Setting up an account and checking that it works

Most people do this in the order the sign-up page suggests: type an email address, invent a password, click through, download, play. It works, and it tends to leave two loose ends — a password reused from somewhere else, and a recovery email address that nobody remembers controlling.

The order below costs about ten extra minutes on the first day and removes both. It is written for any game of this category on any desktop operating system; it is not a walkthrough of any particular publisher's screens, because those screens differ and change. Expect to translate "the verification email" into whatever your publisher calls it.

1. Decide which email address the account will use. Use one that is not your banking or work address. A separate free mailbox used for hobby accounts is ideal, and takes five minutes to create.
2. Prepare the passphrase before you open the sign-up page. Do this first so that you are not inventing one under time pressure with a form in front of you. Section 4.3 explains the method.
3. Go to the publisher's own website by typing or bookmarking the address. Create the account there rather than through a link in an unexpected message. The sign-up form typically asks for an email address, a password and a display name, and may ask for your date of birth and country.
4. Choose a display name that is not your real name. Other players will see it. It is visible for as long as the account exists and is often awkward to change.
5. Open the verification email and follow the confirmation link. This is what activation means in most systems: the account exists but cannot be used until the address is confirmed. If nothing arrives within a few minutes, section 4.4 covers it.
6. Turn on two-step verification if the publisher offers it. This is usually in the account or security settings on the publisher's website rather than in the game. It is the single most effective thing you can do for an account that will accumulate value.
7. Download the client from the publisher's own site and install it. Decline any additional software offered during installation. The download is large; section 4.5 covers what to expect.
8. Run one short session and check four specific things. Not to play well — to confirm the picture, the sound, the controls and the connection behave. Section 4.6 lists them.

If something in the middle fails, stop there rather than working around it. An account that will not verify is a problem to solve with the publisher's support, not a reason to create a second account.

A passphrase is simply a password made of several unrelated words rather than one word with substitutions. Four unrelated words you can picture — nothing drawn from your own life, no names or dates connected to you — make a passphrase that is long, which is what matters, and rememberable, which is what makes it survive contact with daily life.

The rule that matters more than composition is this one: do not use it anywhere else. A password reused between a game account and an email account turns one leak at one company into two compromised accounts. If you already reuse passwords widely, a password manager is the usual answer, and it has the pleasant side effect that you no longer need the passphrase to be memorable at all — only the one that opens the manager.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes current guidance on passphrases, password managers and multi-factor authentication for individuals. Where its advice and a habit of yours disagree, follow the advice: it is maintained, and this page is reviewed only periodically.

Activation, in nearly every system of this kind, is the step that proves the email address belongs to you. Until it is done, the account typically exists in a limited state: you may be able to log in but not to play, or not to log in at all.

If the message has not arrived after a few minutes, work through the ordinary causes in order. Check the junk or spam folder. Check that the address you typed is the one you meant, including the domain. Wait ten minutes, since delivery is sometimes slow. Use the publisher's own "resend verification" function rather than creating a second account with the same address, which usually fails and leaves a confusing half-account behind.

If none of that works, the publisher's support channel is the correct next stop, and the correct way to reach it is from the publisher's own site. A message that arrives offering to fix your verification problem, particularly one that asks for your password, is the pattern described in Step 3, section 3.6.

Installers in this category are generally straightforward, but two habits are worth keeping. Take the download from the publisher's own site, not from a download aggregator, and read each installation screen rather than clicking through, because optional extras are occasionally offered partway along and the default is not always "no".

Expect the installation to take a while, and expect it to be larger than the number quoted on the requirements page once the first update has run. This is the point at which the disk space margin from Step 2 pays for itself. On a connection with a monthly allowance, this is also the single largest download the hobby will ask of you, apart from occasional large updates.

If your operating system asks you to confirm that you want to run the installer, that is the ordinary behaviour of a desktop operating system for any downloaded program, and it is a good moment to check the publisher's name on the prompt. Nothing about such a prompt indicates a problem with your computer.

The first time you launch, resist the urge to play properly. Spend fifteen minutes confirming four things, because each has a different fix and finding them separately is much easier than untangling them later.

Most games of this type start with a tutorial or a practice mode. Use it. It is designed for exactly this moment, and it is the only part of the experience where nobody else is affected by you working out which key does what.

Creating and activating an account is the subject of this step, and World of Tanks is the title whose affiliate programme funds this site, so this is the honest place to name it again. The programme's own description of the arrangement is the whole of what we know: an account is created, the account is activated, and a commission is paid for that. We have not described its interface above and will not, because the procedure in section 4.2 is written to apply to the category rather than to one publisher's screens.

If you decide to use it as your example title, the eight-part procedure applies unchanged, and so does everything in Step 3 about reading the agreement and the classification first.

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. Your costs are unaffected, and this step is written the same way whether you follow it or not.

Our hypothetical household creates one mailbox for hobby accounts, writes a four-word passphrase on paper and puts it where they keep the insurance documents, and creates the account on the desktop computer with an adult present. They turn on two-step verification before installing anything, because it is easier to do in a browser than to remember later.

The download runs on a weekday morning as planned. The first session is fifteen minutes of the tutorial with the detail settings lowered, which answers the picture question immediately. They stop there and do the rest another evening. The household remains a hypothetical illustration, with no names and no reported results.