EA responded to Battlefront 2 unlock estimates, and players weren’t having it

An Electronic Arts representative on Sunday responded to the claim that unlocking one of Battlefront 2’s biggest heroes or villains will take 40 hours of gameplay. It did not go very well.

EA’s community team responded in a thread on the Battlefront subreddit yesterday saying that the time required to unlock Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker was meant “to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.”

In effectively confirming the 40 hour requirement, EA’s reply has a whopping -228,000 points. (That’s downvotes minus upvotes. If there were any.) If this list on the subreddit ListOfComments is correct, EA’s comment is the most downvoted in history, nearly 10 times more than second place (which “literally asked for [downvotes]”). That subreddit’s community is aware, and eye-goggling at the hate thrown EA’s way.

The rest of the EA comment that got so much hate:

As for cost, 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.

We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.

Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can.

Users were not having it.

“People being able to’bypass the ‘accomplishment and sense of pride from unlocking" while you are forced to play as much as a full time job to unlock a single character in the same amount of time it takes some people to get paychecks is ridiculous,” said Scrambles84.

The first reply to EA put it even more concretely:

“Hutt contracts and their rewards were a sense of pride and accomplishment. Various account level races and trooper skins were a sense of accomplishment,” Yuanrang wrote, referencing features of the first Battlefront. “Locking iconic characters behind credit walls that will take dozens of hours to get one is just insane, especially when I am willing to bet you have tons of heroes planned which will be behind similar paywalls?

“You cannot ever attain a sense of pride and accomplishment from that, because most sane people will give up long before this,” they added.

And another user observed: “If I had a credit for every downvote you've gotten I could finally unlock Darth Vader!”

The 40-hour estimate came from this spreadsheet and post in the Battlefront subreddit over the weekend, shortly before Battlefront 2’s 10-hour preview went live on EA Access and Origin Access. To be clear, that estimate was made after playing 21 matches in the Galactic Assault multiplayer mode, and game credits are awarded to superior performance, for reaching milestones, or for completing certain points of Battlefront 2’s single-player campaign. But the analysis found that multiplayer matches awarded, on average, 250 credits per 10 minutes of play. At 60,000 credits for Vader and Skywalker, that comes to about 40 hours of play, and EA’s comment about accomplishment doesn’t appear to dispute that.

In fact, an EA rep gave another response directly to the original post, that said:

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. [...]

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.

That has a -6,557 score, which would be good for ninth place all time.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 launches Nov. 17 for PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One.