EA’s Defense of Star Wars: Battlefront II is Now Reddit’s Most Downvoted Comment

There's just too many people that will buy this for it to be unsuccessful.

I loved going to Sci-Fi conventions until fucking everyone started showing up in the late 80's. And all the toy marketing, lol.

Gaming is now hitting the same transition; people tend to find other shit to do other than put up with BS caused by millions of lame idiots.

When we ran the servers, we could ban idiots or cheaters otherwise fuck with them; one of my favorites was to give them only a pistol and one round in Crysis Wars, lol.

I think, looking back, that Crysis Wars was the peak in gaming; fast, modifiable, dedicated servers, etc.

The New Doom is pretty good; it just doesn't have good flow. I like arcade mode in the Ultra Nightmare setting; it's like cardio. :)

Crysis 3 wasn't bad, but it was way too consoley.

None of the new games seem to have fast keyboard or mouse input, they seem laggy. Yes, I buy mobos with PS2 plugs, usb only does 6 keys at a time, lol.

I guess that's because of the "Everything is a console port" problem; but I haven't seen a game push one of my systems in years, but I don't play at 4k either.

I was really hoping that Quake Wars would be like the old Quake, but it's not worth playing; it sucked after the second closed beta.

Sigh. :(

I saw a bit back that they made the guys that made the patch so you could still play BF2142 (after they shut down Gamespy) take it all down, or get sued into oblivion.

I think they deserve the downvotes; they locked the linked thread to limit the discussion, but it's going on at other places now. :)

Ever heard of Streisand Effect, EA? :D
 
Nice misrepresentation of a larger problem. They're destroying games. "Games as a service" doesn't even hold up under the law in many countries. In Australia, many European countries, unless you're paying a monthly fee, they're PRODUCTS under consumer law, the end. You're paying for a product that's designed to be destroyed. What other "service" do you have no guarantee of how long it will last AND no metric of when it's considered done? Hell, if you buy a game like this a couple years from now, you may only get 1 month of play before they announce it's being shut down. This affects multiplayer AND single player games, it's a plague on the industry.

But hey, put your money where you mouth is. If you honestly believe 2-4 years is a reasonable amount of time to have access to a game that you paid for, then you can never play it again because it's been bricked by design, do you ever watch movies, listen to music, or read books older than 4 years old? Would you be fine if they were all rendered unusable after 4 years? I somehow doubt that. Making games unnecessarily rely on a central server, then shutting it down is destroying games, that's all there is to it. Meanwhile, I can still play Quake online and it's 20 years old. How far we've come.

Exactly...one person using their valuation of something isn't a blanket response that covers everybody's opinion. Not to mention what happens to the games that I don't put 200-400 hours into (or whatever arbitrary value you want to assign a game before it's "worth it")? What happens to a game that is killed before it moves off my backlog? They sure aren't going to reimburse me for it but I don't feel that 0 hours is how much entertainment I paid for.
 
How much cash is it to unlock a hero anyway? Like $5 or $20 to get Vader?
 
The thing that's different about the conversation this time that I'm seeing is, instead of just people raging, the tide seems to be turning to many commenters stating the obvious: the only way this is going to change is if a significant amount of people don't buy the game.

I have a reserved optimism that many people are sick of this shit they will vote with their wallets. That said, I also recall all of the times we see the same internet warrior decrying microtransactions show up a month later on players boards, as well as the people who are doubly responsible by preordering the game + DLCs.

Heck, there are so many great games out there now from indie and other decent houses that don't do this BS -- play those games instead. Go buy Divinity 2 if you haven't, for one.
 
I'm still buying it for the campaign.
And yes, I will spend $60 on it and not give two shits about the whining children on reddit.
I play games to relax, not to get embroiled in drama. When the games stop being fun I simply stop buying them (ie. Assassin's Creed, Battlefield, NFS, CoD etc).

When will people realize 1) they have a choice not to buy something and 2) you are not entitled to anything unless you own the IP.
 
I'm still buying it for the campaign.
And yes, I will spend $60 on it and not give two shits about the whining children on reddit.
I play games to relax, not to get embroiled in drama. When the games stop being fun I simply stop buying them (ie. Assassin's Creed, Battlefield, NFS, CoD etc).

When will people realize 1) they have a choice not to buy something and 2) you are not entitled to anything unless you own the IP.

Sorta shallow and one side way of looking at the problem and declaring it fact.
 
Gauntlet that may have been the first pay to win multi player video game. I'm tired of people thinking that micro-transactions are some sort of new scourge on the land. They aren't.
 
I'm still buying it for the campaign.
And yes, I will spend $60 on it and not give two shits about the whining children on reddit.
I play games to relax, not to get embroiled in drama. When the games stop being fun I simply stop buying them (ie. Assassin's Creed, Battlefield, NFS, CoD etc).

When will people realize 1) they have a choice not to buy something and 2) you are not entitled to anything unless you own the IP.


This is why people speak up. You keep being a sheep, though.
 
Sorta shallow and one side way of looking at the problem and declaring it fact.
It's shallow that he's buying it for the SP campaign, or shallow that consumers have a choice and should vote with their wallets if they don't like something?

With as many people as there are bitching on reddit and downvoting the post from EA(honestly it's more of a meme at this point like the CoD infinite warfare trailer), if EA actually lost 400,000+ customers, they would care. But we know very well that a large portion if not the majority of those people downvoting that post who were considering buying it anyway, will still end up buying it.
 
Seriously though, no one is answering my question. Are people be babies over $5?
 
Seriously though, no one is answering my question. Are people be babies over $5?

You can't pay to unlock them. Either you earn the credits through playing matches or you get them via loot boxes. There is no way to directly pay for them. And I might be wrong, but I believe the only way to get credits from loot boxes is through duplicate cards which give you a tiny amount of credits.
 
You can't pay to unlock them. Either you earn the credits through playing matches or you get them via loot boxes. There is no way to directly pay for them. And I might be wrong, but I believe the only way to get credits from loot boxes is through duplicate cards which give you a tiny amount of credits.
Right, you get 75-100 credits for a duplicate from a loot box, 60 lootboxes for $80, you'd have probably been out a few grand trying to unlock characters that way.
 
You can't pay to unlock them. Either you earn the credits through playing matches or you get them via loot boxes. There is no way to directly pay for them. And I might be wrong, but I believe the only way to get credits from loot boxes is through duplicate cards which give you a tiny amount of credits.

Gotcha, thank you. Yes that totally blows to be shaking around loot boxes for heroes.
 
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Gotcha, thank you. Yes that totally blows to be shaking around look boxes for heroes.
That was the most rewarding part about the movies though!

Remember when everybody really needed Han and Chewie to show up at the Battle of Yavin? They kept passing around the hat for collections until they got enough loot boxes to randomly entice Han and Chewie back. It's one of the all time greatest moments in cinema history! Such wonderful suspense, drama, and a truly rewarding experience!
 
You can thank LoL, they were the first to break a BILLION $$$ doing it and show the model is a HUGE cash cow correctly implemented with a casual, mechanically dumbed down game made for drones.

League is actually free to play. Any money you put in goes to cosmetics. Sure, you can buy champions, but they have free rotation and you can unlock champions with points earned while playing the game. You don’t have to spend any money.
 
Will buy for campaign only. Maybe multiplayer only if I can do bot matches like the first. Don't care to deal with the online stuff
 
Funny enough people really didn't complain as much in BF3/4 about the packs you could buy that unlocks the various classes. To unlock everything was $40... IMO not too opposed to this kind of monitization.. I guess the devil is in the details... Where in BF3/4 you could be relatively geared (enough to compete) in just a few hours of play as each class/vehicle... There were some exceptions here and there but it wasn't horrible.

Another thing... People were complaining about lack of more progression and things to "work for" and unlock during these titles. The comments were literally the game was getting boring. There are a LOT of gamers that want pay to play or other mechanics to reward their awesomeness, but only if they are the ones on top... funny how that works...
The difference in BF3, BF4, and even BF1 is that the weapons and class systems are all relatively balanced enough that the new unlocks don't give huge advantages. In fact, some of the later unlocks are the worst in the game and only work well in extremely niche scenarios. All of these items could be eventually unlocked with playtime if you really wanted the items, but until that point you really weren't disadvantaged.

With Battlefront, these items start to give huge in-game advantages very quickly. Sure you can grind your way up, but Hero classes in this game have many advantages over regular player classes like more health, more powerful attacks, etc. There one disadvantage might even be a bug in that they don't accumulate points as fast as regular classes.

I will let XFactor explain it a bit better.

 
^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This is a great video, dude dropped $100 bucks to fly in circles in an A-wing and gun down Tie Fighters....................which I am guessing is the only effing thing you do in that level...fly around in a circle and blow other people up. Then he made sure, no doubt, his actual character had like the best avaialble guns and could double-jump super high...

And I'm watching this breakdown of this ridiculous card-economy that requires you take a class to figure it all out....AND FOR WHAT!?!?!?! So you can turn faster? Jump higher? Shoot faster? Unlock another gun? :D O. M. F. G. I really had no idea it was *this* bad......TY FOR SHARING THIS.

LOL-Trol-Face.gif
 
The difference in BF3, BF4, and even BF1 is that the weapons and class systems are all relatively balanced enough that the new unlocks don't give huge advantages. In fact, some of the later unlocks are the worst in the game and only work well in extremely niche scenarios. All of these items could be eventually unlocked with playtime if you really wanted the items, but until that point you really weren't disadvantaged.

Eh...I seem to recall some shenanigans with a particularly overpowered IR scope unlock in BF3...

Also, they sold "unlock packs" for real money for those games, to bypass all of the progression grinding.

This is not a new thing for EA, they are just getting worse and worse about it.
 
Eh...I seem to recall some shenanigans with a particularly overpowered IR scope unlock in BF3...

Also, they sold "unlock packs" for real money for those games, to bypass all of the progression grinding.

This is not a new thing for EA, they are just getting worse and worse about it.

It starts "harmless." Though, I never considered a progression system in MP to be harmless. Then, they gradually introduce the shittiness. They'll double down before they finally either give in, or go under. I'm hoping these companies go under and we get a clean slate with a new set of game companies.

Seriously, fuck em all.
 
So is the issue that the guys cost 60k credits or that you could buy credits to skip ahead?

If everyone had to earn 60k credits (no buying credits) I don't see why that would cause this much uproar.
 
Oh please. Let's not pretend they would even be locked at all if EA couldn't make money from it.
I don't know anything about the game so I am truly ignorant of what the issue is. Can you buy credits to skip ahead?
 
Nice misrepresentation of a larger problem. They're destroying games. "Games as a service" doesn't even hold up under the law in many countries. In Australia, many European countries, unless you're paying a monthly fee, they're PRODUCTS under consumer law, the end. You're paying for a product that's designed to be destroyed. What other "service" do you have no guarantee of how long it will last AND no metric of when it's considered done? Hell, if you buy a game like this a couple years from now, you may only get 1 month of play before they announce it's being shut down. This affects multiplayer AND single player games, it's a plague on the industry.

But hey, put your money where you mouth is. If you honestly believe 2-4 years is a reasonable amount of time to have access to a game that you paid for, then you can never play it again because it's been bricked by design, do you ever watch movies, listen to music, or read books older than 4 years old? Would you be fine if they were all rendered unusable after 4 years? I somehow doubt that. Making games unnecessarily rely on a central server, then shutting it down is destroying games, that's all there is to it. Meanwhile, I can still play Quake online and it's 20 years old. How far we've come.

So maybe some modification like a guarantee of one year for server access, and you can decide if you want to buy it. Do you still watch your VHS tapes? How about that first car you bought? Oh - hey those sneakers whose soles you wore through? Things wear out, servers die. I can see maybe requiring some kind of guaranteed minimum that is noted up front (note, I'm talking from a consumer awareness/fairness point of view, not euro-legality as I have no idea about their laws - though I'm sure they could accomodate something like that) but other than that, I don't see an issue other than a waaaambulance.

If you don't like it, don' t buy it and the perceived problem corrects itself. If a majority don't see the issue as many here do, then, well, that's the market, and it sucks to be you. Kind of like it sucks to be anyone who wants a DeLorean...

Note, I did say that shit single player campaigns designed only to lure you into the microtransaction multiplayer is bullshit. I also said money coming in not being used to further develop the game or new games is shitty business practice. But the microtransaction model itself, if well done, shouldn't be an issue for most people, as those who are willing to pay will pay, and those who are not, will either not pay (if its vanity items only) or not play (if its pay to win - which is shit). From the descriptions here of the lootbox model of Battlefront2, it sounds like a shit system and should die a fiery death. But the microtransactional idea in and of itself is not inherently bad. There are, however, very shitty implementations of it.

BB
 
How much cash is it to unlock a hero anyway? Like $5 or $20 to get Vader?
I think it has to do with how Vader is unlocked and the way the reply was structured.

In the beginning of the post, it mentions about the "value of achievement", which has no meaning if the character can be unlocked by using cash. It would have been fine if Vader was either a purchasable character, or 40 hour unlock character, and the reply only included the relevant aspect, but with Vader being both, that post is bound to get flak.
 
Finally some one who has a memory. I believe that MMO's first started dipping their toes into the waters that the players had already tested (via Ebay), by offering name changes, server moves, and other account services for a fee. I remember how ticked off I was the first time that a name change cost something like $5-$20. Since then it has been item, currency, and RNG box sales all the way.

Yes I'd have to guess that the idea probably came from everquest or possibly even diablo. I definitely recall people hacking and cheating in those old games, and there was likely people selling gold for real currency. I think WoW might have been one of the earlier ones to introduce it in game, but I was definitely playing F2P games long before smartphones were around.
 
This makes me kind of glad EA banned my account for no reason. At least now I'm never tempted to buy their games.
 
Eh...I seem to recall some shenanigans with a particularly overpowered IR scope unlock in BF3...

Also, they sold "unlock packs" for real money for those games, to bypass all of the progression grinding.

This is not a new thing for EA, they are just getting worse and worse about it.
The IR scope in BF3 had some bad balancing issues initially giving it an overwhelming advantage, but that was quickly patched. You are correct it as well as any other weapon/mod fit within that category while those issues were present as someone could have bought the unlock pack and have immediate access to the imbalanced and exploitable item.

The unlock packs are exactly what I was explaining. The grind to get said weapons wasn't too terribly bad in most cases (BF3/BF4/BF1 only). As I also mentioned, the unlocks themselves are balanced enough that in many cases the original guns still outclassed them.
Prime Examples of this...
BF3: M16A3 was hands down the best Assault rifle and maybe even the best gun in the game for almost every situation. It was the default weapon in the base game.
BF4: M416 was unlockable in the vanilla game with less than 30 minutes playtime. It still is one of the best weapons in the game.
BF1: Automatico is the fastest killing weapon in the game at close quarters and is unlockable in the vanilla game with less than 30 minutes playtime.

Although I did not like this design, I will give EA a pass on this only because the weapon balance meant that unlocks weren't necessarily better than vanilla game.That's not Pay to Win.

Battlefront II's setup is most definitely a pay to win setup giving immediate and overwhelming advantages to anyone that spends money.
 
I remember when Trip Hawkins was the CEO of EA. "We see further". When you bought a game back then, you usually got something really good. I also liked how they made the game boxes like record albums with stories about the developers.
All developers back then were "indie" developers - Ozark Software (MULE, Seven Cities of Gold, etc), Paul Reiche III (Archon), damn - lots of cool games from the 80's.

I bought a copy of Star Wars Battlefront for the PS4 - but I wasn't a fan of it. Couldn't get into the game at all. That's probably the only EA game I've purchased in the last 8-10 years? Kind of doubtful I'll be buying any of their titles this year.
 
You must be the only non-millennial who is ok with this. The disposable generation has no problem with these tactics but I would think someone from an older generation would prefer to see a return of lasting value. There is a reason why you dont pay by the hour for games presently : Only a few stupid people did it. Now unfortunately the majority of people are willing to be exploited into paying for the same thing over and over again. It's a sickness of this time period.

Ok oldie. Blame the young kids for everything wrong in life.

...Says the generation who raised those young ones that you now complain about, gramps.
 
So maybe some modification like a guarantee of one year for server access, and you can decide if you want to buy it. Do you still watch your VHS tapes? How about that first car you bought? Oh - hey those sneakers whose soles you wore through? Things wear out, servers die.
You're conflating two different things. You're comparing this to the medium, not the unique art or entertainment. No, I don't still watch VHS tapes, but I do still watch movies I haven't seen before from the 80s and 90s and older that I'm interested in. I DO still have copies of music I bought on CD that I ripped and will still listen to. I also read books older than 4 years old. Of course the physical product can wear out and of course servers will shut down. That's not the issue. The issue is artificially handcuffing it so that EVERYTHING dies when the server does, not just official extra features. If companies like EA released an offline or LAN-patch when they shut down the server, then I wouldn't even be writing this, because that would be a sane and fair business practice. But that's not what they do, they kill everything. There's countless games that are no longer supported but still have a strong fan following because they weren't designed to self-destruct like this. Who cares if the physical format becomes obsolete so long as the actual content lives on?

Comparing this to worn out sneakers and a new car is completely disingenous for TWO reasons:

1. You can always buy a new pair of sneakers that function about the same. The same can not be said of media. Each book, game, movie, piece of music is unique and may not have any equivalent. This argument is it doesn't matter that I can't run the original Deus Ex now because there are new FPSs available. Amazing foresight.

2. Let's use your example and say it was like a new car, even though it's not. If I PRESERVED the car and maintained it, it could potentially run as well today as it did when I first bought. This would be like if the new car was GUARANTEED to fall apart and be undriveable after 4 years no matter how good care you take of it, and you couldn't purchase a model that DIDN'T.

BB Gun said:
I don't see an issue other than a waaaambulance.
Either you literally don't care about anything older than 4 years or you're being obtuse. That, or it will have to kill something you actually care about before you learn things the hard way that this is an actual problem.

BB Gun said:
If you don't like it, don' t buy it and the perceived problem corrects itself. If a majority don't see the issue as many here do, then, well, that's the market, and it sucks to be you. Kind of like it sucks to be anyone who wants a DeLorean...
Yeah, that obviously doesn't work. The majority don't see the problem upfront, the only see it years after the fact and by then it's too late. Sure, it sucks to be me, until it sucks for ANYONE who cares about games. I actually don't care about Battlefront 2 specifically, but EA has killed games I DID care about and the situation's getting worse. By making this an industry standard, everyone loses. It all comes around eventually, it's just a matter of time it until it affects something you care about, again, unless you literally never play anything older than 4 years and never replay anything you enjoyed in the past. If so, then I guess you're the ideal consumer for them.

BB Gun said:
Note, I did say that shit single player campaigns designed only to lure you into the microtransaction multiplayer is bullshit. I also said money coming in not being used to further develop the game or new games is shitty business practice. But the microtransaction model itself, if well done, shouldn't be an issue for most people, as those who are willing to pay will pay, and those who are not, will either not pay (if its vanity items only) or not play (if its pay to win - which is shit). From the descriptions here of the lootbox model of Battlefront2, it sounds like a shit system and should die a fiery death. But the microtransactional idea in and of itself is not inherently bad. There are, however, very shitty implementations of it.
That's a separate issue. If a game is too money grabby, you can either not play it or ignore that aspect of it. It may make the game worse, but it's YOUR CALL if you still want to play it or not. If a game is on a central server and shut down, then you have NO SAY whatsoever if you want to continue playing the game even though you paid the company money for it. Again, this shit should be illegal, though I agree, putting in bold test that the game will be shut down after 4 years on the front would be a good first step.
 
Former EA CEO Jon Riccitiello: "Taking advantage of people already being invested in a game they paid money for to get more money out of them isn't gouging."
 
Former EA CEO Jon Riccitiello: "Taking advantage of people already being invested in a game they paid money for to get more money out of them isn't gouging."

I think he's also the guy that was proud to say, on stage at E3, that games are served up in pieces now days.
 
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