Step 4 of 5

Step 4 — Your first session

The first hour in a game like this sets the habits for every hour after it. Ten minutes spent in the settings before the first match decides who can speak to you, how the game looks and sounds, and whether the evening ends well.

Ten minutes in the settings, before the first match

Every game in this category hides its settings in roughly the same places: a gear icon on the main menu, then tabs for graphics, audio, controls and something called privacy, social or account. The names differ; the contents are predictable.

Four things are worth setting before you play rather than after.

1. Graphics. If the computer sat between minimum and recommended in Step 2, start at the lower preset. A game that runs smoothly at low settings is far more pleasant than one that stutters at high settings, and you can raise them later.
2. Audio. Set the master volume somewhere sensible and find the separate control for other players' voices. In most games they are different sliders, and you will want the second one soon.
3. Controls. Note how to mute a player, how to open the scoreboard and how to leave a match. Those three are the ones people hunt for in a hurry.
4. Privacy and social. The most important tab and the least obvious. The next two sections are about it.

Who can talk to you

Online games in this category generally carry two kinds of live communication: voice chat, where players speak into microphones, and text chat, typed into a box. Both are unmoderated in the moment. Whatever a stranger says reaches you before anyone reviews it.

Most games let you choose who is included. The usual options are everyone, your team only, your squad only, your friends only, or nobody. For a first session, team or squad is a reasonable middle setting; it keeps the game playable, since these games are cooperative, while cutting out the general channel where most of the unpleasantness happens.

Check the microphone setting separately. A headset that transmits whenever there is noise in the room — sometimes labelled open mic or voice activation — broadcasts your living room to strangers. Push-to-talk, where you hold a key to speak, is the setting most households prefer once they know it exists.

Friend requests and messages from strangers

After a few matches, friend requests arrive. Most are harmless: someone who played well with you and wants to again. Some are not, and the patterns are consistent enough to describe.

Be wary of a stranger who moves the conversation off the game quickly, who offers free items or account help, who asks what else you play and on which account, or who asks anything about where you live, your school or your age. Offers to trade items outside the game's own systems are a standard method for taking accounts, and so are links sent in chat that lead to a sign-in page.

The rule from Step 3 holds here too: never sign in to anything from a link someone sent you. Open the game's site yourself. Anything real will still be there.

Muting, blocking and reporting

Three tools exist in most games, and they do different jobs.

Reporting is worth doing even though you rarely hear the outcome. Moderation systems act on patterns, and a single report from one match is part of a pattern the publisher can see and you cannot.

For serious matters — threats, image-based abuse, or harmful contact with a child — the eSafety Commissioner has formal reporting schemes that sit outside any game's own system, and a game's report button is not a substitute for them.

What a first hour normally looks like

• Minutes 0–10. The client checks for updates and finishes installing parts of itself. This is normal and it happens on most days you play.
• Minutes 10–20. A tutorial or training mission, if the game has one. Do it even if it looks slow. It teaches the controls that the game will later assume you know.
• Minutes 20–30. Your first real match. Expect confusion about where to go and expect to be beaten by people who have played for years. This is the normal experience and not a sign of a problem.
• Minutes 30–45. A second and third match, in which the map starts to make sense. Somewhere around here most games will offer you something from the shop. You do not have to decide today, and Step 5 is about that offer.
• Minutes 45–60. A good place to stop and judge: did it run smoothly, was the chat tolerable, do you want another session. Those three answers are worth more than any review.

When it runs badly

If the picture stutters or the game feels unresponsive, work through the cheap fixes before concluding the computer cannot handle it. Lower the graphics preset one level and try again. Close other programs, particularly browsers with many tabs and anything streaming video. Check whether a large download is running in the background on the same connection. If you are on wi-fi and a cable is possible, try the cable.

If none of that helps and the computer was below minimum on any line in Step 2, that is your answer, and no setting will fix it. Nothing in the shop will fix it either; buying items does not change how the game performs.

Session length and stopping

These games are built to keep sessions going: daily rewards, a match that starts immediately after the last one ends, progress bars that sit just short of the next step. None of that is sinister by itself, but it does mean that stopping is a decision you have to make rather than a moment the game offers you.

Agreeing a finishing time before the session starts works better than deciding during it, which is the same reason Step 2 asked you to write the agreement down. A clock in view of the screen helps more than it should.

The example household at this step

What the vendor of Enlisted states

The vendor's material for Enlisted describes the final part of its registration as logging in to the game for the first time, on a desktop computer running Windows, macOS or Linux. It does not describe the game's settings menus, and neither does this course — the settings above are the ones common to the category, under whatever names a particular game uses.

Visit the Enlisted website — opens in a new tab.

Paid affiliate link: LOKGROUP s.r.o. is paid a commission for registrations made through it. Nothing on this page is affected by that.

Before you move on

Checklist for Step 4