15 minutes ago, Gallanteer said:

And yet they do care. If they didn't they wouldn't constantly get feedback and patch the games accordingly.

I go back to the media frenzy over Battlefield 4 and how unplayable people claimed it was. Yet it like make other games from them and other companies was well supported.

Still, it's your opinion and is your perception of the company.

I've been playing video games since 1980 and all I've seen is an incredible improvement over the years in technology and a vastly improved industry that responds almost in rwal time to any issues. I have also seen a more impatient and unforgiving fan base emerge. Mistakes still happen, it is the human condition. Their willingness to accept the issues abd try to fix them is a credit.

Now, if only FFG could treat us the same way....

But what is the reason for caring? It seems dubious that empathy would be the cause. They are not making changes because their target audience prefers the game to take another direction. They are changing the game because it is giving them a bad PR issue, which they do not want to escalate into a crisis, although it probably won't develop into a crisis at this point. The measures that they are adopting now is merely damage control.

They are doing the changes for the wrong reasons: they should not have implemented a business model from the mobil game market in the first place for a triple A priced game.

The response from the player base is not because of a "bad product" in which bugs, graphics or some other game mechanic is not living up to user expectations. No Man's Sky was a failure due to its failture to deliver on game mechanics. The issue with BF2 is the business model that it relies on.

But they are not alone in this. I am not solely "hating" on EA for doing this - I am enraged by any company who believes that this is a respectable way of doing business.

On a side note, thank you for the civility and I know that in the end, it is a matter of opinion. My presence in this debate is perhaps more to just indicate my discontent with the direction that the gaming industry has taken rather than influence people's opinion of EA.

25 minutes ago, Marinealver said:

Well consumers have power as long as we still have consumer driven markets in a standard capitalist society. Thing is we have been moving away from a capitalist society and closer to a consumer capitalist society which despite its name is not driven by consumers.

Consumer Capitalist society is where the consumers are manipulated into artificially creating the demand based on arbitrary value of products to push markets to continuing to support an certain industry. The end goal is to change the market from where the industry supports the consumers into where the consumers support the industry. This can be done through a variety of tactics from regulations that favor oligarchs and even require citizens to purchase said services and products such as utilities, to invasive marketing practices in which data can be gathered on consumers and then outreach is tailored to where the consumers are driven to make purchases of goods or services. Thus the end result is where consumers which were once the customer now become a commodity, another thing that can be bought or sold on any market as if it were another trade good like livestock.

So what is the driving force in a Consumer Capitalist society if it is not the customers. Well it then becomes the investors as they control the flow of money and the trade. It wasn't the fact that there was a backlash that got EA to rethink their methods, but thanks to the bad publicity their stock fell as investors sold and even Disney which holds the money for the Star Wars franchise showed concerns. So even though it was consumer backlash that was the catalyst, it was investors pulling out of the market that cause the reaction from EA.

As long as they do respond and improve their games, does it really matter what triggered it?

And had the end users not raised so many issues, would the share price have dropped anyway? Doubtful.

DICE (not necessarily EA) tried to go down the loot box root ala Overwatch and CS-GO but it hasn't worked. They are now responding and trying to fix it rather than ignoring it. Does it really matter what triggered it?

48 minutes ago, Gallanteer said:

Does it really matter what triggered it?

In a way, yes. Not for a specific situation, but for where that means we are. If the customers were merely a catalyst and the investors were the reason, then we have reached (as I believe we have) the consumer capitalist society, which bodes ill for the consumer. If the consumer's triggered it and the reason was their anger, then we are not yet there, and that means both that there is still time to prevent its arrival and that the industry is making games for us, rather than orienting towards games made for profit.

Spoiler Alert!

I just saw Jusice League and realize one thing.

Bruce Wayne got the Justice League and had to unlock his teammates one by one paying microtransactions. To get superman he spent 2 hours and a whole bank's market price

1 hour ago, Hawkwing said:

But what is the reason for caring? It seems dubious that empathy would be the cause. They are not making changes because their target audience prefers the game to take another direction. They are changing the game because it is giving them a bad PR issue, which they do not want to escalate into a crisis, although it probably won't develop into a crisis at this point. The measures that they are adopting now is merely damage control.

They are doing the changes for the wrong reasons: they should not have implemented a business model from the mobil game market in the first place for a triple A priced game.

The response from the player base is not because of a "bad product" in which bugs, graphics or some other game mechanic is not living up to user expectations. No Man's Sky was a failure due to its failture to deliver on game mechanics. The issue with BF2 is the business model that it relies on.

But they are not alone in this. I am not solely "hating" on EA for doing this - I am enraged by any company who believes that this is a respectable way of doing business.

On a side note, thank you for the civility and I know that in the end, it is a matter of opinion. My presence in this debate is perhaps more to just indicate my discontent with the direction that the gaming industry has taken rather than influence people's opinion of EA.

Man all of this reminds me of Android Netrunner.

Bought it yesterday.... really enjoying it so far

Seems a lot better than the first one. Campaign is great so far!!

I detest micro transactions and have long since boycotted anything that has them and specifically EA games. Their games are mostly crap these days so not missing much. As for those saying its a natural result from games becoming more expensive to make, absolute bull. There are still very expensive triple A games being made that don't include microtransactions, a good example was Witcher 3 which had a massive budget (nearly 80 million euro) and no microtransaction bull. It was also highly profitable.

The thing is, without microtransactions they actually need to make a good game to do well financially. Which is risky. The current method for moneymaking for the corporate gaming suits, is invest heavily in marketing hype which often starts a year, sometimes even 2 years before the game is actually launched. People are presented with this amazing view of the to-be released game, their fantasy does the rest, and they preorder en-masse without even knowing what they are really buying. This is then supplemented with microtransactions that apparently people spend obscene amounts of money on. Because for some it makes totally sense to pay more for a single item than for the entire AAA game itself.

This combination takes away a large part of the risk, even if the game isn't very good/riddled with bugs whatever they can still make a tidy profit, and especially if their game takes place within an established franchise people are passionate about. I remember when playing Star Trek Online years back, they had a system of gambling lootboxes with random loot that you could buy to get specific star trek ships, but the odds were really low and the ships were not available anywhere else. Several persons in my guild spend obscene amounts of money on them to get their 'dream ships': several would spend well north of a hundred dollars on lootboxes every single month to collect every ship. One guy in particularly I remember had spend a typical month salary to get his super rare dominion ship (well over a thousand dollars). The game itself was mediocre, with very little investment being made in terms of extra content, it was mostly being milked. Disgusting.

2 hours ago, Lord Tareq said:

Several persons in my guild spend obscene amounts of money on them to get their 'dream ships': several would spend well north of a hundred dollars on lootboxes every single month to collect every ship. One guy in particularly I remember had spend a typical month salary to get his super rare dominion ship (well over a thousand dollars). The game itself was mediocre, with very little investment being made in terms of extra content, it was mostly being milked. Disgusting.

While this is a completely valid point, this guy isn't entirely innocent. I suspect that he was simply financially illiterate, impulsive and had an addictive personality. If he hadn't given it to this game, he would have spent it on any one of the addictions that the modern world makes easy for us, from single malt whisky to asian hookers.

17 hours ago, redxavier said:

I'm a bit disappointed to see all the misinformation from reddit find its way here, but I suppose it can't be helped with so many youtube channels and media cashing in on the hysteria for clicks.

If you would like to hear from people who are actually playing the game, there's a nice secondary subreddit set up here https://www.reddit.com/r/BattlefrontTWO/ where you can see discussions about the game.

And what "misinformation" would that be?

3 hours ago, Warlord Zepnick said:

And what "misinformation" would that be?

I'm trying to be balanced here... but I'll take a stab at it.

The common misconceptions that they were selling characters? Alot of people think Darth Vader came in a lock box or something. Or that buying boxes was an effective way to get credits. Or that it still takes 40 hours to unlock Darth Vader.

I'm not saying that EA is great or the game is perfect... but there really was alot of overreactions and exaggerated claims with regards to the game. I saw a video where some dude playing Boba Fett was like "Watch I'm going to Pay to Win!" and he plays without any upgrades... deliberately misses most of his shots, and only gets one kill. Then he cuts forward to where he's got lots of upgrades and now suddenly he doesn't miss any shots, and he actually decided to start using his special abilities... and gets kills. That sort of thing really annoys me because it doesn't represent the problem.

A maxed out damage buff is only a 10% increase to damage. And considering that even casual players can get that same buff and level it up with crafting parts, a PAYING player may only be doing 4-5% more damage per shot than someone who's never paid. I don't even think that small of an increase makes a meaningful difference to be honest. In either case, you only need to have the enemy in your crosshairs for like 1 good second to kill them. If I shoot your for 340 damage, or 360 damage... and your health is only 250.... did that bonus even matter?

17 hours ago, Crabbok said:

I'm trying to be balanced here... but I'll take a stab at it.

The common misconceptions that they were selling characters? Alot of people think Darth Vader came in a lock box or something. Or that buying boxes was an effective way to get credits. Or that it still takes 40 hours to unlock Darth Vader.

I'm not saying that EA is great or the game is perfect... but there really was alot of overreactions and exaggerated claims with regards to the game. I saw a video where some dude playing Boba Fett was like "Watch I'm going to Pay to Win!" and he plays without any upgrades... deliberately misses most of his shots, and only gets one kill. Then he cuts forward to where he's got lots of upgrades and now suddenly he doesn't miss any shots, and he actually decided to start using his special abilities... and gets kills. That sort of thing really annoys me because it doesn't represent the problem.

A maxed out damage buff is only a 10% increase to damage. And considering that even casual players can get that same buff and level it up with crafting parts, a PAYING player may only be doing 4-5% more damage per shot than someone who's never paid. I don't even think that small of an increase makes a meaningful difference to be honest. In either case, you only need to have the enemy in your crosshairs for like 1 good second to kill them. If I shoot your for 340 damage, or 360 damage... and your health is only 250.... did that bonus even matter?

I can't speak to the misinformation, and I haven't see the Boba video-- so I'll take your word for it.

Whatever misinformation is/was out there though, there is plenty of reliable information that shows just how egregious the "progression" system is in this game.

While some Star Cards may have a minimal impact, there are others such as Hero range increase that certainly make the game P2W. Ex: the deluxe trooper starter pack.

The front end of the game's "progression" system is sped up with milestones to get you hooked-- and then the grind becomes real for what I hear.

So at the end of the day whatever misinformation was out there had a minimal impact because this game is truly a disgrace.

I really like the campaign and the dialogues.

I admit that my research was very bad, the main reason I bought the game was to single play the starfighters...its not in there, making me one sad wanna-be pilot thinking back fondly of x-wing and tie fighter.

I hope they deliver that opportunity later on, it will decide my personal judgement of this game and if I paid too much for what I enjoy. I am def no expert in all this progression stuff, and for all the justified criticism, I am just not in this arcade and mp thing. Feeling bad for the many disappointed, though.

There's a plan to bring more options to arcade at some point; they're still working on it. Offline Starfighter Assault is my number one want. But I'm really enjoying the mp mode in the meantime. And arcade is great fun too, with the custom options.

So having been playing all modes over the weekend I have to say the game is fun and I enjoy to a certain extent but star cards are really poorly thought out. Compared to Titanfall 2 progression and upgrades are really poorly handled. Crafting parts and credits are doled out in small packages considering the cost of everything. I still need to earn another 22,000 credits to unlock all the characters and I still have yet to buy a crate/loot box. I do understand that making AAA games cost more and tbh I would prefer to pay $10 more for a complete game with the option to buy cosmetic upgrades ala Overwatch, Titanfall 2 or Destiny.

My recommendation to improve Battlefront would be

1) To do away with all stat based enhancements altogether then just give different load out options for the different classes that by picking a weapon/ grenade type boost that should be broadly balanced. These should be given automatically with level increases and the option to buy with game currency that you earn through playing.

2) All Characters should just be unlocked not stuck behind a wall with a really high cost

Having said that I'm a sucker and will still play it going forward.

i'm a little pissed i spent my first 15k credits to unlock Vader, but i'm not good enough to actually get enough battle points to use him so i can only use him in the Hero game mode where i get swarmed by 3 other heroes all the time, having known this before hand i would have saved my credits.

2 minutes ago, Darth evil said:

i'm a little pissed i spent my first 15k credits to unlock Vader, but i'm not good enough to actually get enough battle points to use him so i can only use him in the Hero game mode where i get swarmed by 3 other heroes all the time, having known this before hand i would have saved my credits.

This!

Yeah I have bought Luke Vader and Palp but only used Luke twice in Galactic Assault. The one time I played heroes and villains I could not be Luke

I'm enjoying it greatly, especially the starfighter battles. If anyone wants a PC buddy to play with let me know.

38 minutes ago, Darth evil said:

i'm a little pissed i spent my first 15k credits to unlock Vader, but i'm not good enough to actually get enough battle points to use him so i can only use him in the Hero game mode where i get swarmed by 3 other heroes all the time, having known this before hand i would have saved my credits.

This is why I don't think I'll unlock most of the characters until much later. I'm not very good. Having them is not going to help me out. I'd rather have a fully upgraded heavy that in can use every game.