I know that a lot of people don’t like it when talk around here is more direct than open for interpretation, but EA and DICE have crossed the line here with Star Wars Battlefront 2, and here’s why the progression, matchmaking, and reward system is a disgrace.

As noted above, I know a lot of people don’t like titles that read “Here’s Why” but when developers make an excuse as to why something is the way that it is when they had several attempts to fix a current issue before, it becomes a blatant lie you can’t ignore when it’s still present.

Let’s take a step back to October 2016, which leads us to Battlefield 1’s launch. The game launched quite well in comparison to previous Battlefield  titles, but it had glaring issues with its matchmaking system and later with its Battlepack system being rewarded to players randomly.

You would think that having a full year of not having a proper matchmaking system implemented in a series that’s known for its multiplayer,  that the feature would be in a game at launch that’s all about multiplayer, right? Wrong.

What makes this whole situation worse for EA and DICE is that they charge full price for both BF1 and SWBF2, and both are well known multiplayer titles without proper matchmaking. Additionally, the two titles have a free-to-play model setup with a “we’ll develop and fix the game as we go along” mentality, which is just wrong.

I bet you are thinking “what did they recently say, though?” Over on SWBF2’s Reddit, the devs are just going all out. Here’s the two things that d_FireWall posted up that should have been in SWBF2 at launch:

• Performance during games will affect the amount of credits you get at the end of a match.
• Matchmaking will take into account not only player skill, but also total gametime and rarity of star cards. This means that you will be matchmade with players with an average performance similar to you and (to the largest extent possible) not against players who are much better than you, whether by having higher rarity cards or by showing higher skill.

So all that time gamers were just being thrown into matches to be slaughtered by other high ranking players? And you mean to tell me that the same problem found a year ago in BF1 is still present in SWBF2?

But that’s not all, EA and DICE have taken it a step further with a pay-to-skip ahead method with this atrocious model found by Reddit user DawnRR:

The last kicker that makes this whole thing that much more ridicules comes with this statement by the same d_FireWall:

“Working on a game with a live economy and without a premium content lineup is a new challenge for us at DICE.”

My response to the above is: how? BF1’s model is still jacked up if you ask a lot of the premium owners. The player base is split, several PC servers and game modes are dead, progression is shot, and customization is pretty much dead. With that said, how is it that EA and DICE managed to screw up both a paid and free model? I’ll tell you, greed.

Expect more and more of this kind of practice to come out in the near future by EA and DICE.