Cancelled my discounted preorder today. Gotta put money where the mouth is. It's a matter of principle. Even if they reduce the amount prior to release, they can continue to slowly increase the magnitude for this kind of exploitation after normalizing it by starting small.

There are so many things to say about this game's monetization and loot boxes system. But since most of that stuff is already known by most people, I will just mention something that might not be very well known.

The fact that during the game's review event to which many of the important press sites were invited to and will most likely base most or all of their reviews on, the credits needed to unlock certain characters were 6 times lower and therefore faster - 10.000 at most, while in the final game these same characters were bumped to 60.000, requirring roughly around 40 hours to unlock just a single character in te final game.

Perhaps the developers analysed the review event and thought that press reviewers were unlocking characters too fast during the event... that's a really fucking big "perhaps", but if one is to be optimistic about it, there's that.

On the more cynic/pessimistic - and I would even say realistic - side, the developers or the executives at EA knew exactly what they were doing: they intentionally gave reviewers a version that they knew was much more easy and fast to unlock important content than the final game would actually have.

This is hardly the first, second, or third case in which reviewers receive review game codes with certain "advantages" or "benefits" to encourage a more positive review with a higher score that are different than the actual final version of the same game, admitedly this mostly happens with small to mid size companies whose game's success or failure is the difference between a company being able to continue existing or shutting down. It's not justifiable - it never is, but it's understandanble to a certain degree why they choose to do it.

But EA isn't just a small to mid size level company, it's one of the biggest companies in the games industry with thousands of employees, this type of "bait-and-switch" tactic is never acceptable, but when it's done by a company of the size and influence as EA, it's truly troubling.

I really hope it was just an overbalancing mistake, because while EA may not be a good company when it comes to respecting customers' rights, this would be a new low for them - assuming they never did this before - and they would start deserving the title: "Worst Company in America" that they won so many times before.

For those interested, Star Wars: Battlefront 2's Iden Versio, interpreted by actress Janina Gavankar, herself said that the only metrics big companies like EA look and take into consideration are those from sales. This was during one of the Kinda Funny Games Daily podcast a little over a week ago, in which she was a co-host with Greg Miller (link below).

Star Wars' Janina Gavankar Hosts - Kinda Funny Games Daily 11.03.17
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9hicICOZ0c

In the same podcast she reveals that she has talked with a lot of industry people and reaffirms many times, the only metrics big companies like EA truly listen to is sales, not the internet or how vocal people are. So listen to someone that actually is in the industry and know what she's talking about - and like she herself said in the podcast:

"Vote with your wallet, that's the only way consumers can shape the way the games industry is going forward."

I’ll be voting with my wallet as well. Canceled my pre order today from amazon. It sucks because the game looked very fun but the more I read the more I fear for how much this trend could really turn into a pervasive cancer in the industry. I was very excited to play this at first but now I’ll just play something else as this new level of greed is just too much.

People could also vote with their wallet by buying the game if they really want it, but then not buying any of the post-launch monetization crap.

the problem is - there already enough wallets voted for microtransactions. EA just still "EA" u know...

btw buying disc from re-sellers, best thing in this situation

Gotta love Janina Gavankar. Even though she's starring in this game, she said to vote with your wallet. It shows she's a gamer first. Now having said that, I'm totally part of the problem, because my copy should be delivered by 10am this morning. My bad.

It looks impressive, given the framerate. I mean games like AC Origins and Horizon Frozen Wilds look more impressive to me, but this game has double the framerate, so great achievement technically. The rain in that first video though, is very poor.

shit game.

0:47 "Del: This storm is unnatural. I've never seen anything like it. The locals must be terrified"

Completely disgusted by the new norm in the industry. Will make it easier to choose what to care about. Let them suck the sleep's wallets dry until we get heads on spikes.

Fuck DICE & Fuck EA

I just read that while they cut Luke and Vader down by 75% they also cut the rewards down by 75% so it’ll still take really long to get them

I'm not real familiar with the contraversy here on loot boxes and pay to win. Isn't this similar to other games like BF4 where you can pay money for battlepacks, which are basically loot boxes? I've never really had a problem with that.

Also I think only the SP credits have been lowered because they only wanted one character to be unlockable via SP. I'm ok with that as well since I'll be playing more MP over the life of the game Maybe I don't know the whole story.

The problem is they added a ridiculously long grind to temp players to buy loot crates so they can upgrade to better weapons and better abilities a lot faster. So it’s pay to win. Even then the money required to upgrade is a ridiculous amount

Congrats to those who cancelled and voted to keep their hard earned cash. Its about time the gaming community showed these greedy studios like EA we have had enough of exploitation and greed within gaming franchises.

That’s only the credits reward for completing the SP campaign.. Rewards for everything else remained the same afaik..

Been reading and hearing these same old stories of “resistance” for the last 10-15 years now in the gaming community.. Did it change anything? Not really.. Maybe the still relative new “social” media backlash helps a bit in our struggle against the commercialization of our gaming hobby.. Not seen EA be so active in changing one of their games because of critism ever yet..

Well at least EAs stock went down some. At least this whole backlash has cost them some level of public shame and loss of faith from share holders

Except this exact game where they reduced all hero purchases by 75% due to consumer backlash...shout loud enough and they listen. If they see a threat to their bottom line they'll listen. The issue is that for every person willing to boycot this shitty company, theres 100 more willing to support them.