Someone made a post on reddit complaining about how they paid $80 (which is roughly the price of an AAA game these days) to buy Star Wars Battlefront II, only to find out that Darth Vader is locked behind a 40-hour grind, or a paywall. In an attempt to address this, the EA community team responded with this comment, which is currently the most downvoted comment on reddit, sitting at -675000 downvotes:
Here it is in image form, in case the above text breaks (note: the fact that there's no asterisk next to the part saying how old it is means that this comment hasn't been edited outside of the one minute window after posting where you can ninja edit a comment):
The downvotes reflect the fact that this was an incredibly unpopular decision in the /r/StarWarsBattlefront community, and a bunch of other people on reddit seem to have jumped on the bandwagon. As I mentioned when I made the post about people who had never played Dota 2 in their lives suddenly leaving bad reviews on Dota 2 as their way of complaining about the possibility that Half Life 3 will never be released, I don't think it's right for someone to give a review about a game they've never played. I haven't played Star Wars Battlefront (any of them), so I'll refrain from commenting about that.
What I want to write about is what people are up in arms about: the fact that one of the most popular characters is behind a grind or a paywall.
The gaming community tends to accept that exchanging money for time is an acceptable model for free-to-play games, as long as the exchange doesn't result in rich people having an overwhelming advantage over not-so-rich people. I think the Clash family of games does this quite well.
I haven't played in a while, but in Clash Royale, buying gems only allows you to open chests faster and buy gold, cards and chests. It does mean that you can upgrade your units to better units faster, but once you hit certain cap, that's it. Players who will have spent money on the game will probably blitz ahead to the higher leagues until they start getting matched with players who have similar cards, in which it all comes down to skill. Players who don't spend money can eventually get maxed out decks, but it's a long grind to do so (as opening chests has a real-time cooldown in hours). Same with Clash of Clans, where gems only allow you to train troops or upgrade things faster. Once you're in battle, it's all down to your skill. While the grind to get level-capped in both of these games is quite long, it's important to note that both of these games are free-to-play.
Contrast this with the so-called "pay2win" games, where buying exclusive items makes you stronger than the players who don't have these items. I don't know how strong it is at higher levels, because I got bored, but in World of Warcraft, phrost bought me a Lil'Ragnaros mini-pet, which is only available for purchase from the Blizzard store. I was crushing battles that I really had no right to be winning due to the level and elemental difference. (I feel kinda bad, because he bought it for me in return after I bought him the Cinder Kitten, as I know he likes cats and some of the proceeds were going towards Hurricane Sandy victims. Based on the comments, it seems like a crummy fighter.)
Out of these two categories, what happened in Star Wars Battlefront II was definitely more on the side of exchanging money for time, rather than pay2win. However, I can understand the negative outcry, because people were already paying full price for the game! I can sympathise with a free-to-play game having some sort of monetary incentive to save time, because that's their whole business model. I can choose to play the game for free, providing a service to paying players by expanding the potential player pool, but if I'm already paying for the game, I'd expect to get the full game from the start. Especially if I'm paying the price of a AAA game.
"But you do have the full game, you just have to unlock certain parts of it!" you might reply. A few games come to mind in response to this, and I'm glad Nintendo have learned their lesson. WarioWare: Smooth Moves for the Wii is a micro-game game. Rather than having a series of mini-games, like Mario Party, you play even shorter games, that last roughly 5 seconds. It's great fun at parties. Guess what the developers did? Made multiplayer mode an unlock. From memory, it took about 2-3 hours to unlock multiplayer mode, as you had to finish the single-player story first. Can you imagine being excited to play this, after enjoying WarioWare Inc. on the Gamecube, inviting some friends over, inserting the disc, and then finding out multiplayer mode is locked?
Similarly, in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it tried to follow the previous games in having unlockable characters, but you either had to play through the story-mode Subspace Emissary, or play tens or hundreds of games to unlock certain characters. For a game where most of the fun comes from having friends over and beating the crap out of each other with your beloved Nintendo characters, putting in this barrier between buying the game and enjoying it is stupid. I guess they tried to reproduce that feeling you got when you played the N64 Super Smash Bros. and that "Challenger approaching" screen showed up, which for us was completely unexpected when we first played.
We had no idea how it happened, and it wasn't until a friend of ours bought one of those gaming magazines which detailed how to unlock all the heroes, did we finally work out how to unlock Ness. Now, with the Internet, all that excitement is gone, and we really just want to get down to it and play the game.
Back to Star Wars Battlefront II, I can understand EA's perspective, they might not have intended for the Darth Vader (or any other iconic character) unlock to have just been a cash grab. Unlocking things is exciting. What's not exciting is allowing someone to pay their way into getting that thing. If you could just buy those items, you'd probably end up with the same problem the fashion industry is suffering with counterfeit goods. I can't find the article now, but I remember reading that certain iconic Louis Vuitton bags are considered unfashionable because they are often the target of counterfeiters. So people who could actually afford them don't want them because they're too easily mistake for knock-offs, so they lose some of their prestige. The same would apply to Darth Vader - you could have done a marathon grind to unlock it in 3 days, but someone would just assumed you just paid money to get it.
I still remember getting excited seeing certain famous players in Ogrimmar in World of Warcraft and ogling their armour. The armour had such a distinctive look that you would see them and know that they had cleared some of the more difficult raids in the game. They had the prestige because killing certain bosses was the only way to get that armour, and killing them was hard.
Autofix found an image that I think summarises the whole thing perfectly:
A few days ago, EA announced that they are turning off in-game purchases:
https://twitter.com/EAStarWars/status/931332890717143040
Today, we turned off in-game purchases for #StarWarsBattlefrontII
. The game is built on your input, and it will continue to evolve and grow. Read the full update: http://bit.ly/2hyFHce
. The game is built on your input, and it will continue to evolve and grow. Read the full update: http://bit.ly/2hyFHce (Unshortened URL: https://www.ea.com/en-gb/games/starwars/battlefront/battlefront-2/news/pre-launch-update?utm_campaign=swbf2_hd_na_ic_soco_twt_swbfii-prelaunchblog-tw&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&cid=42029&ts=1511088840892)
And image copy:
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