Star Wars: Battlefront 2 has drawn the ire of the gaming community after it emerged that players had to spend a ton of in-game currency to unlock prominent heroes and villains.
Criticism was levelled against the publisher, with many feeling that after spending plenty of cash on the game already, the cost of unlocking characters shouldn’t have been pegged so high.
No ad to show here.
EA initially responded on reddit, saying it wanted gamers to have a “sense of pride and accomplishment” when they did unlock the characters. But gamers weren’t biting at all. In fact, the comment became the most-downvoted one in reddit history, currently sitting at roughly minus 600 000 karma.
It didn’t help matters when a Battlefront 2 community manager called fans “armchair developers” in a since-deleted tweet.
In fact, one so-called armchair developer created a bot of sorts to “play” the game in order to accrue in-game credits.
“The way this would work is you would enter a match, start running this program in the background, and then go do other things while you rack up credits. The bot twitches your mouse every second to fool the servers into thinking your player is active when they’re actually not,” the reddit user and program developer said, noting that he hadn’t actually tested it with the game though.
EA reduces unlock requirements
Nevertheless, the negative press has seen EA issue a blog post to announce that they would be drastically reducing the unlock requirements.
“So, we’re reducing the amount of credits needed to unlock the top heroes by 75%,” the company noted.
It’s great to see a developer respond to widespread criticism and implement changes, even if they haven’t changed the mobile-inspired lootbox system. But what wasn’t great to see was the variety of death threats against EA and employees — disgusting stuff.
