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.

Comments

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the inevitable result of microtransactions.

Long gone are there days of just making a game and shipping it.

They've hidden the refund button

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

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.

Didn't change a thing

[haibane]

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...

This is the problem with hero-type MMOs

[Solandri]

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.

They illegally removed the refund button

[slashmydots]

They just removed the refund button in Origin so nobody can submit a refund request. That's illegal in Germany and a couple other places.

Re:It only matters if....

[MrL0G1C]

I think where they're f**king up is in making the game pay-to-win. People will buy this as per usual, they'll feel the deep unfairness of it and not buy the next pay-to-win game I expect. For EA it doesn't matter if 90% of the user base abandons them as long as the remaining 'whales' make them over 10x more.

Hopefully Indie companies will spot gaps in the market and keep making good games that don't stink of micro-transactions.

I put my money where my mouth is, I don't even buy games with season passes.