Walkthrough
Signing up for a desktop online game, stage by stage
Registration, email confirmation, then the first launch. Three stages, three different sets of things that go wrong. This page walks the whole sequence and marks the point in each stage where people get stuck.
Allow about forty minutes on a typical NBN connection, most of which is an unattended download. Have a working email address you can open in another tab, roughly 60 GB of free disk space as a safe margin for a large modern shooter, and your graphics driver updated beforehand. Confirm your email address before you start the download, not after — an unconfirmed account can install the game and then refuse to sign in to it.
What to have ready before you start
Preparing four things beforehand removes most of the interruptions later.
- An email address you control and can check immediately. A work address is a poor choice: corporate mail filtering is the single most common reason a confirmation message never appears, and you cannot usually inspect the quarantine yourself.
- Free disk space, with room to spare. Large shooters commonly run to tens of gigabytes, and the installer needs working room on top of the finished size. Space on the drive the game installs to, not on any drive.
- A current graphics driver. Install it from the graphics vendor’s own site or its own updater, then restart. Doing this first avoids the most common first-launch crash and takes ten minutes.
- A wired connection if one is within reach. Only for the download. Ethernet is not faster than good Wi-Fi in raw speed terms on most home connections, but it does not drop, and a dropped multi-gigabyte download is the classic wasted evening.
Stage one: creating the account
The account form is a web page, and it fails in ordinary web-form ways. Four points cause nearly all of the rejections.
The password is rejected without saying why
Password rules are frequently stated only after a failure, and sometimes only partially. If a password is refused, the usual causes are length below the minimum, a character the form does not accept, or leading and trailing spaces picked up when pasting from a password manager. Try a long passphrase of unrelated words with no punctuation at the ends. Length beats complexity for both acceptance and security, which is the position the Australian Cyber Security Centre takes in its published guidance for individuals at cyber.gov.au.
The username is taken, repeatedly
On a game with a large existing player base, every short or obvious name is gone. Do not spend twenty minutes on this. Pick something long enough to be unique; in most games the display name shown to other players can be changed later, though sometimes only once or for a fee.
The form loses everything when it reloads
Usually a browser extension interfering with the page, and most often a content blocker or a script blocker. Open the sign-up page in a private window with extensions disabled and try again. This is also worth trying if a button appears to do nothing at all when clicked.
An account already exists for that address
Common when you have previously created an account with the same vendor for another of its titles, since many publishers use one account across everything they run. Use the password reset link rather than creating a second account: duplicate accounts on the same email address are a support problem later, particularly if a purchase is attached to the wrong one.
One decision worth making now
Turn on two-factor authentication as soon as the account exists, before you have anything worth stealing on it. Retrofitting it to an account that has already been compromised is a much slower process, and game accounts with time and purchases attached to them are a known target. The account security page covers the how and the why.
Stage two: confirming the email address
At this point the vendor sends a message containing a confirmation link, and the account stays inactive until that link is opened. Most sign-ups that never complete stop here.
A confirmation email normally arrives within a minute or two. Give it fifteen before assuming anything has failed — greylisting, a legitimate anti-spam technique where a receiving server temporarily rejects a first delivery attempt and accepts the retry, can delay a message by several minutes with nothing wrong at either end.
If nothing has arrived after fifteen minutes, check in this order: the spam or junk folder; the promotions or updates tab if your provider sorts mail into tabs; a search of all folders for the vendor’s name rather than a look in the inbox; then the address you typed, which the sign-up page will usually show you again on the resend screen. A single transposed character in a domain name produces silence rather than an error.
The confirmation email page works through the rest of the causes, including expired links, aliases, and the difference between a message that was blocked and one that was never sent.
What to watch out for at this stage
A genuine confirmation email asks you to click a link to confirm your address, and nothing more. A message that asks for your password, a payment card, or a copy of an identity document in order to “activate” or “verify” an account is not part of any normal sign-up. Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, collects reports of exactly this kind of message at scamwatch.gov.au.
Stage three: download, install and first launch
With the account confirmed, the remaining work is local. The order below matters, because each step depends on the one before it.
- Download the launcher from the vendor’s own site. Not from a search result, a download aggregator, or a video description. Fake installers for popular games are a recurring problem, and the safest habit is to type the vendor’s address yourself or follow a link you already trust.
- Install the launcher and sign in. If sign-in fails here with credentials that work on the website, the account is almost certainly still unconfirmed. Go back to stage two.
- Start the game download and leave it alone. A large download that competes with streaming video on the same connection will slow both. If the launcher has a bandwidth limit setting, leaving it unlimited overnight is usually the fastest route.
- Let the first launch take its time. The first start of a modern game does work it will never do again: shader compilation for your specific graphics card, initial configuration, sometimes a further patch. Several minutes on a black screen or a static logo is normal once. Several minutes every time is not, and that is covered on the install and launch page.
- Set graphics quality before you play, not during. Most games detect hardware and choose a preset, and most of them are optimistic about laptops. Starting one preset lower than the automatic choice and working up gives a stable baseline in ten minutes.
- Check audio output and microphone before your first match. Both are set from whatever the operating system reported at launch, which is frequently not the device you expect. The audio and devices page explains why this changes by itself.
The product linked from this site
Enlisted is an online multiplayer first-person shooter set in the Second World War, published at enlisted.net. The sign-up sequence described on this page is the one that applies to it: register, confirm the email address, then sign in and launch the game. The offer we link to is for desktop computers only, covering Windows, macOS and Linux.
Everything else about the game — what it contains, what it costs if anything, what hardware it asks for, and which modes are available in Australia — is stated by the vendor and can change. This site does not restate it, because a stale specification repeated by a third party is worse than no specification at all.
Vanguard Hub earns a commission when a reader registers through this link. It costs you nothing extra and does not change anything the vendor offers you.
The first ten minutes after it works
Four small pieces of housekeeping, done once, prevent most of the support problems that turn up later.
| Task | Why it matters later |
|---|---|
| Record the exact account email and username | Support requests are matched on the account details, and “the address I think I used” is not enough to recover an account. |
| Enable two-factor authentication | A password alone is recoverable by anyone who obtains it. A second factor stops the most common form of account takeover. |
| Note the install location and its free space | Updates fail without warning on a nearly full drive, and the message usually blames something else. |
| Take one screenshot of working graphics settings | Updates sometimes reset settings. A screenshot restores a known-good baseline in two minutes instead of an evening of experimentation. |
Common questions about signing up
How long should the confirmation email take to arrive?
Usually under two minutes. Fifteen is a reasonable point at which to start investigating, because legitimate delivery delays such as greylisting can account for the first several minutes. Beyond about an hour, treat it as a delivery failure rather than a delay and work through the causes on the confirmation email page.
Can I sign up on my phone and play on my computer later?
The sign-up linked from this site is offered for desktop computers only — Windows, macOS and Linux — so the whole sequence, including registration, is meant to be completed on a desktop or laptop machine. Use the computer you intend to play on.
Why does the game ask for my date of birth?
Age information is ordinarily collected so that a service can apply age-related restrictions to accounts and content. What a particular game does with it is set out in that vendor’s own privacy policy, which is the document to read before entering it. In Australia, how organisations handle personal information is regulated under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner explains those obligations at oaic.gov.au.
The download keeps restarting from the beginning. What causes that?
Most often a connection that drops long enough for the launcher to abandon the transfer, or a disk that has run out of space partway through and cannot write the next chunk. Check free space first because it is instant to check, then move to a wired connection for the download if you can.
Do I need to keep the launcher installed after the game is working?
Yes, for practically all modern online games. The launcher is what authenticates your account and applies updates, and removing it generally means the game will not start or will refuse to connect. It is not an optional extra that can be cleaned up afterwards.