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EA Star Wars Battlefront II Earns A Guinness World Record

Electronic Arts has officially earned a Guinness World Record for Star Wars Battlefront 2. Though it’s not a world record that it’s likely to publicize anytime soon. The record is related to the now-infamous controversy tied to Star Wars Battlefront 2‘s loot boxes. In the midst of the controversy, an EA representative posted to Reddit justifying the publisher’s loot box strategy. That post became the most downvoted comment in Reddit’s history, a record unlikely to be broken in the foreseeable future.

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 (Below) 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.

As for the content of the offending post in question, the EA Community Team account was trying to justify why, based on its beta, Star Wars: Battlefront 2 players had to use the same currently to unlock characters and to open loot boxes.

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

stated an EA community manager in response to a player’s question on the matter. “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.”

Players who were around at the time probably remember the post and the fallout from it (and EA’s loot box practices in the game). The “pride and accomplishment” line inspired dozens on memes and even showed up in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and most were rather unflattering towards EA. Eventually, the backlash forced EA to remove the loot boxes from the game at launch. Despite this however, Star Wars: Battlefront 2‘s sales missed the targets set by the company, something which it blamed on the loot box controversy.

The whole incident left a stain on EA’s reputation, marking the company as a greedy one looking to add loot boxes in every game in the eyes of players. This was made worse by the a company representative defending them as “surprise mechanics” that weren’t a form of gambling to the U.K. Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.