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Yesterday, EA was having a bit of a PR nightmare. It started off with early Battlefront II players having an axe to grind over the game's microtransaction and progression systems, and ended with EA having the most downvoted comment in Reddit history. The backlash was incredibly strong and it has forced EA to respond, starting off with a 75 percent reduction in the number of credits it costs to unlock a hero character.
In a post on EA's website titled ‘change will be a constant in Star Wars Battlefront II', the company said: “Making games great comes from regular tuning. As one example, today we’re making a substantial change based on what we’ve seen during the Play First trial. There’s been a lot of discussion around the amount of in-game credits (and time) it takes to unlock some of our heroes, especially Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Unlocking a hero is a great accomplishment in the game, something we want players to have fun earning. We used data from the beta to help set those levels, but it’s clear that more changes were needed.”
Going forward, hero characters will have their costs reduced by 75 percent. This means Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader will now cost just 15,000 credits each, instead of 60,000. Emperor Palpatine, Chewbacca and Leia Organa will cost 10,000 credits while Iden will cost 5000.
The change should be live in the game already. Later this week, EA/DICE will also be braving the lands of Reddit once again, with an AMA planned for Wednesday.
KitGuru Says: I still don't understand why anyone would have thought that a 40-hour grind was a fair trade to unlock a character. Still, with these changes in place, that issue is a thing of the past and will hopefully result in a better game.
Do you know the most important thing missing from that announcement by EA? The word “sorry”. They clearly still feel justified in what they originally did, by having a pay-to-win game and treating customers as nothing more than ATM’s on the other side of a screen.
I’m not going to buy a single EA game until they start treating customers with some respect. Their business plan is clearly to rinse gamers of as much money as possible.
Yeah I can safely say I will not be buying another EA game ever. I didn’t buy this one, and I won’t consider any more from here on out. I’m completely sincere too. Enough is enough. The landscape needs to be changed by the consumer, not the otherway around.
They’ve forced so many awesome games developers up against the ropes and shut them down when they tried to fight back over the years. They are literally like a cancer of the Video Games Industry with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. They buy out burgeoning games developers, or flash a large wad of cash at them, then once they’re in the fold, they completely hijack the games development process by constraining the timeframes involved, and coerce the vision of the developer to adopt their money-making antics for maximum revenue without a second thought for the IP. Seriously F”k Electronic Arts and the horse they rode in on.
folks should really step up and just make a statment at EA next big hit “we are not buying it” and then show them how a company who treat costumers like shi.t gona end up after that all the companys will stop this bullshit jewish style of business they would still try it again after a 5-10 years but for that long people would get $=worth
You are too late to realize that EA = $-grab. I stopped buying their games since Battlefield 3 (which bytheway they gave out for free). I did not buy BF4 and the sequels to it. I saw them all as being the “minimum effort to earn my cash”, and that’s not worth a buy. I do not care what you are going to tell me about BF1 or any other game you bought from them, which you enjoyed for the first hour or so, because I expect them to deliver a Ghost-Recon WL scale of SP and a Star Citizen (as it is now in 2.6.3) scale of MP (i.e., a whole Solar system) for a Battlefront game or a Arma 3 – scale of Battlefield game – Battlefield 3 was a screw up and died out. Until they do not deliver something BETTER than the older Star Wars games, or something that’s at LEAST as good as Freelancer (2003 game), im not buying from them.