Step 5
Step 5 of 5
Living with an online game: time, money and other players
The first four steps were decisions made once. This one is about the questions that come back every few weeks, and about ending well if you decide to stop.
Time, and the shape of a game's week
An online game is built on a weekly rhythm. There are usually daily objectives that reset overnight, weekly objectives that reset on a fixed day, and seasons that run for a month or three. None of this is hidden; it is printed on the screen.
Understanding the rhythm is useful because it explains a feeling that otherwise seems irrational: the sense that not playing today costs you something. It does, in the narrow sense that a daily objective expired. It does not, in any sense that will matter in a year. Saying that out loud once tends to take most of the pressure out of it.
A practical approach that works for many households is to decide which part of the rhythm you are actually playing for. If it is the matches themselves, daily objectives are optional and can be ignored without consequence. If it is the progression, pick the weekly rhythm rather than the daily one, because a weekly objective can be completed on a Saturday afternoon and a daily one cannot be completed at all once the day has passed.
Set an end time rather than a duration. "Until nine" is enforceable; "an hour" restarts at the end of every match. This is not a rule about discipline, it is a rule about how match-based games end: they do not end, they only pause between rounds.
Money, after the first month
The household rule from Step 3 was agreed before anyone was invested. The test of it comes in the second month, when there is something specific worth wanting and a reason why this month is exceptional.
Three habits keep the rule honest. Keep a running record of what has actually been spent, in AUD, in one place — a note on the fridge is enough. Convert every premium-currency price to dollars out loud before buying. And wait a day on anything that costs more than your agreed single-purchase limit, because a game designed to make a purchase feel urgent is doing so deliberately and a day removes nearly all of that effect.
If a purchase goes wrong — the item was not what was described, or the content was not delivered — the vendor's refund process is the first stop, and Australian consumer guarantees sit behind it. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission explains what those guarantees cover and how to complain if a business will not resolve a problem. Keep the receipt email; refunds are far easier with a transaction reference.
If spending stops feeling like a choice
Where in-game spending has become difficult to control, or where randomised purchases are involved, that is worth treating as its own issue rather than as a budgeting problem. Free, confidential support services exist in Australia; a general practitioner can point you to the ones appropriate to your situation. This course is not qualified to advise further, and would rather say so than offer something it cannot stand behind.
Other players
In a team game against other people, the other people are part of the product. Most are unremarkable. A minority are rude, and a smaller minority are worse than rude, and both are a predictable feature of any large population rather than something that has gone wrong with your particular game.
Every major online game provides three tools, and knowing which to reach for is most of the skill:
Use these
- Mute. For ordinary unpleasantness. Instant, silent, no consequence for you, and it does not need to be justified to anybody.
- Block. For someone who follows you between matches or sends messages. Stops contact rather than just hiding it.
- Report. For behaviour that breaks the game's rules — harassment, cheating, threats, contact with a child. This is the one that produces a record and can lead to action by the publisher.
Know the limits
- Reports are reviewed by the publisher on its own schedule, and you will usually not be told the outcome. That is normal and is not a sign the report was ignored.
- Muting someone does not affect how they treat the next person, which is why reporting matters even when muting has already solved your problem.
- A text chat turned off is one channel; voice chat is often a separate setting.
Where behaviour goes beyond the game — serious threats, image-based abuse, or an adult contacting a child — the eSafety Commissioner is Australia's online safety regulator and has a complaints process and published guidance on what it can act on. Serious threats to a person's safety are a matter for the police, not for a publisher's report queue.
What the game knows about you
A game account holds an email address, a display name, a payment record if you have ever paid, and a history of when and how you played. The vendor's privacy policy sets out what is collected and who it is shared with, and reading it once, slowly, is a reasonable thing to do in the second week when the novelty has worn off.
Two questions are worth answering from that policy specifically. Where is the data stored and processed, since most large game publishers operate outside Australia? And what happens to it if you stop playing or ask for the account to be deleted?
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner regulates privacy in Australia and explains the rights individuals have over personal information and how to complain about the handling of it. Its material is the reference for what you can ask for and of whom.
A six-month timeline
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| First week | Settle display and sound settings. Find mute, block and report. Agree the end-time rule rather than a duration rule. |
| Second week | Read the vendor's privacy policy. Check the account privacy settings again now that you know what they affect. |
| First month | Total what has been spent in AUD. Compare against the household rule from Step 3, and change the rule deliberately if you are going to change it at all. |
| Second month | The test month. Decide whether the unpaid pace is still enjoyable, now that the generous opening period is over. |
| Third month | Check drive space. Online games grow steadily with updates and this is when the drive you freed up in Step 2 fills again. |
| Six months | Re-check that you can still log in from a cold start, and that the recovery codes are still where you put them. |
Leaving, pausing and deleting
Stopping an online game is not an event and does not need to be one. Most people simply stop opening it, and the account sits where it is. That is a legitimate choice and costs nothing, provided you have no recurring subscription running.
If a subscription or pass is running, cancel it where it was started, which may be the vendor's site or the store you bought it through, and confirm the cancellation in writing by keeping the confirmation email. A cancellation you assume happened is the usual source of an unexpected charge two months later.
If you want the account removed rather than dormant, look for account deletion in the vendor's support pages or privacy policy. Expect it to be permanent, to take anything purchased with it, and to be irreversible. Before asking for it, consider pausing for a month instead; a dormant account costs nothing and a deleted one cannot be brought back.
And if you have decided that online gaming is not for your household at all, that outcome is as valid an end to this course as any other. Nothing in these five steps was designed to arrive at a purchase.
The worked example household
Hypothetical household — illustration only
By the second month the household has a note on the fridge with two columns: dollars spent, and the agreed monthly limit. The teenager reports a player for abusive messages in week three, hears nothing back, and is told in advance that hearing nothing is normal. Voice chat is turned off at the account level after a conversation about it rather than as a punishment.
At three months the laptop's drive is full again and photographs move to the external drive a second time. Nobody has cancelled anything, because nobody ever started a subscription. The adults consider the exercise closed.
The product used as this course's example
Everything in this step is written for the category. The affiliate programme for World of Tanks tells us that it is an online multiplayer tank action game of team battles between players on desktop computers, and that we are paid when a reader creates and activates an account. It does not describe that game's chat tools, its subscription arrangements, its deletion process or its privacy practices to us, so we describe none of them. The vendor's own support and privacy pages are the place to check each one.
Visit the World of Tanks websitePaid affiliate link. Multi.kuk.shop s.r.o. is paid a commission if you create and activate an account after following it; your cost is unchanged either way.
Step 5 checklist
The ongoing checklist — revisit it every few months
- Agree an end time rather than a duration, and say it out loud before play starts.
- Decide which rhythm you are playing for: matches, daily objectives, weekly objectives or a season.
- Keep a single written record of money spent in AUD.
- Convert every premium-currency price to dollars before buying it.
- Wait a day before any purchase above your agreed single-purchase limit.
- Keep receipt emails for anything bought.
- Find mute, block and report in the first week, before you need them.
- Report rule-breaking behaviour even when muting has already fixed it for you.
- Check text chat and voice chat settings separately.
- Read the vendor's privacy policy once, and note where data is stored and what deletion involves.
- Review account privacy settings after the first fortnight.
- At one month, compare actual spending against the household rule.
- At three months, check free space on the drive again.
- At six months, log in from a cold start and confirm the recovery codes are still findable.
- Cancel any subscription where it was started, and keep the confirmation.
- If you stop playing, decide deliberately between leaving the account dormant and asking for deletion.
You have finished the course
There is no certificate, no record and nothing to claim, because nothing about you was collected. What you have is five written checklists and a set of figures about your own computer that will answer the same questions for the next game too. The all-checklists page gathers them in one place and prints cleanly.