Yes they will be excluded from ECS clubs. The restrictions are on the app so if someone under the age minimum ATA set (because even if a game dev says 18+ Apple/Google can lower/raise depending on region) they will see the game as boring and leave since they can’t access anything social about the game. Altogether it’s to discourage restricted (under age) accounts from playing as ATA is not welcoming minors.
When doing research about the App Store ratings I’ve come to see that the App Store: play store doesn’t automatically set an age rating in the stores. What happens is the creators of the game/company answers a detailed questionnaire which the game developers answer and their answers determine the outcome of what age range is “welcomed” or “acceptable”🩵
What an absolute joke. You’re lowering the age rating so you become more visible on the App Store to CHILDREN. Thank god u put a real strict age verification system in place tho, the lil age box where u select ur age has famously always worked when creating accounts on the internet lmfaooo /s if yall need more money maybe stop ruining the game year after year and u wont have to make morally questionable decisions to try and increase revenue. It was already lowkey embarrassing to have this app on your phone, soon you’ll probably be looked at like a predator for having it considering its new 13+ age rating. Just big yikes all around. TLDR yall losing money like crazy because you keep losing players year after year due to your own greedy decisions, and are now putting more kids in harms way in order to increase profits. Yuck
Yes but Apple/Google has a final say in what the rating of the game is and can change it if they think it doesn’t match the actual content in game. Also depending on where you are. I see the game as 16+ while others 13+. I’m assuming because ATA removed Pub, filtered out what can be said and restricted what’s allowed as usernames they probably did a new questionnaire and got bumped? I went down the ESRB and PEGI rabbit hole on this stuff 😆
So basically a developer submits their answers > IARC (global rating system) looks at them > automatically assigns the rating for each region. Very interesting to look into with the different ratings around the world 😁
I personally think in-game RWC purchases should be entirely disabled on 13-17 year old accounts, but I suppose the argument could be made as to who would want to spend money on such a heavily restricted game (especially when you're a teenager with little to no disposable income).
This post is long over due in attempting to clarify things. As a club owner it still leaves me with some questions though. Can these restricted accounts join any club that exists? If so can we have a setting for clubs to toggle on/off to allow or not allow these age restricted accounts to join? I'd like to not have them in my club at all which I'm sure many others are of the same opinion. If they can join any club and can't see club walls or club announcements, that is where most clubs post their rules and that could be a bit of an issue. Will these players with restricted access be able to win cats and other ec drops from parties/rewards or be able to purchase them in the shop? If your goal is to target more adult players for them to find the app, I don't see the logic behind saying dropping the rating to 13+ is going to do that. As an adult I am not searching the app store for childish games. None of this makes sense and it seems like we're just being fed a bunch of crap that we're expected to just take and move along. Though the move along for most of us will be moving along right off this app. None of us want kids on this app and none of us have a problem with the age restriction that was put in place. What we have an issue with is why is the rating being dropped to show up more to attract kids to the app? Just makes it seem like a ploy to up your downloads.
Thank you for clarifying! Had a tad too much caffeine and the in-brain-visual-feature was blurry 😂 😅🙈
Mentioned this a bit above. They realistically can’t join EC clubs since they can’t read club walls or chat at all. This means they’ll never know how an EC club works or why they’d ever even need to buy an item like a cat or dog. As a former EC admin, I’d never let someone in who randomly applied at the door and said nothing.
Devs have a direct influence on what their app is age rated by what they fill out on the app stores questionnaire, let's not get passed this point. Devs have lied and said only app store chooses rating which is incorrect, and funny how they made all these changes right before they started getting the age brackets lowered to 12+
My Google play store showing "PG 12" for pimd 🤡 Not to mention kids who are under 18 i used to report to ata but they didn't do anything because their bot was too busy closing my messages instead of doing what's right, like Chrystal230 for example, when we had old campus and pub chat, she was in campus looking for boys who are 14 and had a 15 yo in her wall. And when i walled her to tell her game isn't for minors and to delete it & come back when she's 18 she told me she hate me and to kill myself (there are screenshots i can provide as proof on discord if anyone need it). It was about 5, 6 months ago but still... As for ata, you guys should change in play store back to PG 17+ or even better PG 21 because this game definitely isn't for the kids!!
Yes. They have restricted what's allowed as username, but hunt drop has a "Kill them" on it and LB avi's is "Jerk" something 😂 Really consistent. About the age rating and minors, actually, nothing has changed. They were "free" to join even earlier when the app was 16/17+. Now they just have to join two times 😂 Cause it's what will happen as soon as they'll understand they can't do anything. I don't know if this is actually a way to get them bored and push them to leave, or if it's more like: "They will obviously lie about their ages and it won't be our responsability anymore" as wash your hands of it, since I bet you have seen how some other games available for kids had a positive boom. The negative point of this it's about adults having troubles to find PIMD. And specially in the "group" of adults who will decide to install the game seeing it's for kids. Iykyk.
The simply question I have here is: If kids from 13-17 can't really play the game, since communcation is a core aspect of the game. Why you still let them be here? Why not not directlty remove them from the game? Like what is the reason?
Just make the app 18+? How is that hard? You guys just spent MORE coding effort and money on allow minors in than making the app fully 18+ and safe for everyone, are you actually serious? If you really cared about minors and the userbase's experience you wouldn't let minors into this game AT ALL. This is just going to result in adults being restricted because you guys think they are minors and it won't fix the issue of minors lying about their age, since some minors use their parents' bank cards to pay for stuff (you know, an old tactic that kids have been using since around 2006). This is incredibly ineffective AND it is annoying to the paying adult playerbase that uplifts your game financially. Maybe instead you could have coded something called an AGE VERIFICATION process? There would still be lying minors that get through by asking their incredibly dumb parents to go through it for them, but a LOT less would get through than just straight up letting them into the game to profit off of their addiction to lootboxes 💀 Even Discord servers with less staff and financial means than you have age verification processes where you take a pic of your face holding a visible ID. How hard is that to code? A Discord bot can do it for servers that have thousands of individuals in them, but you guys can't? Are you kidding me?
This is legit the exact thing I’m going through they think I’m a minor and my stuff is restricted when I’m an adult💀 they are going to lose a lot of adults playing this game because of this.
Thank you for replying even though it was above; as I said I didn't (and still don't tbh) have the energy to read through all the answers so I just read ATA's post and asked my question right away. Anyway! I can understand the reasoning, but I find it kinda sad 😣 if I were a minor, I don't think I would enjoy the game that much with so much stuff restricted. Then again, I guess it all depends on what a restricted account actually sees, because if they don't even know there ARE walls and chats and all? Well, then they don't know what they're missing or even that they're missing a part of the game altogether, and I can see some teenagers still enjoying the game that way. But hey, I'm old, I don't need to worry about that luckily!
Here’s my understanding of the situation: So what happens if a 14-year-old downloads PIMD? The app store can send PIMD an age signal. It’s privacy-friendly, so it doesn’t reveal someone’s actual age. Instead, it tells the app they’re likely in a certain age range based on things like account settings, child accounts, parental controls, etc. If the signal says they’re likely 13 to 17, they’ll automatically get the teen version. Reinstalling the app won’t change that unless the account or device settings change. But whyyy even have a teen version? Why not just block them if the age signal is 13 to 17? 😭 Because age signals aren’t perfect. Sometimes an adult might get flagged as a teen. Giving them the teen version lets them verify their age instead of getting locked out before they’ve even had a chance to play. So you admit it’s not perfect! Conversely, a teen could also be mistaken for an adult then? 💀 Potentially, yeah. That’s why parental controls matter. Setting up child accounts and parental controls helps app stores generate more accurate age signals, not just for PIMD but across lots of apps. Waittt, so a kid could just lie about their age to PIMD and get the full version? 🤯 If that happens, the issue probably started before they even downloaded PIMD. It likely means the app store didn’t have enough information to recognize them as a child, often because there wasn’t a properly set up child account or parental controls. So even if PIMD were rated 21+, they could still potentially download it. At that point, the issue is bigger than PIMD. If they can get around the app store’s age protections, they can potentially access lots of other mature-rated apps too. My final thoughts At first, I was really skeptical. I even questioned whether I wanted to keep supporting the game. I got hung up on the 13+ rating and completely missed the bigger picture. I also get why so many people are questioning it. A lot of us lied about our age to play PIMD back in the day. But honestly… doesn’t that prove the old 17+ rating wasn’t really working? Ironically, many of us are living proof of that. Technology has moved on. Age signals and parental controls aren’t perfect, but they’re a much stronger safeguard than relying on an age rating alone. The 13+ rating is easy to fixate on, but I don’t think it’s the real story. It’s really a byproduct of a system that’s trying to put younger users into a safer version of the game instead of relying on an age gate that many of us already proved was easy to get around.
Yeah, I figured stuff like this would happen. I'm sorry this is happening to you. If I just sit here and take time to think about this, I think this is what they should do now, since they already spent money on the coding: 1) Make the rating 18+ to keep the game from being recommended to minors (duh). 2) Keep the coded restrictions they just spent money on coding to keep minors from entering the game and being exposed to adult content, while giving a chance for adults interested in the game to experience a sort of tutorial area to decide if they want to keep playing the game and go through the age verification process (because consent is key and adults should get some sort of sample of the game prior to making their decision). 3) To access the adult content of the game once they've completed the tutorial area, the player must go through a true age verification process, where the player submits a picture of themselves, holding an ID (the ID must have a picture of them on it and a date of birth, duh). Similar to how crypto wallet apps do it, the ID verification data must be deleted within lawful limits and cannot be shared with 3rd parties. 4) The age verification is processed by a REAL HUMAN BEING who will accept or deny the verification (yes ATA will have to hire real employees dedicated to this, because AI is way too unreliable for this process). 5) ATA should spend money on advertising the game to adults and advertise it as a unique 18+ social game (which it actually is), going all in on adult themes, giving more SFW and NSFW options for their adult playerbase, like coding NSFW toggles for the adults that don't want their game to appear too sexual during work (or any other reasons) or catering to their actual playerbase's mature sensibilities by being more risqué in their NSFW content instead of doing nonsense to appear more PG (Second Life does this by having PG, Moderate and Adult toggles for content, so players can find items and locations that cater to them as individuals and as adults. It also doubles perfectly to keep teens out of inappropriate content, since Second Life has an adult side to it and has always had this obsession with keeping a teen rating, my guess is money, but whatever). Would it be annoying for adults to go through this age verification process? Oh, absolutely, but would it keep minors out more effectively than whatever the hell this is trying to achieve on its own? Yes. I think that when a game is on the app store, it has a much higher responsibility to keep kids out of its adult spaces, because this generation of kids is way more likely to get their games from mobile stores than any previous generations, so if they are going to go down the "protect the kids at all cost" route, then they better go all in with it. Since PIMD doesn't have separate PG, Moderate and Adult areas that are actively moderated by HUMANS, like Second Life* does, this is even more important. *I am comparing PIMD to Second Life, because it is also an adult leaning social game and although I wish Second Life was rated for adults on the app stores, at least Second Life has restricted areas and shopping restrictions for unverified accounts and most adult locations kick you out manually if your account is younger since locations are moderated acticely by the playerbase (On Second Life you can see when an account was created and whether it's a verified account by looking at the person's profile).
Asking adults to upload their passports or government ID just to play PIMD feels kinda wild 😭 Government ID checks make sense for banks and crypto because they are regulated industries and legally required to verify identities for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and compliance laws. PIMD is a mobile game, not a bank. I can’t think of many mainstream mobile games that require every adult to upload a government ID just to access the normal version. The privacy concerns and security risks alone would be massive.