Devs promise to change Battlefront II until players are happy
-Ars Technica article title
It is the rare headline that gets me to laugh out loud, but this one managed it.
EA’s Star Wars: Battlefront II woes around lockboxes and pay to win and the game in general continue unabated. I’m not keen on EA when they’re having a good day… since a “good day” at EA usually means buying a studio they’ll close down sooner or later or screwing up a long treasured franchise… so this has been amusing to watch from the sidelines.
Fun created here… on an Orca graveyard!
Starting with what seemed to be like a “land war in Asia” grade mistake where players could unlock things either by playing or paying using the same currency, allowing players to immediately calculate an hours/money comparison, made more grievous by having it in a PvP shooter. So the rage online was epic and the EA response on Reddit became the most down-voted item ever. Call Guinness, we have another video game record for the books!
EA stuck to their guns… for a bit, then suddenly dropped the price of unlocks by a whopping 75% while trying to put all of this in back in the bottle by promising… well… you can see the quote above. My immediate reaction on Twitter was:
I guess the devs ought to be familiar with Hell already, working for EA as they do.
At this point EA can only hope to fix enough so that the review scores from the big sites… which are all on hold right now, so the current Meta Critic score of 79 is based on four sites, three of which I would call “minor” and a fourth I haven’t heard of… won’t tank. But good luck making any of the vocal members of their audience happy at this point. On that front the pooch has already been well and truly screwed. Anything short of removing lockboxes completely… and EA won’t ever do that… will fail to meet their stated goal.
Anyway, we shall see if anything is learned here.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Well, the PS4 reviews are up and user score is 0.9. Zero point nine. With almost 3000 reviews. I haven’t seen one that low.
The 29 critics still gave it a 75. That’s a bit of a range.
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According to Massively the Belgian Gambling Commission is now interested in lockboxes and if you click through to the source of that report you’ll find that the Netherlands has joined in too.
There’ll be tears before bedtime.
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@Isey – I habitually only look at the PC reviews because I don’t own a current console. I think they’ve finally stopped making new games for the PS3.
@Bhagpuss – Dammit, I knew if people got too loud about this sort of thing some government somewhere would poke their nose in. We’ll likely be the worse for it, no doubt.
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If gamers truly want these disgusting business practices to change then they need to stop buying lootbox games and stop supporting EA. Jimquisition, Worth A Buy, ACG, and numerous other websites have made it quite clear about the situation with BF2 and have highlighted the token poorly made single player campaign and the lacklustre multiplayer in the game.
EA only continues with these poor business practices because lemming gamers continue to buy into this crap. And if a person is dumb enough to continue spending money on lootboxes don’t complain when the entire industry churns out lootbox simulators by the dozen.
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You know when this whole thing is getting covered by NPR it has hit some sort of critical mass.
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Well, the put microtransactions on hold. I’m shocked.
https://www.ea.com/games/starwars/battlefront/battlefront-2/news/pre-launch-update?utm_campaign=swbf2_hd_na_ic_soco_twt_swbfii-prelaunchblog-tw&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&cid=42029&ts=1510882058445
I mean, temporarily but damn, that’s a backpedal.
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Well they just announced they are removing micro transactions from bf2 https://kotaku.com/ea-temporarily-removes-microtransactions-from-star-wars-1820528445
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@ Random Poster – Even the link you have there says “temporarily” in the URL. They might just be cynically trying to salvage reviews. Meta Critic only counts the first score sites post. If they revise later nobody cares.
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“We’ll likely be the worse for it, no doubt.”
Nope, nuke it all. Regulate the shit out of all of it. Ban trading card games for all I care, I don’t play any of them because it was always obviously pay to win garbage for people I consider stupid. Who would play basketball with someone who bought a $10000 basketball that goes right into the basket every time they shoot it? What if you were the one with that magic basketball, whats the point of the game? I had never even considered a government getting involved, but the prospect of it tickles me greatly. That shit has now overrun my hobby of 35 years and I’d like it out, and I’d most certainly be better for it. That said I’m pretty sure the video game industry will come together and pay off whoever needs to be paid off to keep the status quo.
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