Star Wars Battlefront 2 unlocks debate brings rage and death threats

Yesterday we posted about concerns over the Star Wars Battlefront 2 progression system raised by the community. The issue has rolled into Monday with the community going for EA’s jugular following their response at the weekend.

Reddit has unsurprisingly fanned the flames and one particular thread which includes a response from EA has now become the most downvoted comment of all time on Reddit. As of writing it’s currently standing at 51K downvotes.

There has been further repercussion after the subject started to appear on Twitter. EA’s Matt Everett posted a Tweet calling the community “Armchair developers”. The Tweet was subsequently deleted and a follow-up was posted by Mat to clarify.

My tweets earlier had nothing to do with community remarks or topics within or around SWBFII. I made a tweet about a general thing and people claim I am speaking about my games community complaints. #disheartning #Frustrated Sorry to those who think it was about Star Wars.

— Mat Everett (@sledgehammer70) November 12, 2017

I removed those tweets as hordes of angry gamers being told I was speaking about them were upset. I get that, but someone misinterpreted my tweet, I again apologize for that, but it was not my intent. Trust me I am at bat for this community and game/franchise I love.

— Mat Everett (@sledgehammer70) November 12, 2017

The uglier side of the videogaming communities has also surfaced with an EA developer receiving death threats. He posted:

https://twitter.com/BiggSean66/status/930058496216670211

The Star Wars Battlefront 2 progression system is by no means perfect but gamers need to get a grip on reality, death threats are not OK.

Today’s problems stem from the response posted yesterday in a thread detailing how long it would take to unlock heroes. This was roughly calculated at around 40 hours. The response from EA attempted to explain the reasoning behind the progression system.

Our goal involves creating a compelling progression path for all of our players. There’s a lot of content at launch with even more coming via live service, and we’ll continuously adjust our progression mechanics to give players a sense of accomplishment as they explore all of Battlefront 2.

I posted this in another thread, but feel it would be good to post here as well.

Heroes earned through Credits: The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes. We selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we’re looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we’ll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.

Credits Earned: We’re looking at the results daily and will be continuing to tune this to ensure that players feel a meaningful sense of reward for the time they spend with Battlefront 2.

We appreciate the conversation here, and our team is working to make the best choices possible for the game and the players. We will provide more details and updates as we can.

There’s no doubt EA has miscalculated how tolerant their community is over loot boxes and unlocks, and this problem is not going to go away. Star Wars Battlefront 2 releases later this week and EA are going to have to try to calm the storm and maybe even start to “tune” the system ahead of launch.