EA removes microtransactions from Star Wars Battlefront II

You must have been living in a cave on the world's most isolated island if you haven't heard about the controversy surrounding Star Wars Battlefront II's progression system the last few days. Many of the players who've gotten to play the game early feel that the game almost forces microtransactions on them by locking the best Star Cards and heroes/villains in randomised loot crates and high amounts of currency (something we also note in our review) The developers tried to fix some of this by lowering the price of the heroes/villains, while stating that they were looking into making further changes in the future. Well, the future is now, and the changes are what you might call very significant.

EA and Dice have decided to remove the game's Crystals currency, and with that removing microtransactions entirely for the time being. They've realised that the system needs further tweaking, so they've decided to temporarily shut off all in-game purchases. "We hear you loud and clear, so we're turning off all in-game purchases," Oskar Gabrielson, GM of DICE, writes in the company's blog post. "We will now spend more time listening, adjusting, balancing and tuning. This means that the option to purchase crystals in the game is now offline, and all progression will be earned through gameplay. The ability to purchase crystals in-game will become available at a later date, only after we've made changes to the game. We'll share more details as we work through this."

Our sources tells us that the developers are considering several different changes, including increasing the amount of currency we get for playing, lowering the prices for loot crates and characters even further, and even making loot crates cosmetics only. There have also been rumblings of the game going completely progression-based with microtransactions being a part of that instead, but nothing is set in stone at the moment.

This is definitely a good, but not perfect, move in our opinion. The only thing that might seem unfair now is how the random number generator treats you when opening loot crates. At least you don't have to fear that other players are better than you because they were willing to spend more money on the game.

What kind of changes do you hope they end up going with?