Step 3 / 5

Step 3 of 5

Reading the account terms before you agree to them

Nobody reads the whole document, and you are not going to either. The skill worth having is knowing which four or five clauses are worth finding, and what your position is in Australia regardless of what the document says.

What a game account actually is

An account is a record held on the publisher's servers that ties your progress, your purchases and your settings to an identifier — almost always an email address. It is not a copy of the game you own. In nearly every case you are granted a licence to use the software and the service, on the publisher's terms, for as long as the arrangement lasts.

That distinction has a practical edge. Things you buy inside the game generally live in the account rather than on your computer, and the account lives on the publisher's side. So the questions worth asking of a terms document are about the account's lifespan, not about disks and files.

You will also meet the phrase single opt-in. It describes a sign-up where giving your email address once is enough to create the account, in contrast with a double opt-in, where you confirm a second time before the account exists. The affiliate arrangement behind this site is a single opt-in one that also involves installing the client and activating the account, which is the vendor's own description of what it covers.

What a sign-up form asks for, and why

A typical sign-up form in this category asks for an email address, a password, a display name and a country, and sometimes a date of birth. Each of those has a reason, and knowing the reason tells you how carefully to choose the value.

• Email address. This is your account's identity and your route back in if you forget the password. It is worth using an address you will still have in five years, and worth not using a work address you could lose access to when you change jobs.
• Password. Unique to this account, not reused from anywhere else. General guidance on passphrases for individuals is published by the Australian Cyber Security Centre, and a password manager — including the one built into your browser — is an ordinary way to keep them.
• Display name. Visible to strangers. Not your full name, not your suburb, not your year of birth.
• Country. Affects which terms, prices and legal regime apply. Answer honestly.
• Date of birth. Used for age gating. Also answer honestly; a falsified date can disable the protections the game applies to younger players.

If a sign-up form asks for a phone number, a postal address or an identity document before you have bought anything, that is worth pausing over. It is not automatically wrong — some services have genuine reasons — but it is a reasonable moment to go and read the privacy notice before continuing.

Activation emails and the lookalike kind

After you sign up you should receive one email asking you to confirm the address. Clicking the link in it is what “activating the account” means. Until then the account exists in an unfinished state and may not let you in.

Because everyone in this category sends such an email, the pattern is also imitated. The general habit that protects you is simple and costs nothing: expect the activation email within a few minutes of signing up, and treat an unexpected one that arrives days later, or one that asks for a password or payment details rather than just a confirmation, as something to ignore. If you are unsure, do not use the link — go to the site yourself the way you did the first time and sign in there.

Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, publishes material on scams reported in Australia and is the place to check a pattern you are unsure about, or to report one. Nothing here suggests anything has happened to you; this is a habit to carry, not a warning about your situation.

The clauses worth finding

Open the terms of service and use your browser's find function rather than reading from the top. These are the headings or words worth searching for.

Five searches take about ten minutes and leave you better informed than almost anyone signing up around you. If a clause is written so that you genuinely cannot tell what it means, that is a fair reason to ask the publisher's support before agreeing, or to decide the game is not for you.

The rights the document cannot remove

In Australia, goods and services supplied to consumers come with guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law, and a business cannot contract out of them. A terms-of-service document that says otherwise does not change the position. The ACCC administers that law and publishes guidance on consumer guarantees, including how they apply to digital products and online purchases.

Two points follow from that for a new player. First, a clause saying “all sales are final” is not the whole story; your statutory position sits alongside it. Second, where a business operating in Australia makes a claim about its product in advertising, the prohibition on misleading or deceptive conduct applies to that claim.

This course does not tell you what your remedy is in any particular situation, because that depends on facts we do not have. It tells you where to read the law from the body that administers it, which is more useful than a confident guess from us.

What happens to the information you give

A sign-up creates a record. The privacy notice attached to it is the document that says what the publisher does with that record, who else sees it, and where it is stored. In this category, publishers are often based overseas, and the notice will usually say so.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is the Australian regulator for privacy and publishes the Australian Privacy Principles, which describe how organisations covered by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) are expected to handle personal information. Reading the principles once gives you a frame for reading any privacy notice: what is collected, why, who it goes to, whether it leaves the country, and how you ask for access to it.

For what it is worth, you can see our own answer to those questions applied to this site, in full, on our privacy policy. It is a short document because this site collects almost nothing.

Age, consent and other people in the house

If the person who will be playing is a child or teenager, the account belongs to the household as much as to them. The eSafety Commissioner is the Australian body for online safety and publishes material for families about games, including chat, contact with strangers and reporting.

Two practical things, before the account exists rather than after. Decide who holds the password and the recovery email. And decide whether a payment method will be attached to the account at all — an account with no card attached cannot generate a surprise. Step 5 goes further into spending.

The household example

Where our example product sits in this step

The sign-up described in the vendor's own terms for the arrangement behind this site involves creating an account, installing the client and activating the account. That is the whole of what we have been told, and we are not going to characterise the rest of the sign-up flow from memory. Read the terms at the source before you agree to them: visit the World of Warships website.

Paid link. Mimo-mind s.r.o. receives a commission if you follow it and create and activate an account. Same cost to you, and no influence on what this step says. Full explanation.