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EA's 'Star Wars' PR Disaster Finally Pushed Gamers Into Open Revolt Against Loot Boxes (rollingstone.com)
Gaming company Electronic Arts is not having a good week. Bowing to pressure from early players of Star Wars Battlefront II and the historically negative reaction over the weekend to the company's response to complaints on Reddit, the company has now detailed significant cuts in the cost to unlock characters in its game and promised to continue to listen to player feedback. From a report: Most importantly, Electronic Arts today announced that they are reducing the number of credits needed to unlock top characters in the game by 75 percent. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader will now cost 15,000 credits. Emperor Palatine, Chewbacca and Leia Organa will now cost 10,000 and Iden will cost 5,000. Mashable reports on the outcry that took place over the weekend: Battlefront II isn't technically out until Nov. 17, but fans that subscribe to EA Access or Origin Access -- which give Xbox One and PC players, respectively, a five-day, 10-hour window to play EA games before they launch -- are discovering how those changes feel. And it's a bad scene, friends. "At the current price of 60,000 credits it will take you 40 hours of gameplay time to earn the right to unlock one hero or villain [in Star Wars: Battlefront II]," Reddit user TheHotterPotato wrote in a post. "That means 40 hours of saving each and every credit, no buying any crates at all, so no bonus credits from getting duplicates in crates." The Reddit post produced such a mind-blowingly negative response that an agent of EA actually responded. Unfortunately, that response made things even worse. EA's Reddit account is plastered with a barrage of downvotes, with one particular response receiving over 600,000 downvotes -- a record.
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I don't play free-to-play games, or games with those mechanics in them - but according to the very latest from Jim Sterling, they've hidden the refund button on EA's page for this game after the mentioned user outrage.
The funny thing is they basically reduced the amount of credits to get a hero by 75%, but they also reduced the amount earned by 75% on each mission. So its basically the same thing...
Everyone's fantasy is to play the hero. But if everyone is running around in a shared game playing a hero, then suddenly heroes are normal, meaning they aren't really heroes anymore. To maintain the illusion of a heroic player character, you have to populate the world with lower-ability bots. That works in a RPG-type MMO, but not in a PVP-type MMO. SW Battlefront tried to get around it by time-limiting how long until and how often you could play the heroes. But that resulted in having to play grunts lots of times before you were allowed to play the hero (for one life after you've unlocked it). The PVP-equivalent of grinding in a RPG.
I think this is why the CRPG genre has gradually shifted away from MMOs back to single-player instanced games in recent years. It's hard to make players feel special in a shared-world game with thousands of other heroes running around. Though a good compromise might be a shared-instance CRPG which you can play together with a few friends.
Egalitarian PVP MMOs or deathmatch-type games, where everyone plays "characters" with the same abilities or picks from a subset of fixed choices with quasi-balanced abilities, don't have this problem.
EA existed (and was hated) long before DLC and microtransactions were a thing.
Computer games designed and sold by corporations are an old thing, corporations isn't incompatible with fun. The idea is ridiculous - many old games that is still spoken about as innovative, fun by nostalgic geeks were in almost all cases designed by and distributed by specialized game development companies. Including EA.
And about franchises not being able to change: Fallout. Heard of it?
The idea is ridiculous - many old games that is still spoken about as innovative, fun by nostalgic geeks were in almost all cases designed by and distributed by specialized game development companies. Including EA.
I'm reminded of older games, and even new games, when I read these.
The complaint is that it takes about 40 hours of gameplay to unlock. Similar multiplayer match games report that mainstream players often spend 15-20 hours per week for about a month, then settle to about 10 hours per week until the games fall out of favor. Their hardcore players can log 80+ hours per week. This means many players would be able to unlock one hero before the end of November, and hardcore gamer teens will likely unlock one or two before Thanksgiving. Most players will unlock two or three before Christmas, hardcore gamers could unlock all the heroes before Christmas under the old structure.
In the older games the high-end unlockables were not available until near the end of the game, often requiring 100+ hours to achieve. And those were single player games played once, not the online match games where statistically people replay them for over a thousand hours on average before moving on.
With the update math suggests they're unlocked with about six hours of gameplay. All of them can be unlocked with 80 hours of gameplay, meaning hardcore players will likely have them all unlocked before the Thanksgiving holiday is over, more casual players can have every character unlocked before Christmas. Far too easy for such a long-running game, in my view.
I think EA was trying to bypass the claims that only the unemployed teens devoting extended hours to the game could unlock those characters, so they added an alternate way to achieve them. Players have been calling for this type of unlock for years, and few games offer it. At 40 hours to unlock and $80 for Darth Vader, that's about $2/hour. Lesser characters were closer to $1/hour or $0.50/hour. While I rarely buy in-game content, those prices don't feel outlandish. Unfortunately and ironically, by providing exactly the thing the players demand, the players revolted.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I can think of a good example of DLC done right: Rocksmith 2014. If you haven't heard of Rocksmith it's basically Rock Band or Guitar Hero with a real guitar and you're actually playing the song. Every week they release a song pack, 3-5 songs. They're up to about 1100 songs total. I've shelled out several grand over the years on this and am happy to do so, it's worth every penny to me. I get to cherry pick the songs I like and they all fit in a single game. I can start a random list and play till my fingers bleed (feels so good)