Star Wars Battlefront II Developer Receiving Death Threats over Microtransactions

Star Wars Battlefront II is undoubtedly going to be a popular game.  Following the beta, it came to light that many of the progression systems in the game had been changed.  For many these changes seemed like they were for the worse, as EA leaned in heavily on a system that had users earning “Star Crates”  a loot box that could be earned or purchased via microtransactions in the game.

Over the weekend a Reddit post was made on the Star Wars Battlefront hub that analyzed the new system and cast the game’s progression system in a pretty bad light.  Basically, the thread broke down the amount of time it would take to unlock certain things in the game by just playing and not spending additional money.  The analysis stated that it would take 40 hours of gameplay to earn the popular heroes in Star Wars Battlefront 2, something that urged folks in the online community to once again brandish their pitchforks and torches.  This analysis also prompted a developer response, at which point the death threats started rolling in for @BiggSean66.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 doesn’t fit the definition of Pay to Win, says EA Developer

If you want to take a look at the numbers that were crunched over on Reddit, you can find that here.  But the jist of it was that despite EA claiming to make changes to the game that were more player friendly, it didn’t seem to be the case.  In the year of aggressive microtransactions in the form of loot boxes by nearly every major games publisher, EA decided to wade into the angry mob and issue a statement.

While this statement from EA was fairly innocuous, Sean took to Twitter to explain that the Reddit analysis was “highly inaccurate and that it didn’t take a lot of factors into account to come to its conclusions.  There’s been a lot of “Pay to Win” talk surrounding Star Wars Battlefront II since the beta, but Sean also says that the game is certainly not that.

“BF2 doesn’t fit the definition of P2W because nearly everything can be unlocked via game play.  It may take longer/be harder than ppl prefer — but it’s not P2W.”

Regardless, it appears that these statements have been inflammatory.  Unfortunately, for Sean he’s spending his days counting death threats and personal attacks.  “So I’m up to 7 death threats and over 1600 personal attacks now (and yes, for legal reasons I’m keeping track).  And why, you might ask?  Because of an unpopular feature in a game.”