About this course and the people publishing it

Plain Method is a single course of five steps, written for readers in Australia who are new to large online games played on a desktop or laptop computer. It is published by a company, not by an individual, and it is paid for by affiliate commission. Both of those facts shape what you should expect from it, so they are stated here rather than buried.

The publisher

Plain Method is published by LUKREX s.r.o., a company registered in the Czech Republic.

LUKREX s.r.o.
Ve Smečkách 603/13, Nové Město, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic
Company registration: 26881705
VAT number: CZ26881705
Email: info@plainmethod.online

Where the course has an author, that author is the LUKREX s.r.o. editorial team. We do not publish bylines, staff names or photographs, because a course of this kind does not depend on who wrote it — it depends on whether each claim can be checked against a source you can open yourself.

How the course was structured

The five steps were written as one piece rather than as separate articles, and the order is the argument. Step 1 defines the vocabulary. Step 2 applies it to your own equipment. Step 3 deals with suitability and money before any account exists. Step 4 is the practical sequence. Step 5 covers the months afterwards.

Each step was drafted around its checklist. We wrote the list of things a reader should be able to do at the end, then wrote the prose that makes each line possible, then removed anything that did not serve a line. That is why the steps contain no history of the genre, no opinions about which titles are good, and no comparisons between products.

Terms are introduced once, in Step 1, and reused without re-explanation afterwards. If a word in a later step is unfamiliar, it is defined in the glossary on the checklists page.

What each step relies on

The course draws on three kinds of source, and keeps them separate.

Australian public bodies, for anything about classification, consumer rights, online safety, privacy or scams. Those are the Australian Classification Board, the ACCC, the eSafety Commissioner, the OAIC, Scamwatch and the Australian Cyber Security Centre. Where a step makes a claim in any of those areas, it links to the body rather than paraphrasing legislation, because the detail changes and a summary here would go stale.

Vendor statements, for anything about a specific product. The only product named in the course is War Thunder, and what the course says about it is limited to what its vendor states: that it is an online multiplayer war simulator with planes, helicopters, tanks and ships, created and published by Gaijin Entertainment, available for desktop and laptop computers running Windows, macOS or Linux, with an account created by registering, confirming an email address and signing in. We publish no price, no classification and no quality judgement for it, because the vendor's own description does not supply them.

Generic technical description, for everything else: what a client is, how a launcher works, how requirements lists are laid out, what two-factor authentication does. These are written as general guidance about the category and apply to any title. They are deliberately not written as a walkthrough of any particular company's screens, which would date quickly and would read as an endorsement.

Where none of those three could support a sentence, the sentence was removed. There are no statistics, benchmarks, test results, survey figures or awards anywhere on this site, because we have not run any tests and would not ask you to take ours on trust.

The commercial relationship, stated plainly

Plain Method earns money from affiliate commission. One product is named in the course, and the links to it are paid links: if you register through one, LUKREX s.r.o. receives a commission from the affiliate network that operates the link. You pay no more than you otherwise would.

So yes — the one product mentioned by name is a product the publisher has a commercial relationship with. That is the honest description of the arrangement, and we would rather you knew it on the About page than deduced it later.

What the commission does not do is decide what the steps say. The checklists would be identical if the arrangement ended tomorrow, because none of them depends on which title you choose. The course is written so that it works just as well for a reader who substitutes a different game at Step 1 and never follows a link, and we think that is the only defensible way to run a site funded this way. The Affiliate Disclosure sets out the arrangement in full, including what does decide the content.

What this site is not

It is not War Thunder's official site, and it is not a partner, reseller or authorised source for it or for any other publisher. It is not a news outlet, and it does not report on the games industry. It is not a personal blog, and nothing on it is anybody's account of their own experience. It is not an accredited course: there is no registration, no assessment and no certificate, and nothing here is professional advice.

It is also not a collector of data. There is no sign-up, no newsletter, no account and no form. The site sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser, which is why the checklists do not remember what you tick. The Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy describe exactly what that means.

Review and corrections

The whole course is reviewed on a fixed schedule, at least twice a year, and additionally whenever something changes that affects what a step says — a change to Australian classification or consumer rules, a change to what one of the linked bodies publishes, or a change to the vendor's own description of the named product. The date of the most recent review appears in the footer of every page.

Corrections are made to the page itself rather than appended as notes, and the review date is updated when they are. If you find something in the course that is wrong, out of date or unclear, write to info@plainmethod.online and say which step and which sentence. We read everything sent there, and a specific message about one sentence is far more useful than a general one.