A question-and-answer resource for players in Australia
What do people ask before they install an online war game?
Mostly the same eight or nine things: how long the download takes, whether an ageing laptop will cope, what the game will try to sell them later, and whether it belongs on the family computer. This site answers them one at a time.
How this site is paid for
Vanguard Digital carries paid links. When a reader follows our link to the War Thunder sign-up page and creates an account there, the advertising network pays us a fee. The reader pays nothing extra, and nothing about the sign-up changes because the visit came from here.
That fee is the only income this site has, which is worth knowing when you read what we write about the title it applies to. Every paid link is marked where it appears, and the affiliate disclosure page sets out the arrangement in full.
Start with the question you actually have
Each page below stands on its own and answers one cluster of questions, short version first.
- How do I set one of these games up, and how long does it take?
Account creation, the email confirmation step that trips people up, and what the tutorial is for.
- What will it cost me, and what are my rights if I spend money?
How these games make money, what a randomised crate is, and what the Australian Consumer Law says about digital purchases.
- Will it run on my computer, and why is my ping so high?
Desktop platforms, the parts that matter, how to read your own specifications, and why distance to the server beats download speed.
- How do I keep the account from being stolen?
Passphrases, multi-factor authentication, fake launchers, trade scams, and where to report one in Australia.
- What does any of this jargon mean?
Arcade, realistic and simulator play, tech trees, battle rating, and the terms chat uses without explaining.
- Is this suitable for a younger player in the house?
Who classifies games here, what a classification covers, and the parts of online play nobody classifies at all.
- What can you tell me about War Thunder specifically?
The title behind our paid link: what the publisher says it is, and the questions we will not answer.
Four answers, one line each
Is a modern vehicle game a big download?
Assume tens of gigabytes rather than a few, and expect a patch on first launch. The publisher's own page carries the current figure.
Do I need a joystick?
No. Keyboard and mouse is the normal way in, and the category is built around it. A stick is a preference.
Why does the game want my email confirmed?
Because that address is how you recover the account later. An unconfirmed one means a locked-out player with no way back.
Can I play on a phone or tablet?
Not for the title we cover. These are desktop games — Windows, macOS or Linux on a computer you sit at.
What this category actually is
A vehicle combat game puts you in the seat of something built for war — an aircraft, a helicopter, a tank, a warship — and drops you into a match against other people doing the same. Differences between titles are matters of degree: how much physics is simulated, how many vehicles there are to unlock, and how long the unlocking takes.
The vehicles are usually real designs from real conflicts, which pulls in a particular sort of player — someone here for the machines first and the shooting second. The appeal rests on detail and progression as much as on reflexes, and a session can be slow in a way that action games are not.
Two things separate the category from most online shooters. The first is scale: a match may cover many kilometres of map, so spotting an opponent is itself a skill. The second is progression — nearly every title runs a tree of vehicles you unlock by playing, and the pace of that unlocking is the lever a publisher uses to sell you things. The jargon page covers the mechanics; the costs page covers the money.
The one title we cover in detail, and why it is only one
Vanguard Digital has a commercial arrangement with one advertiser, for one game: War Thunder, an online multiplayer vehicle combat title published by Gaijin Entertainment, with aircraft, helicopters, ground vehicles and ships. The page about it sets out what the publisher says the game is, what signing up involves, and what we cannot verify and so will not claim.
We do not maintain a league table of competitors, because we are not in a position to run one honestly. Covering one title we are paid for, and saying so on every page, is a narrower promise than a ranking — but it is one we can keep.
Visit the War Thunder sign-up page
That button is our paid link. If you create an account after using it, the advertising network pays Vanguard Digital a fee; your sign-up is the same either way. The publisher's own site, which pays us nothing, is at warthunder.com.
Questions we are not the right place for
An honest resource is partly a list of things it will not do. We publish no prices or discounts: they change by region and by week, and the publisher's own store is the only accurate source. We publish no benchmark figures or frame rates, because we have not run those tests, and repeating someone else's numbers as our own would be dishonest.
We cannot help with an account problem either. Nobody here can see your account, reset a password or answer a ban appeal; that is the publisher's support desk, and anyone else offering to do it is worth being suspicious of. We also take no view on which game you should play — that depends on your hardware, your patience for progression and who you intend to play with.
Words you will meet in the first hour
- Tech tree
- The branching chart of vehicles a game lets you unlock, usually grouped by nation and ordered roughly by era. Your progress through it is the game's main long-term structure.
- Grind
- The playing time between one unlock and the next. A short grind keeps players moving; a long one is what premium currency and accelerated progression are typically sold against.
- Battle rating
- A number attached to each vehicle that decides which other vehicles it can meet in a match. It is the matchmaking dial, and misreading it is the usual cause of a very one-sided first evening.
- Repair cost
- An in-game charge deducted when a vehicle is destroyed, in the game's own currency. Higher-tier vehicles usually cost more, which is why a bad match near the top of a tree can leave you worse off than when you sat down.
- Crate or case
- A purchasable container whose contents are randomised. Whether the odds are shown before you buy varies by title and by country. Treat it as a spending decision, not a reward.
The full glossary goes further, including the difference between arcade, realistic and simulator play.
Australian services worth having bookmarked
The Australian Classification Board is the body that classifies games distributed here, and its database is where to look up a specific title rather than trusting a forum post. The eSafety Commissioner publishes practical material on online gaming for parents and carers, including how to handle unwanted contact in chat.
On the money side, the ACCC explains the consumer guarantees that apply to digital products bought in Australia. Where something looks deliberate — a fake storefront, a resold account — Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, takes the report, and the Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes the passphrase and multi-factor guidance behind our account safety page.
How a page here gets written
Subjects come from questions asked over and over in public gaming forums — the ones with dozens of near-identical versions. A page is only worth writing if the answer is stable enough to stay true for a year.
Anything specific to a product is attributed to the publisher who states it, rather than asserted as our own finding. Anything about Australian law or classification links to the body that says it, so you can check the wording yourself. Where we do not know, the page says so. The about page sets out the method and its limits in full.