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It’s a referendum on loot boxes.

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This is now almost 200k more downvoted than the most upvoted thread on all of reddit

I emailed Disney to let them know their brand is being used to introduce children to gambling and to abuse the mentally ill. I know corporations don't really care about anything but shouting into the void is always fun.

EA's response to criticism: cutting hero costs. So now instead of spending 30 hours working to unlock heroes, you'll only have to spend 10.

Great.

Apparently EA thinks it's fine to teach children to gamble, as long as nobody is too upset by the stick side.

Same thing occurred with CS:GO, there's been some crazy gambling going on in CS:GO, Bloomberg claimed $2.3 billion:



It's basically a loophole to get children addicted to gambling, and should have been regulated a long time ago.

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It's now more than double the most upvoted thing ever on Reddit.

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I just read on a forum that while EA cut the in-game credits required to unlock heroes and other stuff by 75%, they offset that concession completely by making unlock progression 75% slower. Can anyone confirm this? It seems ludicrous that they would do this and not realize they're digging a deeper hole for themselves as far as the internet backlash goes.

Edit: or maybe it was that they cut the actual money required to unlock stuff by 75% and slowed the progression by 75% to offset that. The forum post was kind of ambiguous.

You unlock heroes using credits. You can open loot boxes using either credits or crystals.

Crystals are purchased with real money.

Credits are earned through gameplay, or found in loot boxes.

Hero costs have been reduced (credits). Loot box rewards have stayed the same, so effectively the amount of real money heroes cost has reduced. The other thing they did was reduce the number of credits you get for finishing the single player campaign from 20,000 to 5,000. The reason is because finishing the single player campaign is supposed to give you just enough to buy a specific hero.

Why didn’t they just unlock the hero instead of giving you credits, you ask? Because they want to force players to experience the virtual currency ****, with all the wooshy sound effects and casino pathological manipulation stuff.

The important thing to keep in mind is that EA always intended to ratchet this stuff down. They planned to get in front of the controversy by making just enough meaningless changes that criticism could be discounted, and that the media wouldn’t be able to objectively report on whether those changes were successful.

They knew they were going to get bad PR for doing anything like this, because the basic idea behind Star Wars Battlefront 2 is unethical. It should rightfully be criminal, and eventually there are going to be consequences for that.

I sometimes think, "maybe we should teach more statistics in school versus calc so people can be aware of how stupid gambling is," then I realize it would most likely have little effect.

So far I've won money gambling. Because I only place bets where I personally determined the odds against a person I knew, and they were <no offense> dumb enough to take it.

Also gambling is way less fun personally when you understand the probabilities and "play right". Good play for many games is mechanistic, and even in poker good play involves folding most hands. Many people claim there are other elements, but so far I've found playing the odds and ignoring all other aspects of the game wins for me.

Oh, what were we talking about? Right. Casinos are basically a simulacrum of America itself, and video games today all suck.

Incidentally, if my history is correct, probability was invented for the express purpose of taking other people's money through gambling.

Poker is more fun when you're playing against androids that were programmed to autisticly narrate a memory dump of the situation they are in as a cheap expository technique, rather than incorporating theory of mind into their artificial intelligence.

AFAIK most poker bots use negamax with a hand valuation heuristic. The "theory of mind" falls out of the game matrix. I haven't looked into this for a few years though, so it's possible leading bots are expert systems again.

Fake edit: You were talking about Poker Night at the Inventory, weren't you?

No, just Lt. Commander Data acting like he couldn't figure out what bluffing was because of the trope that somehow emotions are so deep that machines can't grok them.

Huh?

A certain famous poker player (whose name I don't remember because, uh, lol, it's poker) was convinced a human was controlling the actions of a poker bot because it bluffed him. Later he joked about how computers that bluff = humanity is doomed.

If a hugely successful player of a game doesn't understand why a core strategy of that game works, a professional writer has basically no hope.

By the way, those hollywood poker moments with the bluff and standoff basically never happen in the real game. Most of poker is accurately estimating hand strengths. That's why playing poker with (amateur) friends is almost always a disappointing experience, because, yeah, I mean, it's gambling. Skill is important but luck matters much more, and if player skills are limited it's a silly random game. You might as well play Candyland.

If you want to play poker with your buddies and have actual fun, maybe force some of those hollywood moments, you should play a simplified variant. Bluffing and skill are much bigger factors in games like Kuhn poker and Leduc hold'em. Naturally, of course, computers excel at these games.

Disclaimer: I am not a poker expert. My experience with poker is limited to academic poker research and some disappointing games with other amateurs.

Don't worry, it's not like I'm a big poker player. It's just something we did as teenagers that felt cool because it felt like gambling even when we didn't use real money. If I were a kid today I would probably just play an EA game instead.


People who are really into poker and treat it as a sport are an enigma to me. One such individual who is a friend of mine has told me that the single political issue of online poker is the sole reason he is a libertarian, and is a single issue voter in that capacity. (He's the kind of guy who also happens to be super into watching professional fighting matches.)

You should probably warn your friend that libertarianism also means your opponent is free to cheat.

Guess what 99% of gambling regulations are about.

The only airquotes "sport" I watch is LTTP randomizer.



I don't know why, but there's something about it that tweaks me. It's a game I know quite well, there's an aspect of luck and gambling in terms of the routes chosen, and the players must be very skilled both in terms of understanding how the randomizer works and how to play the original game.

I watched the singleplayer campaign of the new Battlefront on Youtube because I'm not buying an EA game. Apparently, the Empire felt it was okay to scorch a fully loyal, pro-Imperial planet to show the universe (why?) how evil they are. I'm sure there was more to this from the "source material" the game lifted it from but this whole thing was presented in such a laughably bad way.

The best deterrent towards violence is to shoot yourself.

It gets better. After this happens the female lead realizes how evil the empire is, and defects. The campaign climaxes with a battle against her admiral father. She wins, and just before dying, her father tells her that she was right to defect.

lol.

SW:BF2 is a bad enough game that I wish I hadn't already been boycotting EA for over a decade, just so I could not buy it twice.

I must have really zoned out. Why did she need to be ordered to go to her homeworld Viagra to extract someone out, setting up the whole defection scene. The planet was Imperial-controlled and pro-Empire, so couldn't they just shuttle-bus the person out? BBQing the planet first then escorting certain people out seems like a scheduling conflict.

There's something beautiful in the way how EA went beyond my expectations.

Explain away the story by saying Star Wars is for children.

Explain away the gambling by saying Star Wars is for adults.

tfw you'll never get to experience 1998 star wars ever again

Gameinformer's given SW:BF2 a 6.5, which is actually negative 0.5 given that game scores start at 7 now. I assume the industry has already colluded to blacklist them, but if they hadn't before, they certainly will now.

I hope the lootcrates help that actor who played the Imperial father with his stroke, judging from the mocap animation of his face.

Frostbite isn't a very good engine guys.

ME:A was almost finished when EA ordered the team to start over again with Frostbite. Frostbite doesn't have an animation system. Frostbite doesn't have animation tools. The game ended up looking and playing like garbage because Frostbite is a bad engine unless you are literally one of a handful of people working on a specific team at a specific internal studio, and even then your walk cycles will look like they're spazzing out.


And don't even get me started on EA's incompetent tone mapping and eye ache inducing chromatic aberration and anamorphic lens flares. The ****? Have these people never gone outside before? The optics they used to film the original trilogy didn't even have chromatic aberration, what are they even doing? God damn AAA games are all ugly as **** now.

Edit: Oh, and film grain. How could I forget film grain?

Film grain, anamorphic lens flares, super saturating tone mapping, and chromatic aberration. AAA developers are dead set on making every game look like it was filmed in the 1920s and processed with TechniColor.

I'm curious what was the justification of this switch, which can I assume was costly? On the surface, seems like almost sabotage at that point. Respawn Entertainment used Source for their Titanfall games I later found out but I'm guessing they too are going with Frostbite.

Don't forget about other headache-inducing pp effects like motion blur.

I'm like 99% sure post-processing effects are the work of higher up do-nothings who need to feel they're having an impact on development.

I thought motion blur was to hide the fact that game is running at a locked 30fps, which becomes apparent when rotating fast.

Because EA paid to make Frostbite and everybody at EA is required to use it. Don’t think about it too hard; they didn’t.

It was certainly sabotage-like. Most of the core staff quit shortly after this. There are gameplay videos on YouTube from the alpha, showing how much more polished the game was before switching to the objectively and factually worse Frostbite engine. I would have quit too under those conditions.

Yes, Respawn will be required to use Frostbite. Eventually. Most likely when switching would cause the most harm to a product in development.

Not exactly.

I’m willing to blame executives for almost anything, but this is a case where I think it’s the developers who are 100% to blame. They’re more interested in making cool pp effects than doing their jobs. Not that I can blame them much, since otherwise there isn’t much of their jobs worth salvaging.

Graphics programmers really eat this stuff up because they have no taste (I’ve gotten into a heated argument with a AAA graphics programmer about HDR on this very forum). The rationale is literally that - it’s cool that we know how to do this, so let’s do it. It’s the same attitude that fueled coloured lighting and lens flares 1.0 in the 90s. Or sometimes they justify it by saying it’s more “cinematic”, because I guess that’s a look that a first person shooter ought to have - but truthfully I don’t think they put even that much thought into it. They’ve clearly never seen a movie if they think it’s cinematic, any more than they’ve ever been outside if they think their over saturated bloomed out bokeh riddled travesty is realistic to human vision. Lighting and materials designers like tone mapping too because it means they don’t need to work very hard. Tone mapping automatically patches holes in their work, even if the whole game looks awful as a result.

Note that tone mapping in particular is meant to automatically simulate the careful hand work of a film editor. This perhaps suggests the very idea is a bad one, since film editing is all about taste, while tone mapping is all about the terms of a polynomial. Nintendo is just about the only game company that makes tasteful looking games anymore. Notably, they don’t use tone mapping for this exact reason: automatic tone mapping doesn’t look very good, and simultaneously gives you almost no control over the result.

This is exactly why we need more guns in our society.

I never finished TIE Fighter, although it's on the list to go back to, but I'm assuming that in that game you actually start and finish the game as a diehard Imperial. Other than perhaps alternate or dark side endings in the Jedi Knight and Force Unleashed games, has there been another game where you start and finish as a legitimate bad guy?

Oh, and in all of this controversy, let's not forget the role the ESRB is playing right now. They have legitimized loot boxes by claiming they are not gambling, and more importantly, have specifically said that games containing real-money loot boxes are appropriate for sale to all audiences.

Like the MPAA, the ESRB is an attempt at industry self-regulation, an attempt to ensure inappropriate games are not sold to young audiences. The ESRB's decision that casino-style psychological manipulation is appropriate for children is an express abdication of their responsibility in this case, and a clear failure of industry self-regulation - a decision that was made, no doubt, because EA requested it, not because it's what's best for children or for the game industry.

Remember those "consequences" I mentioned above? This very well might be one of them. I read about the ESRB's miserable failure in Forbes of all places, so they aren't going to be able to back away from that one. Activists have been trying to take game ratings out of the hands of the industry almost forever, and now they have a very difficult case for an opponent to argue against.

Well, you could count KOTOR. Because you actually are the last war's bad guy and the Jedi are trying to brainwash you into being good again.

Also X-Wing vs TIE Fighter (well, Balance of Power, because the original didn't have much of a campaign). The Old Republic as well. And Rebellion. Probably Galactic Battlegrounds and Empire At War as well.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/star-wars-battlefront-ii/star-wars-battlefront-2-progression-microtransactions-issues

Since launch, players have been working out how long it would take to earn everything in the game without spending any money. It works out to around 4,528 hours of game time. That is six entire months inside the game. Of course, you could skip that time investment and spend the approximately $2,000 required to open enough Trooper Crates to bag all the unlocks.

Wowza.