Electronic Arts has made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the infamous Star Wars Battlefront II, but it’s very doubtful that EA DICE will be happy to share the news. Two years ago in 2017, EA DICE was doing its best to deal with upset fans and bad press surrounding the release of Battlefront II and the overwhelming negative response to its loot box based “surprise mechanics.” A community manager used EA’s official Reddit account to try and tame tempers by defending how long it would take (or how expensive it would be) to unlock the game’s most desirable characters, garnering over 600,000 downvotes for the attempt.
A Reddit user named “u/-amsha- ” uploaded photo this week of the Guinness Book Of World Records for 2020 that shows EA’s award for the “Most-downvoted comment on Reddit,” with the description reading, “An official post by videogames publisher Electronic Arts, responding to players’ complaints about having to unlock characters such as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2017) through ‘loot boxes’, has 683,000 downvotes.”
Made it to the Guinness book of world records, 2020 from r/StarWars
The comment from EA’s community manager, posted in November of 2017, became a meme due to the overwhelmingly negative way the phrase “sense of pride and accomplishment” was received by the Battlefront community, bringing even more attention to the game’s poor player reception and helped make Battlefront II and EA something of a poster child for full-price games with way too much content arbitrarily locked behind microtranscations or paid DLC. The controversy sparked international discussion about the potential dangers of loot boxes and the need for industry regulations.
Since the game’s release, EA DICE has made many changes to the way Star Wars Battlefront II handles loot boxes and content, and the developers have acknowledged that their loot box structure was a mistake, creating an extremely damaging impression of the game that far overshadowed its virtues. The game also received new additional content earlier this year.
EA Games, with developer Respawn Entertainment, is preparing to release their new title Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order on November 15th of this year for the PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and took the time to promise their audience that “no loot boxes” would be added to the game.
EA DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront II is available now for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.