EA's infamous defense of Battlefront 2's awful grind wins a Guinness World Record

(Image credit: EA)

Back in 2017, some poor community manager at EA waded into the exploding controversy on Reddit surrounding Star Wars Battlefront 2's lootboxes. It might've seemed like a sensible move at the time, but that now-infamous comment quickly drew the ire of gamers from every corner of the internet, collecting an astonishing 667,821 downvotes (and, somehow, 109 Reddit Gold awards). Now that oopsie is forever immortalized on your nephew's bookshelf in the form of a Guinness World Record 2020 award for most downvoted Reddit comment.

Reddit user '-amsha-' spotted the record in the latest edition of Guinness World Records and shared a picture on the Star Wars subreddit. I had already known that particular comment was the most downvoted comment on Reddit, I had no idea it outpaced the second most downvoted comment by more than 600,000 votes.

If you missed the controversy when it was erupting in 2017, the issue was over Battlefront 2's contentious progression system that forced players to grind relentlessly to unlock notable heroes like Darth Vader for use in-game.

As the issue boiled over, EA's community team began making statements explaining their motives, each one often gathering tens of thousands of downvotes. But when it said that grinding for heroes was meant to instill "a sense of pride and accomplishment" in players, shit really hit the fan and the comment was downvoted into oblivion.

Anger over EA's greedy lootboxes became the defining topic of PC gaming in 2017 and continues to stay in the foreground as government regulators slowly began to investigate the issue. Concerns about lootboxes conditioning younger players to gamble as well as their inherent fairness have already led to countries responding with different forms of regulation.

Despite all that gamer rage, the developers at Dice did listen to the overwhelming feedback and began making changes to Battlefront 2's progression system, making it more rewarding and taking away the emphasis on loot boxes. Even if it had an ugly launch, Battlefront 2 is actually in a pretty good place.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated there was a way to directly purchase heroes at launch. That wasn't the case—the issue over Battlefront 2's monetization was about loot boxes which contained Star Cards, not heroes, and which were changed.

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.