Gaming Parental Controls - Some games ask for Pin even when game rating is not restricted

[daq]

I've currently got Parental Controls set up on my Wii U to prevent my kid from accessing data management or messing with my internet connection.

The game rating in parental controls is totally disabled, but I find there are a few games that are still locked out by a "this game has been restricted by game rating in parental controls, please enter PIN" message.

Is it something to do with some games perhaps not having any rating listed, hence the Wii U asking for a pin? (specific games ive encountered this problem on are RUNBOW, ANGRY BIRDS TRILOGY and ARMILLO). Wondering if anyone knows why this might be happening or has seen this problem before?

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I'm not sure, but

I've currently got Parental Controls set up on my Wii U to prevent my kid from accessing data management or messing with my internet connection.

The game rating in parental controls is totally disabled, but I find there are a few games that are still locked out by a "this game has been restricted by game rating in parental controls, please enter PIN" message.

Is it something to do with some games perhaps not having any rating listed, hence the Wii U asking for a pin? (specific games ive encountered this problem on are RUNBOW, ANGRY BIRDS TRILOGY and ARMILLO). Wondering if anyone knows why this might be happening or has seen this problem before?

I'm not sure, but if it is a missing rating that's the problem, you could solve that easily by grabbing the meta.xml of the games with ftpiiu everywhere, editing the rating info stored in it and uploading it back to the Wii U. The ratings seem to be numeric values and I'm not sure what they mean, so copying the rating info from a game you have that works might be the easiest.
I'm not sure where in the file system the games are stored although I think they're in storage_mlc (likely there's a folder called "title" or "usr", Google is not very helpful at providing pictures of exactly what I need though), but it shouldn't be hard to find them, you know you're in the right location when you see folders with numbers and letters containing code, content and meta folders. The folders containing the code, content and meta folders correspond to title IDs which you can look up on the title key site to find out which ones they are.
The lines starting with pc_ are all the ratings, you can replace them all or just replace the one relevant to your region, it probably doesn't matter.
Do make sure that you keep the permissions the same when replacing the file (try right clicking the file in the FTP client and seeing if there's an option to check/change them)

 

[daq]

I'm not sure, but if it is a missing rating that's the problem, you could solve that easily by grabbing the meta.xml of the games with ftpiiu everywhere, editing the rating info stored in it and uploading it back to the Wii U. The ratings seem to be numeric values and I'm not sure what they mean, so copying the rating info from a game you have that works might be the easiest.

Thanks, Looking into this further and the issue is tied to the console region and some games never having a rating set for specific countries. My console was set to New Zealand, and even though the game rating was set to allow all game ratings it would ask for a pin on those games I mentioned above. I changed my console region to UK, and they work as expected with no pin being asked. I had a quick look through the meta.xml of some of these games and think the issue is likely tied to these lines:
<pc_cob type="unsignedInt" length="4">192</pc_cob>
<pc_oflc type="unsignedInt" length="4">192</pc_oflc>

most other (working) games seem to have this listed for these lines:
<pc_cob type="unsignedInt" length="4">0</pc_cob>
<pc_oflc type="unsignedInt" length="4">0</pc_oflc>

Still - rather than edit lots of specific meta.xml files though, I think Ill just set my console to UK region and leave it at that. Thanks for the help!

 

[daq]

Well after running into problems with my console being set to a region that did not match my NNID (and Nintendo not allowing country changes on the NNID) I changed my region back to New Zealand and then edited the meta.xml files to fix the problem using FTPii Everywhere.

I just copied the below rating info from these lines in MARIO 3d WORLD meta.xml (which opened fine for me)
<pc_cero type="unsignedInt" length="4">128</pc_cero>
<pc_esrb type="unsignedInt" length="4">128</pc_esrb>
<pc_bbfc type="unsignedInt" length="4">192</pc_bbfc>
<pc_usk type="unsignedInt" length="4">6</pc_usk>
<pc_pegi_gen type="unsignedInt" length="4">3</pc_pegi_gen>
<pc_pegi_fin type="unsignedInt" length="4">192</pc_pegi_fin>
<pc_pegi_prt type="unsignedInt" length="4">4</pc_pegi_prt>
<pc_pegi_bbfc type="unsignedInt" length="4">3</pc_pegi_bbfc>
<pc_cob type="unsignedInt" length="4">0</pc_cob>
<pc_grb type="unsignedInt" length="4">128</pc_grb>
<pc_cgsrr type="unsignedInt" length="4">128</pc_cgsrr>
<pc_oflc type="unsignedInt" length="4">0</pc_oflc>


and pasted in those lines over any non working games meta.xml in the storage_usb\title\00050000\101XXXXX\meta directory.
For some games that have updates applied you also need to make sure to replace the updated meta.xml lines in the update directory (0005000e) as well, which is in storage_usb\title\0005000e\101XXXXX\meta directory. (and if you have dlc likely also in 0005000c\101XXXXX\meta as well, but i didnt have any that needed that).

All seems to work as normal. Anyways, I cant imagine this would be an issue for most people, but on the off chance you have parental controls applied and live in a country where the developer did not happen to set any rating information (or wrong information) this should fix things.