Mat Everett from EA calls community “arm chair developers” after the massive outcry from gamers over the heavy microtransaction focus in the upcoming Star Wars title.
Mat Everett later deleted the comments from Twitter, but the internet never forgets.
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The issue and controversy in question here started after a Reddit user by the name of /TheHotterPotato shared his experience with playing Star Wars: Battlefront II and crunched the numbers on what it would take to unlock a new hero through an insane grind, rather than paying for loot boxes via microtransactions. According to /TheHotterPotato, who shared an online Google spreadsheet detailing his gameplay experience (shown below), it would take players 40 hours or so to earn enough in-game credits to unlock a new playable hero without spending a single credit anywhere else.
The cheapest heroes in Battlefront II range from 20K credits on up, while Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are on the more expensive side priced at 60K credits each. Earning about 25.39 credits/minute (or 0.42 credits/second) in-game means that players will need to spend well over 170+ hours to unlock every available character if they aren’t spending real money to bypass the intense grind. Spending about 2.5 hours grinding will earn you just enough credits to purchase a Trooper Crate, which in turn equates to more than 2,360 minutes or nearly 40 hours to unlock your first available hero. What’s more painful, is the breakdown of the minimum wage in the United States and how much money a player would need to invest in microtransactions vs spending a ridiculous amount of time to unlock the hero of their choice. Ouch.
EA Community Manager Mat Everett took to social media calling the internet “arm chair developers” a term referred to home audiences watching sporting events who yell at their TV sets from the comfort of their armchairs at home. Essentially calling the community ignorant of what it means to be a developer, despite the fact that the product is targeted at the very audience he is insulting who are clearly dissatisfied with the direction EA is taking the Battlefront franchise, let alone his harsh and unacceptable words.
Once the community fired back at Mat for his harshness and severe lack of professionalism, he deleted his Tweets and tried to backtrack by saying that his words had nothing to do with EA’s nor the Battlefront community. Those Tweets are still up at the time of this writing. What is NOT up, however, is Mat’s detailed Twitter bio which was up a mere half hour ago explaining his role within EA, an update he removed completely during all this social media backlash (before and after shown below – with before having been picked up from the Internet Archive here).
BEFORE
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AFTER
Smooth, Mat. Real smooth…
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EA previously commented on the progression system and heavy focus on microtransactions driving the progress in their game, which you can see below.
“Our goal involves creating a compelling progression path for all of our players. There’s a lot of content at launch with even more coming via live service, and we’ll continuously adjust our progression mechanics to give players a sense of accomplishment as they explore all of Battlefront 2.
Heroes earned through Credits: The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes. 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.
Credits Earned: We’re looking at the results daily and will be continuing to tune this to ensure that players feel a meaningful sense of reward for the time they spend with Battlefront 2.
We appreciate the conversation here, and our team is working to make the best choices possible for the game and the players. We will provide more details and updates as we can.“
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Yikes, talk about a slippery slope. If EA’s reputation is any indication, you can expect that they likely won’t take the focus off of microtransactions. However, we will just have to wait and see and hope for the best.
The face you make when the EA Community Manger makes a total ass of himself.
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Star Wars: Battlefront II releases worldwide on November 17th, 2017 for PC, XBO, and PS4.
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