Step 5 of 5

Settling in: time, money and the rest of the household

The first hour of a game is designed to be easy. The twentieth hour is where the habits form, and this last step is about setting them deliberately rather than discovering them later. Nothing here is urgent and none of it has to be done today.

What changes after the first week

Three things usually change. The game stops teaching you and starts asking you to progress, which is slower. Offers appear that are tailored to how you have played. And the game acquires a place in your week. None of that is sinister; it is what a service designed to be played for years looks like. But the decisions you make in week two tend to stick, so they are worth making on purpose.

Keeping the spending cap you set in Step 1

You wrote an annual figure in AUD at the end of Step 1. Four ordinary measures keep it honest.

Do not store a card on the account. Entering the number each time adds ten seconds, which is precisely the pause that an impulse purchase does not survive.

Keep one note of every purchase with the date and the amount in AUD, in the same place you keep the cap. Game storefronts and the publisher's own purchase history both work, but a note you keep yourself is harder to overlook.

Decide in advance what you will buy, by category. "Cosmetic items only" or "one content pack a year" are easy rules to keep. "Whatever seems worth it at the time" is not a rule.

Treat a limited-time offer as a reason to wait. Seasonal content returns far more often than its countdown suggests, and the one purchase people regret is usually the one made under a clock.

If something does go wrong with a purchase — the wrong item, a charge you did not authorise, a product that does not work as described — you have the publisher's refund policy and, separately, the consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law. The ACCC explains what those guarantees cover, and your bank's unauthorised-transaction process is a third route when a card has been used without permission.

In-game currency, and why it is confusing on purpose

Most games sell a token currency rather than items directly: you buy a quantity of coins, gold or credits with real money, then spend them inside the game. Two features of that are worth noticing. Bundles rarely match prices, so you are left with a remainder you cannot spend, which quietly encourages the next purchase. And a price shown in tokens is harder to compare with a price in dollars, which blunts the ordinary sense of whether something is expensive.

The habit that fixes both: before buying, convert the token price back into AUD yourself and write that number down. If the figure looks unreasonable in dollars, it is unreasonable in coins.

Randomised items, and who should not be buying them

Some games sell containers whose contents are random: you pay a known amount for an unknown item. Whether a particular game does this is a matter of fact you can check on its store page, and the consumer advice attached to an Australian classification sometimes mentions in-game purchases. The Australian Classification Board is the source for what a specific title has been given; this course states no rating or threshold of its own.

Two plain positions follow. For an adult, a randomised purchase is a gamble on a cosmetic outcome, and it belongs inside the annual cap like any other spending — not outside it because it feels like play rather than shopping. For anyone under 18, this course does not present randomised purchases or anything resembling gambling as suitable, and the practical answer is a household rule plus the operating system's purchase controls, set in Step 3.

If gambling-like spending stops feeling optional for anyone in the household, that is a point to seek help from a professional service rather than a web page; eSafety publishes guidance for families about online gaming.

A weekly time budget that survives contact with a good game

A time budget works better as a shape than as a total. "Two evenings a week, finishing by eleven" is keepable; "no more than six hours" is not, because nobody counts while they are enjoying themselves. Two mechanics help: decide the finishing time before you start and set an alarm outside the game, and finish on a natural boundary, because the "one more match" reflex is strongest when a match is unresolved.

It is also worth noticing which kind of session you are having. A session you chose is different from one you are in because you did not decide to do anything else.

One computer, several people

A shared machine turns a personal hobby into a scheduling question. Three things are worth agreeing out loud rather than discovering in an argument.

Who has the computer when. Evenings used for schoolwork or shift work beat evenings used for a match, and saying so in advance costs nothing.

Separate user accounts on the computer itself. Windows, macOS and Linux all support one account per person, which keeps game settings, saved logins and browser history apart. It is free and takes a few minutes.

Who can spend. If one person's card is on the machine, the purchase-confirmation setting from Step 4 is what stops an accidental charge being somebody else's problem.

Bandwidth belongs in the same conversation. A multi-gigabyte patch at six in the evening will be noticed by everyone else in the house; most launchers can update at a quieter hour instead.

Updates, patch notes and disk creep

An online game is not finished when you install it. Expect updates every few weeks and the installed size to grow over a year, so check the free-space figure from your Step 2 sheet every few months rather than waiting for an update to fail.

Patch notes are the publisher's own list of what changed, and worth skimming: a change can alter something you had learned to rely on, and the notes are where changes to prices, rewards or progression are announced.

Graphics drivers deserve the same occasional attention, from the hardware maker's own site rather than from a driver-updating utility. If a game that ran well starts behaving oddly after an update, the driver is a reasonable first suspect.

Chat, conduct and reporting

Large online games are public places, and behaviour in them ranges as widely as behaviour anywhere. Two tools are always present: muting, which stops you hearing one person, and reporting, which tells the publisher. Using both early costs nothing.

The conduct rules you accepted in Step 3 apply to you as well. An account can be restricted for what is typed in chat, and a moment of temper is a poor trade for an account you have spent months on.

Where behaviour goes beyond rudeness — threats, image-based abuse, or targeting a child — the eSafety Commissioner is the Australian body that accepts reports and explains what it can act on. The Australian Cyber Security Centre remains the place for account security questions, and Scamwatch for anything that smells like a scam.

A first month, in order

Stopping cleanly

Stopping is part of the course, not a failure of it. Three levels exist, and they are different from each other.

Taking a break means closing the launcher. Nothing is lost, and the only cost of returning is a large update.

Uninstalling frees the disk space but leaves the account standing. Use your operating system's own uninstall tool, and check afterwards whether a launcher or a leftover folder remains.

Closing the account is the final level, and it is also where the privacy notice you read in Step 3 becomes useful: it should state how to request deletion of your data and what the publisher keeps regardless. If a publisher covered by Australian privacy law will not deal with a request, the OAIC complaints process is the escalation. Note that purchases do not usually survive a closure, which is a reason to decide calmly rather than in a bad week.

The example household at Step 5

Visit the War Thunder website

Paid link: a commission reaches Solid Facet from the affiliate network that operates the link if you register through it. Your cost is identical, and every habit on this page applies to any online game.

Step 5 checklist