Downvotes for days

About 24 hours ago there was a Reddit post complaining about micro-transactions in "Star Wars Battlefront 2," which is Electronic Arts' new game that releases on Friday. The post was complaining about the amount of time that someone would need to take to unlock Darth Vader (who is one of the most popular characters in the Star Wars franchise) in the game, even after paying $80 for the full game. The total time it would take would be about 40 hours of in game playtime or about 60 thousand in game credits, which is the equivalent of an additional 80 real US dollars.

EA responded to the post very vaguely and there was outrage from the Reddit community. At the writing of this post, the downvote count for the comment is sitting at 567 thousand! That is the all-time most downvoted comment/post/anything in the history of Reddit. For reference, the second most downvoted post only has 23 thousand downvotes, and that post was literally asking for them. That means the comment by EA has almost 25 times the amount of downvotes as the second most downvoted post, and this happened in the span of 24 hours!

This is not the first time that EA has been harshly criticized for micro-transactions in their games, but it is the first time there has been such a large backlash. The company did respond to the community backlash by decreasing the amount of time required to unlock characters by 75%. They also reduced the amount of credits it takes to buy the character by 75%.

While 10 hours is far more reasonable than 40 hours, many fans on Reddit feel it is still too much time for a single character in a multiplayer first-person shooter title. I'm inclined to agree with that sentiment, because that is a lot of time even though it is much better than before. Most people don't put time like that into first-person shooters since that is a lot of grinding of a fairly repetitive genre of games. I don't want to presume whether the game will be good or bad, but I don't like how the gaming industry has been shifting more towards micro-transactions by forcing players to put ridiculous amounts of hours into games to heavily incentivize them into buying items with real money. I think it's a terrible business practice that makes consumers wary of large game publishers like EA, and is bad for the video game industry, because it sets a bad precedent.

What do you guys think of this reaction by the community? And what are your guys' feelings on micro-transactions in games?