The short version
Wait ten minutes. Search the whole mailbox for the game's name rather than opening the inbox folder and scrolling. Check junk, spam, promotions and any rule that files mail automatically. Confirm the address you typed is the address you meant. Only then use the resend option, and only once.
Why activation exists at all
Confirming an email address does two jobs. It proves the address works, so password resets have somewhere to go, and it makes bulk account creation expensive enough to discourage. The side effect is that a new account sits in an inactive state until the confirmation is completed, and the login screen rarely explains that clearly. The message you get is usually a generic failure, which sends people off to reset passwords that were never wrong.
If you registered minutes ago and cannot log in, assume activation before you assume anything else.
Where the message actually goes
| Cause | How it looks | What resolves it |
|---|---|---|
| Filtered into junk or a category folder | Nothing in the inbox, everything otherwise normal | Search the entire mailbox, including junk and archived mail, for the vendor's name |
| A typo in the address | Nothing arrives, no bounce, resending changes nothing | Register again with a carefully typed address, or ask the vendor to correct it |
| Provider delay | The message arrives twenty minutes to a few hours late | Waiting, and not requesting five more copies in the meantime |
| A work or school mailbox with strict filtering | No message and no junk folder entry, because it was rejected before delivery | Use a personal address instead |
| A full mailbox | Mail stops arriving generally, not just from the vendor | Clear space, then resend |
| An expired link | The message is there, but clicking it reports that it is no longer valid | Request a fresh confirmation and use it straight away |
Work through it in this order
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Give it ten minutes
Automated mail is not instant, particularly at busy times. Ten minutes of patience costs nothing and resolves a reasonable share of cases on its own.
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Search the mailbox, do not browse it
Use the search box and the vendor's name, with the search scope set to all mail rather than the inbox. Filtering rules you set up years ago, promotional tabs and aggressive junk detection all file mail somewhere you would never think to look. Searching finds it; scrolling does not.
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Read the address back
Open the registration page again and look at the address you entered, character by character. The usual suspects are a missing letter in the domain, a swapped pair in the local part, and an address at a provider one letter away from the intended one. If the address is wrong, no amount of resending will help, because the mail is being delivered correctly to somebody else.
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Use resend once
One resend, then wait. Requesting several in quick succession can invalidate earlier links, so you end up clicking an older message and being told it has expired. If you have already sent four requests, use the newest message and ignore the rest.
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Try a different mailbox
If a work or institutional address is involved, register with a personal one. Organisational mail filtering is often configured to reject unrecognised bulk senders outright, and you cannot see or change that from your end.
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Contact the vendor, with specifics
If none of the above has worked, the vendor's own support channel is the only remaining route. Give them the exact address used, the approximate time of registration and the player name. Nobody else can do this for you — this site has no connection to any game account system and no ability to look anything up.
Where this goes wrong in a way that costs you something
- A second account is not a fix. Registering again with the same address usually fails, and registering with a different one leaves you with two half-finished accounts and a harder support conversation.
- The link goes where the message goes. If a confirmation email arrives for an account you did not create, someone has typed your address by mistake, or is testing it. Do not confirm it, and do not follow links in it.
- Nobody legitimate asks for your password by email. A message asking you to reply with your password, or to confirm it on a page reached from a link, is a phishing attempt regardless of how well it is written. Report those to Scamwatch, and read the Australian Cyber Security Centre guidance on recognising them.
- Paid account recovery services are not a thing. Anyone advertising guaranteed recovery of a game account for a fee is selling either nothing or someone else's account.
The message arrived, but the link will not work
This is a different fault from a missing message, and it has a shorter list of causes.
- The link reports that it has expired
- Confirmation links are deliberately short-lived. If the message has been sitting unread since yesterday, request a new one rather than trying to make the old one work.
- The link has been broken across two lines
- Some mail clients wrap long addresses, and clicking then sends only the first half. Copy the whole address out of the message and paste it into the address bar in one piece.
- The page opens but says the account is already confirmed
- That is success, not failure. It usually means an earlier click registered. Go back to the login screen and try the account.
- The link opens a page that asks for your password
- A confirmation link should confirm, not ask you to authenticate again on an unfamiliar page. Check the address bar carefully before typing anything, and treat a mismatch as phishing.
Once the account is active
Two things are worth doing immediately, while you are still thinking about the account rather than about the game. Turn on multi-factor authentication if the vendor offers it, because game accounts with time and money in them are worth stealing and are stolen routinely. And record which email address the account is registered to, somewhere you will find it in two years, because the most common reason a long-dormant account cannot be recovered is that nobody remembers which mailbox it belongs to.
If the login now works but the client will not open, the fault has moved to your machine rather than to your account, and the launch failures page takes it from there.
What happens to your address
An email address given to a game vendor is handled under that vendor's own privacy policy, not ours. Ignite Works collects nothing: there is no form on this site, and we have no way to receive your address unless you choose to email us. If you believe an organisation has mishandled your personal information in Australia, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is the regulator that handles complaints.