Zen, please explain!

[snoopy]

I found Mel Kirk's comments to be insensitive and insulting. The so called "vocal minority" is the main audience for these tables. Going as far as removing features from a table like a mini game is going too far (not to mention Champion Pub is already in a somewhat unfinished state, as is).

same here,first the vocal minority thing, then throwing Farsight under the Bus with his ESRB Rating comment was unnecessary.

[Brianvgplayer]

So far I like the physics and polish much better than Farsight's, I just wish the game wasn't stuck with 4Kids like Censorship.

[snoopy]

McLovin wrote:Hi everyone,

Doom and The Walking Dead fall under our descriptors of Fantasy Violence and Mild Language, while some themes in these tables would require 'Alcohol and Tobacco Reference' and 'Suggestive Themes' which we don't have listed for Pinball FX3.

There are internal talks about what could be a good option here, when we have news on this we'll try to inform everyone.

then please explain to me, why the walking dead table has a Axe with blood on it as plunger ,but the Sword on the MM backglass is censored? This makes zero sense at all.

[Alipan]

What's with the age rating anyhow - kids don't actually play this do they?

Everyone knows the Pinball audience is 99% middle aged men and the kids are all playing Fortnite.

[snoopy]

What's with the age rating anyhow - kids don't actually play this do they?

Everyone knows the Pinball audience is 99% middle aged men and the kids are all playing Fortnite.

exactly,this is ridiculous beyond belief. Im 56 years old and do not want Disney sanitized recreations of real Tables.

[teamski]

What's with the age rating anyhow - kids don't actually play this do they?

Everyone knows the Pinball audience is 99% middle aged men and the kids are all playing Fortnite.

Sad but oh so true, lol!

-Ski

[hunter328]

same here,first the vocal minority thing, then throwing Farsight under the Bus with his ESRB Rating comment was unnecessary.

Where is this article or interview? I’d like to read it.

Myself, I’m here for the pinball gameplay. As long as the ESRB Rating doesn’t effect which tables they can bring over I’m ok. Even if it does though, there must be so many tables that I’d be awhile before they were left with only tables they feel they couldn’t include under the current rating. Hopefully by that time they’ve figured out a way to include them, maybe in a teens and up DLC pack or something. “The Tables in the Back Room” DLC, lol. Like that room in the video rental store when you were a kid that only creepy looking guys ever came in and out of.
I can see a group of kids at a sleepover now, acting all sneaky, as they make sure the parents are asleep so that they can load up and play Scared Stiff! Then the inevitable disappointment when they realize it doesn’t contain anything even close to what they see on the internet.

[snoopy]

Article is here:https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/...r-esrb-rating/

[shogun00]

Article is here:https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/...r-esrb-rating/

Thanks for the link and now we actually have a good explanation on the edits.

Kirk noted that Zen Studios has been penalized for inadvertently crossing the ESRB in the past. Last year, the studio's Infinite Minigolf was removed from digital storefronts after some inappropriate placeholder artwork accidentally made its way into the VR version of the game. The ESRB raised the game's rating to a T, requiring it to be altered and resubmitted to the ESRB before it could go back on sale at the original E rating.

Yikes! That will explain why they are being extra cautious.

[hunter328]

same here,first the vocal minority thing, then throwing Farsight under the Bus with his ESRB Rating comment was unnecessary.

Thanks for the link. As far as what he said in the article, I don’t see how he could answer questions about how TPA version has these things and PBFX3 doesn’t without saying what he did. I don’t see that as him throwing Farsight under the bus but just answering what was asked. And I’d think that vocal minority part is almost surely correct. You’re always going to hear a lot more from those with negative views than those with positive, making it look at first glance like things are skewed to the negative. That’s Statistics 101.
Hopefully they’ll figure a way to make everyone happy. Myself, I’m more than happy with the tables so far, but to each their own.

[Brianvgplayer]

Thanks for the link. As far as what he said in the article, I don’t see how he could answer questions about how TPA version has these things and PBFX3 doesn’t without saying what he did. I don’t see that as him throwing Farsight under the bus but just answering what was asked. And I’d think that vocal minority part is almost surely correct. You’re always going to hear a lot more from those with negative views than those with positive, making it look at first glance like things are skewed to the negative. That’s Statistics 101.
Hopefully they’ll figure a way to make everyone happy. Myself, I’m more than happy with the tables so far, but to each their own.

The problem isn't the tables themselves, but the censorship of the tables. I like the way the tables play, but the censorship is very similar to the silliness of 4Kids where they censored Luffy's smile in an episode of One Piece for no good reason. And it's possible some of the changes could affect how the tables play. A mode may be removed from Champion Pub, a game with a somewhat limited rule set, as is.

[snoopy]

the whole protecting the Kids argument is quite frankly absolute bs, they hear worse at school then from a pinball machine qoute.i find it quite telling that they removed the preservepinball hashtag pretty quickly after the ars technica article was out.

[tfhfony]

the whole protecting the Kids argument is quite frankly absolute bs, they hear worse at school then from a pinball machine qoute.i find it quite telling that they removed the preservepinball hashtag pretty quickly after the ars technica article was out.

Don't get me wrong: I would prefer uncensored tables as well, but you can hardly blame ZEN for restrictions set by Disney or ESRB.
I do hope they find a way to solve this by making a special 16+ DLC or whatever solution they can find. Though I'll end up purchasing the tables anyway.

[hunter328]

The problem isn't the tables themselves, but the censorship of the tables. I like the way the tables play, but the censorship is very similar to the silliness of 4Kids where they censored Luffy's smile in an episode of One Piece for no good reason. And it's possible some of the changes could affect how the tables play. A mode may be removed from Champion Pub, a game with a somewhat limited rule set, as is.

I get that and it’s more than a fair complaint. But I also understand Zen’s side of the issue. Some of what I’ve read makes it sound like Zen is trying to be some kind of watchdog group out to protect kids and aggressively out to censor whatever they view as inappropriate when it seems to me more like they always envisioned their game to be family friendly and easily able to receive the E10 rating and are now handcuffed by the strict guidelines of that when it comes to content they didn’t originally create but are trying to recreate as faithfully as they can. Something they probably didn’t foresee happening when they set those policies up originally since they always had complete control over what went into their own creations. Now that they’ve run into this problem, and I chose to believe them when they say it’s a complicated one that’s not easily fixed, I can understand why they had to censor what they did. I also think that these being the very first days of Zen having this license that it’s too early to give up hope that they’ll be able to come to a solution that makes everyone happy. I even think they were probably upset at having to censor the tables in the first place, but they realized they were in a situation where they had no real choice at this time.

I’m holding out hope that before they come to a point where they’d have to release a table where the actual gameplay would have to be altered that they will have devised a way where doing so would be unnecessary.

[Brianvgplayer]

I'm under the impression from the article that they chose to censor it to keep the ESRB rating, rather than the ESRB telling them to do so, and didn't make it clear that it was their intention all along. I disagree that many of those comments needed to be said, especially the one about the way Farsight handles the ESRB ratings. From the sound of it, that thing with the Mini Golf game was something that should have been caught much earlier (and I read somewhere that the XONE and PS4 versions were rated T even before the art was changed for the Switch version).

Edit: It looks like an announcent will be made soon. I may sound negative, but I am enjoying the tables themselves and the physics are definitely much better than Farsight's floaty physics. I also like how the tables in arcade and tournament modes seem just as mean as the originals.