Battlefront II's monetization has had fans on a rollercoaster of emotions. When EA DICE announced that post-launch content additions would be entirely free, it was taken very positively as the community wouldn't have to split like in the first Battlefront game by DICE.
However, with the Season Pass threat gone, Star Wars Battlefront II's beta immediately raised strong concerns with its loot box system and potentially Pay-to-Win nature of multiplayer.
The community's outcry was massive and the developers eventually made several changes to the progression system. This once again seemed to set the game on the right path, but now that Star Wars Battlefront II is playable (albeit in a limited form) on PC via Origin Access and Xbox One via EA Access, the grinding required to unlock heroes turned out to be insane.
Reddit user TheHotterPotato crunched some numbers and postulated that it would take 40 hours of gameplay to unlock just one of the many heroes available in the game. Here's the lowdown from his spreadsheet, which made the rounds all over the Web during the weekend.
Average Galactic Assault Match Length: 11:09
In my opinion this needs to increase by at least a factor of two, maybe more.
Average Credits per Match: 275
Far too low, we will get into that in a moment.
Average Credits per Minute of Gameplay: 25.04
At first it sounds reasonable...
Gameplay Minutes Required to Earn a Trooper Crate (4000): 159.73
Almost 3 hours of gameplay required to earn a trooper crate at the current rate. I understand these values don't include what you earn in challenges, but I am mainly doing this to figure out what it's going to be like after the first week and I am done chasing the easy challenges and start playing the way I enjoy. 3 hours is far, far too much of a time requirement.
Gameplay Minutes Required to Unlock One Hero: 2,395.97
You read that correctly. At the current price of 60,000 credits it will take you 40 hours of gameplay time to earn the right to unlock one hero or villain. That means 40 hours of saving each and every credit, no buying any crates at all, so no bonus credits from getting duplicates in crates.
This predictably angered the Star Wars Battlefront II community once more. The game's main subreddit is now flooded with complaints addressing this very topic and, as usual in this day and age, some have reached out to EA/DICE developers on social media channels like Twitter.
One developer in particular, Sean, was keen to address that spreadsheet as "highly inaccurate" because it doesn't take a lot of factors into account, apparently.
Just an FYI: that reddit article is highly inaccurate
— Sean 🦈 (@PayneKiller75) November 12, 2017
No, he doesn't. Not at all.
— Sean 🦈 (@PayneKiller75) November 12, 2017
His point is pretty clear, I think. And I simply said that reddit article that's being referenced is inaccurate. As it is. It doesn't take a lot of factors into account.
— Sean 🦈 (@PayneKiller75) November 12, 2017
Sean also maintained that Battlefront II isn't a Pay-to-Win game at all as "nearly everything" can be unlocked via gameplay. He also rejected the notion that the developers working on the game are tight-lipped on these matters.
Oh, ok. And 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
— Sean 🦈 (@PayneKiller75) November 12, 2017
https://twitter.com/BiggSean66/status/929616797384417280
Back on the issue at hand, though, some users have noted that while the game requires players to shell 60K credits to unlock heroes right now, the official website actually says it should take 10K credits. It is being speculated that the price could go down once the game officially launches on November 17th.
We'll keep monitoring the situation and provide relevant updates on Wccftech, so stay tuned.
