Reddit’s video game community has the lightsabers out for the developer of “Star Wars: Battlefront II,” as a response to complaints about the game set a new record for the most-disliked post on the site.
Electronic Arts has been feeling dark side-level rage from “Star Wars” fans all week, ever since it was discovered that the company was withholding popular characters Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader behind a paywall in their new “Battlefront” game. The characters could only be unlocked by paying money, or logging 40 hours of playtime.
“Seriously? I paid $80 to have Vader locked?” one user wrote on Reddit Sunday.
EA’s community team , explaining that the paywall is meant to “provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.”
“As for the cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch,” the company said.
“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.”
Reddit users can respond to a post through a “karma” system that bumps it up or down by one point. By Tuesday afternoon, users had flooded EA with enough “candid feedback” and negative karma to bury it in a galaxy far, far away, giving it an overall score of -683,000.
As a point of comparison, the only accumulated a net karma total of 283,000.
“This is a cop-out answer,” said the top reply to the post. “I’m left unconvinced that this was a decision made with the community in mind. No, it was a decision made with currency in mind.”
EA acknowledged the anger over its character pricing in a statement on Monday.
“There’s been a lot of discussion around the amount of in-game credits (and time) it takes to unlock some our heroes,” wrote John Wasilczyk, executive producer of DICE, the EA-owned developer of the game.
Wasilczyk added that the developer will hold an “Ask Me Anything” chat on Reddit Wednesday.
