
The most downvoted comment in Reddit's history - edem
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98/
======
bunderbunder
I'm continually fascinated by the gaming community's relationship with EA.

It's like, "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me 37 times. . . ahh, what the
hey, let's throw another 60 quid in this hole. I'm sure this time it'll be
different."

~~~
CydeWeys
Exactly the same with me. I never buy games at launch and I tend to stay away
from F2P games entirely. There's way too many games coming out compared to the
free time I have available to play them, so I've accepted that I'm never going
to play the vast majority of releases. Others need to come to that same
realization -- it's perfectly fine to skip a game if the company's practices
suck.

As for what I have been playing, I'm really putting a lot of time into
Factorio at the moment. It's an indie game that costs $20 for the entire
experience and is an amazing value (I'm at hour 70 with no sign of slowing
down yet).

~~~
Balgair
On Factorio and those kinda game:

To me, Factorio is _very_ basically just simplified Eagle with monsters (Eagle
is PCB designer software). You have underground belts (vias), smelters (ICs),
inserters (Caps, resistors, 2 lead parts). Then you throw some monsters in
there to give some random fuzz on the designs and make things a bit more
'spicy'.

Mincraft is much the same, it's a _very_ basic Solidworks. You can extrude and
loft with the voxels, put in some basic digital electronics (redstone), some
basic fluids (water/lava), and make simple machines (look at mob-grinders).
Throw in some randomness with the creepers and other mobs to make things
spicy.

Kerbal is also the same. It's a basic flight simulator. You can mess with
staging, centers of mass, and centers of thrust. You can do simple ballistic
and orbital mechanics. Then you throw in the wonkiness of the physics
simulator and the fan-named 'Kraken' and you have the randomness of monsters
(I think they could have done better in this regard)

A lot of these 'indie' sleeper hits seems to be like that: Take some
industrial design software, make it so basic a 7 year old can use it, throw in
monsters to mess up the designs and to shoot/stab.

Other software that could be used for this process is Z-max (optics design
software), some kinda Wall-Street software that's not just excel, maybe some
urban planning but better/more random than SimCity/CitiesSkylines, other
stuff.

Any ideas?

EDIT: Here is a wiki page of possible avenues:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer-
aided_engine...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer-
aided_engineering_software)

~~~
CydeWeys
So I've played all the ones that you've mentioned and loved them (especially
Kerbal Space Program), but I'd like to point out that they're fun to play
because they're _games_ , whereas similar industrial software applications are
not games. This is a very meaningful distinction because the addition of game
mechanics makes them fun to play around with.

I also don't think the connections are quite so close as you make them out to
be. Factorio is at its heart a _survival_ game -- you can't just dismiss the
enemies as added "spice", as they are an integral part of the challenge. The
advanced factory automation becomes necessary to build up your tech level high
enough to take on the higher level monsters that come at you later in the
game.

~~~
Balgair
I mean, I really like messing about with SW in my free time; the X-Wing is
coming along, but I don't really have the ram.

I get that they are games at the end of the day, but many of the
elements/mechanics seem to be from 'real' software (in this category of game).
It's not a criticism, it's just an observation.

For more on how to go into video game theory, PennyArcade's XtraCredits series
is pretty binge-able:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCODtTcd5M1JavPCOr_Uydg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCODtTcd5M1JavPCOr_Uydg)

------
danso
Wow that's some incredible brigading. One of the most upvoted comments (it
might be the most upvoted one, don't know) is at a mere 98.6K:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5h7gq8/i_was_goofy_at...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5h7gq8/i_was_goofy_at_walt_disney_world_for_over_20/day38fu/)

The most upvoted post is 283K:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5gn8ru/guardians_of_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5gn8ru/guardians_of_the_front_page/)

Considering how upvoted-items get more and more visible, and thus more and
more upvotes, it's a huge achievement for a downvoted comment to have that
much engagement.

edit: via r/subredditdrama, the most downvoted comments noted so far:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfComments/wiki/downvoted](https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfComments/wiki/downvoted)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/7cicb7/user...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/7cicb7/users_turn_to_the_salty_side_in/)

~~~
Raphmedia
> Wow that's some incredible brigading.

Is it really brigading? The entire gaming community hates those practices.
Nobody is manipulating people to downvote this comment. It's genuine hate and
digust. Paying the price of a game to unlock one single character is a joke.

EA's reply is also very bad. "The intent is to provide players with a sense of
pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes."

I fail to see how paying $80 gives players a sense of pride and
accomplishment.

~~~
danso
I mean "brigading" in the technical sense of people passing around the link
and getting more people to pile on than would organically occur, not
necessarily the astroturf connotation. Because for most users, comments under
a certain threshold (-50) are hidden (but can be revealed manually). The
entire r/Battlefront userbase is just 91K users.

~~~
ric2b
I believe the comment received reddit gold specifically to keep it visible.

------
CoolGuySteve
It's weird, the Cluetrain Manifesto is old enough to drive now but companies
still don't talk like human beings. I'm not sure what EA's social media group
is trying to accomplish by engaging in such a clumsy way.

[http://www.cluetrain.com](http://www.cluetrain.com)

~~~
cirgue
I had completely forgotten about this. It makes me sad to read, because it
seems like the culture of the tech industry has gone whole-hog on "sterile
happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets". Machine learning on the
blockchain, anyone?

------
louhike
Even though I hate the business model, this is going crazy with people sending
death threats to employees. They never hid their intent, the business model
for the game has been discussed for a long time.

------
Pigo
If people hate EA so much, why do they keep buying their games? It's not like
Time Warner, with a monopoly you can't avoid.

~~~
kazagistar
Every copyright is a monopoly on a very specific niche. People arent looking
for just some game, they want "that experience they loved from the first game,
set in their favorite science fantasy universe" or whatever. They can't get it
elsewhere, and thus the publisher can do some pretty abusive things to extract
money from the fans. In this case, trying to push people gambling addictions
they can exploit for profit.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Its sounding like youre trying to start opening a line of debate of:

"If content is part of the national identity or popular outside its initial
entertainment function, there should be limitations on the governmental
exclusivity(copyright) so that others may use."

~~~
cestith
This is why copyright used to be for a reasonably limited term.

------
deanclatworthy
Nothing is going to change in the gaming community unless people stop buying
these kinds of games. I am on my way to sell COD:WWII as I type this comment
as the multiplayer maps are so monotonous and yet they expect me to pay the
price of the game again to unlock all the other maps in the next few months
(season pass). I’ll probably never buy another COD game after this.

~~~
4c2383f5c88e911
So, nothing will change then? "Vote with your wallet" doesn't work, and never
has.

~~~
floofyfloofer
It could work, but it's a lopsided feedback system: EA can't count the number
of people who didn't buy their game, they can only count the number of actual
purchases. So, voting with your wallet leads to underperforming sales numbers,
which they'll rationalize to be based on anything but the insulting ways they
try to extract additional money from their players, or the myriad of ways they
treat their fan base like idiots.

They learn the wrong lessons, assuming the franchise must be at fault, not the
mechanics that make the game loathsome.

------
amyjess
Only 19 hours old, too.

One thing to keep in mind is that Reddit used to normalize votes until about a
year ago or so, such that it was exceedingly rare for a post to get beyond
triple digits (both positive and negative). I wonder how many older unpopular
comments would have made it into the negative six figures if vote totals had
been uncapped sooner.

~~~
teraflop
According to the admins, the scores on older posts were recalculated after the
scoring was changed.

------
runeks
Can anyone explain what this is about, for non-gamers like myself? Am I
understanding it right, in that he paid $80 for a game in which he needs to
pay even more to get access to the Darth Vader character?

Is there a price list somewhere for what it costs to purchase various in-game
things?

~~~
minimaxir
Good summary of the issue:
[https://reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7cddyo/_/dpqoy26/...](https://reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7cddyo/_/dpqoy26/?context=1)

~~~
chengiz
That has too much jargon to be a good summary to a non-gamer IMO. To wit-

"While some games might offer loot boxes for cosmetic options, Battlefront II
is using loot crates as their primary form of progression through the
multiplayer content, via Star Cards."

------
asveikau
Of all the things in humanity to show outrage about, even limiting oneself to
considering outrageous topics that made it to reddit posts, this seems very
small. I would figure the most downvoted comment in history would show
something grotesque.

~~~
floofyfloofer
Unbridled greed _is_ pretty grotesque.

~~~
asveikau
Of all things you can do to a person, I think mis-pricing something in a video
game and a subsequent PR blunder is very small potatoes. Even if we restrict
to your phrase "unbridled greed" and exclude more serious topics like physical
harm and abuse, there is a _lot_ more of that going on that is worse than
this.

------
malikNF
Looks like everything they are posting is getting down-voted.

[https://www.reddit.com/user/EACommunityTeam](https://www.reddit.com/user/EACommunityTeam)

~~~
executesorder66
And yet they still have positive karma.

    
    
        Most upvoted comment: +318 
        Most downvoted comment: -377k
    

Somehow this results in 7,438 comment karma for the user. What the hell
reddit?

edit: and no, the sum of the rest of their comments does not add up anywhere
near 377k.

~~~
atrus
Reddit limits how much a single comment can effect your overall karma score.
This was done to slow down negative karma trolls.

------
simook
This is why I've stopped buying new games. At 31 years old, I've realized that
learning new things is more important than paying to entertain myself.

~~~
metalliqaz
Wait, which is it? When you say "this is why" it implies you stopped because
of unbounded greed on the part of large gaming publishers. However, then you
explain it as growing out of gaming and a shift in your interests to learning.

Also, in my opinion, learning and entertainment don't have to be mutually
exclusive. You sound like an I-don't-watch-TV snob right now, to be honest.

~~~
eduren
Agree. As much as I love HN, I think it suffers from too much snobbery at
times...

 _Which is why I 've decided recently (since turning 27 and a half) to
transition away from online forums and focus on building pen-pal relationships
with fellow hackers through physical mail. Really makes me feel like I'm
improving myself_

------
kvark
I don't understand the rage here. EA is a busyness, kindly explaining the
reasoning behind their product decisions in the open. We should be thankful,
not angry.

~~~
whamlastxmas
The beatings will continue until morale improves

~~~
kvark
The "me" beating goal is to turn me against EA? I'm way past that point, so
the effort is wasted:) I just don't understand how people expect EA to do
anything other than maximizing the profits.

~~~
pavel_lishin
If a scorpion stings me, I can still be upset about it, despite the scorpion's
nature.

------
falcolas
I left this comment in the previous edition of this post, reproducing here for
some context around the "why":

There was another post on Reddit which “did the math” a few days ago:
unlocking a hero would take around 40 hours of play, modulo a few challenges
and other purchases. There was concern about loot boxes and micro transactions
affecting gameplay; I feel it’s safe to say those concerns were justified.

~~~
fixermark
... at which point a person can calculate their 40 hours of play * what the
time is worth to them, and decide if $80 to just buy the thing is worth it.

~~~
jy1
It's 40 hours after you buy the game ($80).

~~~
falcolas
Indeed. Plus, that's 40 hours per hero, not including improvements and gear
for the base classes.

------
zeveb
I wonder if EA will need to get a new user account.

~~~
jasonkostempski
I don't know what reddit gold does but could they have given themselves those
12 to counteract the downvotes?

~~~
DonHopkins
EA just posted the most downvoted comment in history of the universe, by
orders of magnitude.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98/)

People are actually "hate guilding": paying real money for reddit gold in
order to send "fuck you" messages to EA that they can't ignore or mute in a
locked thread.

We may be witnessing the birth of a new business model.

EACommunityTeam -652k points 1 day ago [gold star] x67

The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for
unlocking different heroes.

As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and
other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things,
we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and
we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges
that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.

We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth
around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous
social media outlets.

Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and
update everyone as soon and as often as we can.

------
kazagistar
Of course it would be an informative comment that pepole don't like.

~~~
marcelluspye
It's only informative if you take what they said at face value.

------
guiomie
Ahah, not surprised. That game felt like a beta when it was released, I could
not comprehend how they could release something like this. I only started
getting back into gaming recently, and to my surprise, the issue of launching
broken games seems to be industry practice. Battlefield 1 had so many issues,
the new CoD:WW2 has so many issues. I stopped gaming a few years ago (last
game was CoD:2), and I am shocked that the community endures this... but what
is the alternative? Stop gaming?

~~~
mastax
Battlefront 2 (the new one) isn't released until the 17.

~~~
guiomie
I thought they had changed Battlefront 1.

------
jameskilton
Previous discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15685405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15685405)

------
bigtunacan
Apparently the huge response had some impact as EA is now dropping the price
of some of these characters.

[http://m.ign.com/articles/2017/11/13/ea-to-reduce-star-
wars-...](http://m.ign.com/articles/2017/11/13/ea-to-reduce-star-wars-
battlefront-2-hero-costs-by-75-percent)

------
jordigh
Wow, modern gaming is serious business. I wish we devoted this much energy
into more, ahem, important things. I'm not sure even movies, books, TV series
or other kinds of entertainment would produce such a reaction from people.

------
Wimpzilla
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15685405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15685405)

Was already posted, dunno why double the news!

------
DonHopkins
Rumor has it that The Sims 5 will come with only pay toilets, and require an
in-app purchase to kill a character.

------
therealmarv
now I downvoted too

------
ryanmarsh
The most brigaded comment in Reddit’s history

FTFY

------
OpenDrapery
I really want [thing] but cannot afford [thing] at the current price point.
Rage! Kick! Scream!

Doesn't this sentiment have to be nearly as old as markets themselves? What
makes you more angry, the fact that you cannot get the thing you want? Or the
harsh realization that there is a class of people who can afford it, and you
are not in that class?

Pricing is science, with a little art thrown in. EA is a publicly traded
company whose stock has climbed from $12 to $120 in the last five years. Their
imperative is to maximize shareholder value, not appease gamers.

The grown up thing to do is to focus on the things that you enjoy + can
afford.

~~~
fixermark
People, perhaps, get upset about this sort of thing because game content isn't
"real," in the sense that an employee could spend mere seconds (assuming a
script was already cooked for them to do it) to give this art asset to players
for free. The $80 pricepoint (or 40 hours of game interaction) seems a very
artificial thing. It doesn't take $80 worth of work to produce and distribute
the Vader art asset, so why should one be compelled to pay $80 for it?

... but this is a misunderstanding of the nature of digital content and
monopoly. The old rules of supply and demand still apply---even if satisfying
demand is relatively trivial after the archetype has been created---when one
party has a monopoly on supply, as EA does here. And when the archetype still
takes several dozens or hundreds of person-hours to fabricate, there is still
cost to EA to be offset. But even if there weren't cost to EA to offset: they
have a monopoly on the product, they can charge what they will, the amount of
markup they can generate is immaterial.

