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Star Wars Battlefront 2 - now with lootbox drama

Nathir

Liturgist
Joined
Aug 3, 2017
Messages
1,090
Wow, nice explanation Mengsk. How kind of them. I Bought the game now, love EA.
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
Challenges? You mean the bit where the pay2win folks would blow you away in two nanoseconds because you don't have all the shiny stuff they bought? You do realise that that money making gambit has been around in Flash MMO games since the year dot? You deliberately pit player vs player and set out some items that give advantages and stand back and watch the escalating arms race while raking in the cash.
Capture(1).PNG


 

Cael

Arcane
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,287
Since that patent is by Activision, I presume EA is going to get sued to oblivion?
 

Daedalos

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
5,559
Location
Denmark
They only cut the rewards in the campaign you fucking moron. Research your shit before you mouth off. Credit gain in matches, challenges, etc. is EXCACTLY the same as before.
They reduced campaign reward because they reduced the hero prices. this was always intentional.

Challenges? You mean the bit where the pay2win folks would blow you away in two nanoseconds because you don't have all the shiny stuff they bought? You do realise that that money making gambit has been around in Flash MMO games since the year dot? You deliberately pit player vs player and set out some items that give advantages and stand back and watch the escalating arms race while raking in the cash.

Also, it was NOT intentional that they reduce the prices. That came about because of the backlash. So, you are basically telling me that it was EA's intention to make it even WORSE than what they have already told the players that already led to the outright revolt? I am sure the players would LOVE to hear that.

Challenges are reward based "quests" if you will, give you credits, crates and all sorts of shit... easy to unlock alot of stuff for free for your characters.

No, I meant the intention of the campaign reward was to buy 1 specific hero (IDEN) which cost exactly 20.000. Now Iden cost 5000, so they reduced campaign reward to match that.. understand now?
 

Cael

Arcane
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,287
Challenges are reward based "quests" if you will, give you credits, crates and all sorts of shit... easy to unlock alot of stuff for free for your characters.

No, I meant the intention of the campaign reward was to buy 1 specific hero (IDEN) which cost exactly 20.000. Now Iden cost 5000, so they reduced campaign reward to match that.. understand now?

Oh, I understand it. I even commented on it before. The whole reason for reducing the cost of the heroes was because it took too long to get. Now, they reduced the reward to match, the time to hero is still the same.

Now, whether the challenges have a significant impact on this would depend on the ratio of challenges vs campaign rewards. Given EA's recent actions (removing refund, etc.) and historical buffoonery, I am beginning to wonder if the challenges rate is going to be tampered with from what it was originally.
 

Durandal

Arcane
Joined
May 13, 2015
Messages
2,117
Location
New Eden
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Unlocking Everything in Battlefront II Requires 4,528 hours or $2100

I can't do anything but laugh. This is so hilarious yet so sad all at the same time. Holy shit EA. Really?
There is a grand total of 324 cards. Upgrading these will require a total of 155,520 crafting parts. This requires opening a grand total of 3,111 loot crates which will require 4,528 hours of gameplay.
The 600 credits received from a hero crate is worth 27% the cost of a hero crate. This is equivalent to 30 crystals. To account for this, I reduced the cost of a hero crate from 110 crystals to 80 crystals. 12,000 crystals can be bought for $100.

Opening the required 3,111 loot crates requires 248,880 crystals. If you only purchase $100 crystal packs, this will cost $2,100.
Link to the site of the guy who calculated all the math: http://www.swtorstrategies.com/2017...-or-2100-to-unlock-all-base-game-content.html

Lock and fine me $2100 worth of SWBF2 credits if old.
Unfortunately source is down atm
 

Daedalos

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
5,559
Location
Denmark
Challenges are reward based "quests" if you will, give you credits, crates and all sorts of shit... easy to unlock alot of stuff for free for your characters.

No, I meant the intention of the campaign reward was to buy 1 specific hero (IDEN) which cost exactly 20.000. Now Iden cost 5000, so they reduced campaign reward to match that.. understand now?

Oh, I understand it. I even commented on it before. The whole reason for reducing the cost of the heroes was because it took too long to get. Now, they reduced the reward to match, the time to hero is still the same.

Now, whether the challenges have a significant impact on this would depend on the ratio of challenges vs campaign rewards. Given EA's recent actions (removing refund, etc.) and historical buffoonery, I am beginning to wonder if the challenges rate is going to be tampered with from what it was originally.

What are you talking about?

Time to hero unlock is NOT the same. How could it be? Credits earned through playing, challenges etc. is exactly the same as before the hero reduction in price. Hence, the time to unlock heroes is drastically reduced.
I already unlocked several of the locked heroes with just playing casually. Its not hard.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Hey, newsflash for you guise, for EA, you aren't much different from those dogs used by behaviorists on experiments, you press the button and shinny cool stuff happens, getting you addicted, well, it seems to be the case and most people aren't much better than dogs because Ubisoft just announced that half of their revenue come from micro transactions and loot crates. Goody, dog, take this biscuit! Good boy!
 

DragoFireheart

all caps, rainbow colors, SOMETHING.
Joined
Jun 16, 2007
Messages
23,731
hahahahahaha

I have this funny feeling

EA will still make massive profits

causals are retarded

the average gamer is a little bitch

ITZ will not come, it has already came and this is the new normal and it is called EA

ITZ was so deadly and powerful not even the RPG Codex saw it. but it is here now

this micro-transaction pay-to-win will now fully infect all future games. not just video games, EVERY kind of game. Even games where it doesn't make sense it will infect like Monopoly board games. It's only a matter of time before even the likes of Nintendo gives into the ITZ

welcome to video game Hell, brought to you by stupid casuals
 

Cool name

Arcane
Joined
Oct 14, 2012
Messages
2,147
market it and hype it up as the first empire campaign since original bf2 and tie fighter... have main character defect in one of the first few missions

pull this lootbox shit, respond to crowd butthurt in stupid ways.

it's like EA+DICE actively tried to fuck up as much as possible. Doesn't matter of course, gamers are retards who don't seem to comprehend the idea of simply not buying something. hobby attracts ppl with mental+emotional development of small children


lol does this guy not realize that the "good guy devs are responsible for all good aspects of a game and evil greedy publishers are responsible for all the bad" myth lost any shred of credibility it may have had, years ago?

I'd thought that myth was becoming less popular, Kickstarter at least should've been the final nail in the coffin for it
 

Durandal

Arcane
Joined
May 13, 2015
Messages
2,117
Location
New Eden
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
https://archive.fo/9eniY
The Curious Case Of The 'EA Game Dev' Who Said He Received Death Threats
Jason Schreier
vwoq1yzh2ybeojvqomeg.png


Earlier this week, a man with “Game Dev @EA” in his Twitter profile wrote that he had received death threats from angry Star Wars Battlefront II fans. His story was covered by news outlets like USA Today, the BBC, and Yahoo. Vice wrote an editorial about it, CNBC ran a headline about it, and the tweet was retweeted by hundreds of people. There’s just one lingering question: Does he actually work at Electronic Arts?

With around 5,000 followers on Twitter, BiggSean66 doesn’t have a particularly huge audience or platform, but when he tweeted Monday that he was “up to 7 death threats, and over 1600 individual personal attacks now,” he went viral. Gaming and mainstream outlets picked up his story, writing about how the outrage over Star Wars Battlefront II’s microtransactions led to gamers threatening BiggSean66’s life. Hundreds of developers and journalists also quoted him, sent sympathies, and talked about the incident on Twitter, condemning those who felt the need to sent death threats to BiggSean66.

Yet, after speaking to several current EA employees, cross-referencing his details with Linkedin and Facebook pages, and reaching out to BiggSean66, I’ve become convinced that he does not actually work for EA. In fact, since I sent him several messages yesterday and this morning, he has changed his Twitter profile to remove all mentions of EA.

Left: BiggSean66's profile on November 13. Right: BiggSean66's profile on November 15.
EA says it also has not been able to confirm that BiggSean66 works for the company. This morning, the publisher sent me this statement: “We take threats against our employees very seriously. Our first concern is ensuring safety and support for our people, and since the reports first surfaced we’ve been investigating this internally. At this time, we’re not able to verify this individual’s claims of employment at EA, nor the threats made against him.”

When I first saw BiggSean66’s Twitter account on Monday, I thought something seemed off. His tweets appeared too bizarre and unprofessional to be coming from a real employee, and he would publicly comment on subjects that I couldn’t imagine anyone at EA would ever dare talking about on the record. For example, in response to my story last month about the collapse of Visceral Games, BiggSean66 wrote that the situation was “clearly quite a bit more complex than a simple EA hates SP games”:

After digging into his old tweets, I became even more skeptical. BiggSean66 would often chime into other people’s conversations, telling them he worked for EA and offering his perspective. He tweeted frequently about working at EA, without offering many specifics on what he did or what kind of position he had. Although he was always gregarious and defensive of the company, he had a tendency to speak on behalf of EA in ways that struck me as questionable.

He also had a tendency to get into strange fights with people:

BiggSean66 created his Twitter account in early 2015, and almost immediately, he began claiming that he worked for EA, cultivating relationships with fans and even some employees of the company, like Battlefield community manager Jeff Braddock. Some EA employees have also followed him on Twitter, especially in the wake of his Monday tweets about death threats. But out of 100,000 tweets, BiggSean66 didn’t appear to offer many specifics about his identity or role, except in one tweet, where he posted a photograph of what he said was him and his wife (which we won’t share here).

He would often tweet at people telling them to come say hi to him on EA’s campus, in Redwood Shores, but after searching for several hours, I couldn’t find any cases of him actually meeting or interacting with anyone as an EA representative. Earlier this year, he tweeted frequently about EA’s June event, EA Play, but he then told others on Twitter that he had not been able to attend.

There were some contradictions on his Twitter feed, too. In July 2015, BiggSean66 said that he had started working at EA “a few months ago” and couldn’t get time off yet.

But last week, he said he was about to hit his four-year anniversary, which would indicate that he started in November or December of 2013.

With no luck verifying BiggSean66’s identity on Twitter, I started trying to connect the dots elsewhere. He had a YouTube account and Google profile, which seemed like a good lead. In it, BiggSean66 said he did “Data Entry & Analysis at Electronic Arts”:

This was a start. I spent some time combing Linkedin and Facebook for people named Sean who worked in data entry and analysis at EA Redwood Shores, but only one person fit the bill, and his personal details didn’t match with BiggSean66’s photo or other information I’d found on the Twitter account. Then I found this tweet, in which BiggSean66 said he was a QA analyst:

Again, no luck on Linkedin or Facebook. I considered that his name might not really be Sean, but I still couldn’t find anyone who fit his details or whose picture resembled BiggSean66’s.

Contacting BiggSean66 also proved difficult, but thanks to a clutch assist from the Kotaku Twitter account, I managed to get in touch with him via Twitter DMs. I told him I was working on a story and really needed to talk to him, ideally on the phone. He said Twitter DMs would be best, and that I was welcome to ask him my questions, “as long as it’s off the record.” I said OK, but his request wouldn’t matter much, because after I sent over this question, he stopped responding.

BiggSean66 didn’t respond to any of my follow-up questions, but at some point after receiving them, he changed his Twitter profile, removing all mentions of EA. He has also locked his account. He hasn’t tweeted since Monday.

The debate about the economy of Star Wars Battlefront II has been ugly, and threats against developers, players and anyone else are no trifling thing. (I’ve been there, too.) BiggSean66’s tweet resonated with a lot of people because it feels true. Anger tends to swell in gaming communities. Furious, partisan players do sometimes cross the line and send threats. Game developers often are brow-beaten for design decisions they made, sometimes for decisions over which they had no control. But it’s not often you find a game developer’s death threat go viral—making its way not just to game sites but to large mainstream outlets—only for it to turn out that he might not be a developer after all.

 

HitPepper

Erudite
Joined
Jul 6, 2015
Messages
284
So this blew up in EA's face, and rightly so.

Fortunately, they fixed some of the problems and are workong on others.

The game itself? Fucking amazing. Been playing it nonstop almost. And still real fun.
I got a free trial for the Origin Access thing (which gets you 10 hours of BF2) and yeah, it's really sad that they managed to make a beautiful, fun game which sadly has the lootbox-based progression strapped on. They could have just made lootboxes give you cosmetic stuff and XP/credit buffs, they would have still gotten them whales. Make the cards (some are really powerful) unlockable via leveling like Call of Duty. I don't know. Anything is better than what we got. Here's a few examples
LGbNrFi.jpg
OjfadT6.jpg


And the "did you just get inside a vehicle? Let me fix that for you" card
H0MYOLl.jpg
 

Projas

Information Superhighwayman
Patron
Joined
Aug 5, 2016
Messages
1,202
Location
Best Republic
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
lol does this guy not realize that the "good guy devs are responsible for all good aspects of a game and evil greedy publishers are responsible for all the bad" myth lost any shred of credibility it may have had, years ago?
He writes for Kotaku you realize
 

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