Step 3 of 5
Step 3 — Classification ratings, randomised rewards and what things cost
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that saves the most trouble. Nothing in it requires you to install anything or to make a purchase. It asks you to look two things up and to write one rule down.
Looking up an Australian classification
Computer games distributed in Australia are classified under the national classification scheme. The body that administers it is the Australian Classification Board, which publishes a searchable database of classification decisions along with the markings and the consumer advice attached to each one.
The practical instruction is short: search that database for the title you are considering, and read the entry rather than relying on what an advertisement, an app store listing or a friend has told you. A listing elsewhere may show a rating from a different country's system, and those systems do not map neatly onto the Australian one.
The Board's own site is the correct place to learn what each Australian classification category means and which of them carry legal restrictions. This course deliberately does not paraphrase those definitions or state any age threshold on the Board's behalf, because getting a detail wrong in a paraphrase is worse than sending you to the source. The source is free, public and takes about two minutes to read.
If you find no Australian entry. Some titles distributed only through particular online channels may not appear in the database you expect. That is not, on its own, evidence of anything improper. It does mean you have less official information to work with, and that the rest of this step — the consumer advice you read on the vendor's own page, and the spending rule you set — carries more of the weight.
Consumer advice, and why it is the useful part
Alongside the classification marking, the Board publishes consumer advice: a short line describing the content that led to the classification. For a parent, this line is usually more useful than the letter beside it, because it tells you what is actually in the game rather than which bucket it fell into.
Read it literally. If the advice mentions online interactivity, that means other people will be able to reach the player in some way, which is a different consideration from the content of the game itself. If it mentions in-game purchases, that is the Board telling you the money question in this step applies.
The eSafety Commissioner publishes free guidance for Australian families about online services, including games, and about what to do when something goes wrong in an online space. It is the right place to go for the social side of this question — chat, contact from strangers, and reporting — which classification markings do not cover.
What a randomised reward is
This is the piece of vocabulary that matters most in a free-to-begin collection RPG, so here it is plainly.
- Randomised in-game reward
- An item you obtain whose contents are not known in advance. You spend something — an in-game currency, or sometimes real money — and receive one or more items drawn from a pool, by chance rather than by choice.
- In-game currency
- A token used only inside the game. It is usually earned by playing and can usually also be bought with real money, which is what links the two economies together.
- Drop rate or odds
- The published probability of receiving a particular item from a randomised draw. Some vendors publish these; some do not.
Two things follow from the definition, and both are worth saying out loud before you start.
The first is arithmetic. Where a reward is drawn at random, the amount you must spend to obtain a specific item is not fixed. It has an average, and individual outcomes scatter around that average in both directions. Anyone who tells you a specific item costs a specific amount is describing an average at best.
The second is about attention. Randomised rewards are compelling in a way that a plain shop is not, and that is a design property rather than an accident. Knowing this in advance does not make you immune to it, but it does let you decide your position while you are calm, which is the entire point of the next section.
Where a vendor publishes odds for its randomised draws, read them before you spend. Where a vendor does not publish them, treat that absence as information in itself. For the product named in this course, the vendor's published description available to us does not state anything about randomised rewards or their odds, so this course states nothing about them either; look on the vendor's own pages.
If someone under 18 will play
Purchasable randomised items are not a suitable feature to present to a child as harmless, and this course will not do so. If the player is under 18, treat the money question as an adult decision that is not delegated.
In practice that usually means three things. Payment details are not stored in the account the young person uses. Any purchase goes through an adult, at the time, as a separate conversation. And the classification entry and consumer advice are read by the adult before the game is installed, not afterwards.
The eSafety Commissioner publishes material written for parents and carers on setting these kinds of expectations, including conversations that are easier to have before an account exists than after. The Australian Classification Board is the source for what the classification itself means and permits.
Setting a spending position that survives
A spending position is a rule you write down before you install, in Australian dollars, that you can check against later without having to make a fresh judgement each time. It works because it moves the decision out of the moment when an offer is on screen.
A workable rule has four parts.
An amount per month. Any number, including zero. Zero is a complete and common answer, and a free-to-begin game is playable on it indefinitely.
A payment route. Decide in advance how a purchase would be made if one were made. A prepaid card or a gift card with a fixed balance enforces the limit by itself. A stored credit card does the opposite.
A waiting period. Agree that any purchase waits until the next day. Most offers that feel urgent are no longer interesting twenty-four hours later, and the ones that still are can be bought then.
A review date. Pick a date a month out to check what was actually spent against what the rule said. Without this, the rule is a wish.
Write the four lines on the same piece of paper as your five hardware lines from Step 2. If other people in the household are involved, they should see it before the game is installed, not after the first disagreement.
Your position as a consumer in Australia
Buying something inside a game is still a purchase, and Australian consumer protections do not stop applying because a transaction happens on a screen. The Australian Consumer Law is administered by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, whose site sets out consumer guarantees, what misleading or deceptive conduct means, and how to make a complaint.
Two practical habits follow. Keep the receipt: digital purchases generate an email or an in-account record, and that record is what any later question will turn on. And read what is actually being sold before you buy it, particularly where what is sold is a chance rather than an item.
If a vendor's conduct seems misleading, the ACCC's site explains where a report goes. If what you have struck is a scam rather than a dispute — a fake storefront, a bogus "top-up" site, an approach by message offering cheap currency — Scamwatch is the place to read about current patterns and to report.
Where you want to look at the vendor's own published material for the product this course names, the link is here, and it is a paid one.
Visit the Raid: Shadow Legends website
Paid affiliate link: this site's publisher receives a commission if you register, install and start the tutorial through it. The commission does not change your cost and did not decide what this step says.
The household in our example
Our hypothetical Adelaide household searched the classification database for the title the 15-year-old had asked for, read the entry and the consumer advice together at the kitchen table, and then spent longer than they expected talking about the line that mentioned online interactivity. That was the part neither adult had thought about.
Their spending rule came out at twenty Australian dollars a month, paid only from a prepaid gift card bought in a shop, with a one-day wait on any purchase and a review set for the first Sunday of the following month. The 15-year-old argued for more and accepted the number. The adults noted privately that the number mattered less than the prepaid card, which made the rule self-enforcing.
They did not look up odds for randomised rewards, because the vendor's pages they could find did not publish any. They wrote "odds not published" on the envelope rather than assuming a figure.
Before you move on
You should now have read an Australian classification entry and its consumer advice from the source rather than from an advertisement, be able to explain what a randomised reward is to someone else, and have four written lines describing your spending position.
Nothing so far has installed anything or spent anything. Step 4 is where the game actually arrives on the computer, and it is written so that you can do it without agreeing to anything you have not read.
Step 3 checklist
- Search the Australian Classification Board database for the title and read the entry itself.
- Read the consumer advice line, not only the classification marking.
- Note separately whether the advice mentions online interactivity, and decide what that means for your household.
- Check whether the vendor publishes odds for any randomised rewards; if it does not, write down that it does not.
- Write your monthly amount in Australian dollars. Zero is a complete answer.
- Decide the payment route, and prefer one with a fixed balance over a stored card.
- Agree a one-day wait on any purchase.
- Put a review date in the calendar one month out.
- If the player is under 18, confirm no payment details will be stored in their account.
- Bookmark the ACCC and Scamwatch pages so you are not searching for them under pressure later.