight. The category exists on those platforms, the system requirements publishers publish are written for those platforms, and the setup steps in Step 4 assume you are sitting at a machine with a keyboard, a mouse and a screen you can see properly.

Phones and tablets host a large and separate world of games, including some that borrow the look of this one. Nothing in this course transfers cleanly to them: the storage maths is different, the controls are different, the purchase flow runs through a different store with different refund arrangements. If a phone is the only computer in the house, this particular hobby is not available, and the honest thing to say is so.

"Desktop" here also includes laptops running those same operating systems. A laptop is a desktop computer in the sense that matters — it runs the same software — but it has two practical disadvantages worth knowing before you start: it usually has weaker graphics capability for the same price, and it gets hot and loud when asked to work hard for an hour. Neither is disqualifying. Both are things to test rather than assume, which is what the Step 2 checklist is for.

Computer games distributed in Australia are classified, and the classification is a legal marking rather than a publisher's opinion. The body responsible is the Australian Classification Board, which classifies films, computer games and certain publications and publishes the classifications it has issued. Its site also explains the consumer advice lines that sit beside a classification — the short phrases describing what in the game led to it.

Two practical consequences follow. First, if there is a person under eighteen in the household, the classification and the consumer advice are the first thing to look at, and they are published by a source independent of whoever is selling the game. Second, classifications are specific to a title and can change when a title changes, so the useful habit is to check the Board's own listing rather than relying on a number someone quoted in a forum post three years ago.

This course does not state the classification of any particular title, because the Board's published record is the source for that and it is one search away. Step 3 shows you how to read what you find there, including the part that trips people up: a classification tells you about content, not about how much the game will ask you to spend.

World of Tanks is one example of the category this course describes: a title you play on a desktop computer through an account that you create and then activate. We name it because the affiliate programme behind it funds this site, and the honest place to say that is right next to the name rather than in small type at the bottom.

What we will not do is describe the game's contents, requirements, price structure or features, because the only thing we have been told about it is the commercial arrangement itself: an account is created, an account is activated, and a commission is paid for that. Everything else — what it needs from your computer, what is purchasable inside it, what its classification is in Australia, what its account agreement says — is stated by the publisher and the Classification Board, and Steps 2, 3 and 4 are about reading those sources for yourself rather than taking ours.

The link below goes directly to the title. Nothing later in the course depends on having opened it.

Visit the World of Tanks website

Paid affiliate link. PADOLO s.r.o. is paid a commission if you create and activate an account after following it. The price you pay is not affected, and the course is identical whether you follow it or not.

Our hypothetical household — two adults, a thirteen-year-old, one ageing laptop and one second-hand desktop computer — starts here with a conversation rather than a download. The thirteen-year-old has seen friends play; one adult has agreed to look into it; nobody has installed anything.

What Step 1 gives them is a shared vocabulary. When the thirteen-year-old says "it's free", the adult can now ask the useful follow-up: free to install, and then what is purchasable inside it? When the thirteen-year-old says "it runs on the laptop", the adult knows that is a claim to be tested against published requirements rather than accepted. And before any of that, the household has a classification to look up from a body that is not selling anything.

They are an illustration and nothing more: no names, no results, no stand-in for any real reader. Their job is to turn abstract advice into a sentence someone might say at a kitchen table.