The Guinness Book of World Records has given EA a prestigious award in its annals of history. A sharp-eyed Redditor noticed the award, given to the video game publisher for one of its initial responses to the Star Wars Battlefront II loot crate controversy.
Redditor Amsha posted the following image, taken from the latest version of the book:
The original comment in question is reprinted below:
The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.
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.
On its face, this comment doesn’t deserve to have 667,821 downvotes (the next-most downvoted comment on Reddit, to give this some scale, has just 88,892 downvotes). A little context is in order.
This comment was dropped in a thread where players were expressing unhappiness about the amount of time it was going to take to unlock heroes in Star Wars Battlefront II. Players who had bought the Deluxe Edition of the game were angry that certain core heroes like Darth Vader were going to be locked by default and require a long grind to purchase. Players calculated that it could take up to 40 hours of play to unlock a single hero under EA’s proposed loot crate system.
Battlefront II’s loot crate system was infamously bad. Players earned currency at a snail’s pace and virtually all game advancement was tied to loot crates. The contents of loot crates, however, were entirely random. There was no way to spend time in a specific game mode to unlock features, weapons, or abilities — you might spend 12 hours playing in one mode and earn rewards for a class you didn’t use or a game mode you didn’t play. EA’s defense of this system as “providing heroes with a sense of pride and accomplishment” was seen as a slap in the face to the community and a laughable insult to its intelligence.
They weren’t wrong. EA tried to hold the line on these decisions until Disney executives forced the company to pull the loot crate system just hours before launch. Now, the entire event — and EA’s worst-in-class loot box system — are recorded for posterity.
Hopefully, the executives in question get complementary copies of the tome. They could keep them on their desks as a reminder of what happens when greed and hubris overpower good game design. The reason I’m willing to frame the issue so bluntly is specifically that the entirely randomized nature of the loot crate system EA was poised to implement was obviously terrible to anyone who spent even a few minutes contemplating the question. Making your loot random and tying all loot into a loot crate mechanism is a terrible way to reward players. Most games tie at least some rewards directly to the core gameplay loot because players like to be rewarded for content they are running as opposed to receiving rewards that may have nothing to do with the parts of the game
they enjoy playing.
EA hasn’t stopped trying to argue that its conduct in these events was blameless; the company took substantial heat earlier this year for describing its game mechanisms as ‘Quite ethical surprise mechanics.’ Thus far, neither the public nor legislators investigating whether loot boxes are equivalent to gambling have been willing to buy what the company is selling.
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