Star Wars Battlefront 2 has spent the last few weeks leading up to its official release under fire, largely for its nonsensical progression system that heavily promotes the spending of real-world money for in-game items that improve multiplayer performance.

$100 USD = 12,000 Crystals = 60 Trooper Loot Crates

Numbers of Items May Vary

4 Items: 26 = 43%

5 Items: 34 = 56%

Star Cards Breakdown

Common (White): 152 = 72.7%

Uncommon (Green): 35 = 16.7%

Rare (Blue): 3 = 1.4%

Cosmetics: 19 = 9.1%

Crafting and Credits

Crafting bundle (45): 34 = 56%

Crafting bundle (60): 26 = 43%

Let's Talk About Duplicates

As of last night, a statement was issued stating the Electronic Arts is disabling premium currency in Star War Battlefront 2 until appropriate changes can be made. And because of this we've since updated our final Star Wars Battlefront 2 review Right before that announcement, we decided to see exactly what the value of real-world money in the game looked like, so we spent $100 USD and recorded the whole thing. Please watch the video above for our full conversation and the actual opening of the boxes, and our findings from the raw data, but you can see the basics below:Why did we decide to only open Trooper Crates? Of the three crate types (Trooper, Hero, and Starfighter) the Trooper crate is the most likely type to be purchased by players, since it contains cards for the four base classes that you'll be playing the most.There's a lot of RNG (randomness) involved with loot crates, but the first and largest is the number of items you get in the loot crates. Over the 60 Trooper loot crates we opened, every one gave us four or five items, and the split was pretty close.We ended up getting about four more crates containing five items, than the crates that contained four items, but my gut tells me there's probably a 50/50 chance between four and five.Star Cards are what Battlefront 2 multiplayer progression is all about. You need them to improve your abilities for classes, heroes, and ships. The catch is that you only earn "levels" for each class, hero, and ship, by collecting Star Cards for them, which allows you to equip more Star Cards, and so on and so forth. Here's our breakdown of Star Cards from opening 60 Loot Crates:The most obvious takeaway from these numbers is that three-quarters of the cards you get in a Trooper loot crate are going to be common. Uncommon cards are more infrequent, but it's rare quality cards that are woefully infrequent in crates. Only three of the cards out of all 209 we opened were rare, which is about 1 out of 20 loot crates, and considering rare cards aren't even the highest quality of cards, that's not enough.The rest of the stuff you get in loot crates are forms of currency. You CAN get small bundles of credits (which are laughably small since they take up a spot that could have been a star card), but you will ALWAYS get a bundle of crafting materials, which is great, because crafting becomes the main way to advance in the late-game progression.Strangely, crafting bundles come in two different denominations, 45 and 60, which doesn't seem necessary, but what about this system does?We ended up getting more bundles of 45 crafting units, than bundles of 60 crafting units, but once again my gut tells me this is a 50/50 split on a long enough timeline.This biggest problem with loot crates is that they become less valuable the more you use them. This is for two reasons:

1. The more cards you own, the more duplicates you're going to see coming out of loot crates. And since duplicates only return a paltry number of credits, instead of crafting materials, they have very limited value.

2. Since most of the Battlefront 2 multiplayer progression leans toward crafting epic cards, which requires 480 crafting materials to upgrade a rare card to an epic card, it takes more and more loot crates to upgrade a card from common to uncommon, from uncommon to rare, and from rare to epic.

Common (White) duplicates: 50

Uncommon (Green) duplicates: 6

Our Total Net Gain

Common (white) cards: 152

Uncommon (green) cards: 35

Rare (blue) cards: 3

Cosmetics (Victory Poses and Taunt) cards: 19

Credits (from duplicates and bundles): 15,800

Crafting units: 3,090

All this means that the more Star Cards you unlock, the less valuable loot crates become. Which sucks, because they're the only way to progress once you've completed all the achievements.From a nearly fresh Battlefront 2 account, we got 56 duplicates from 60 Trooper crates -That's CRAZY!But it gets worse. Since duplicates only refund you 200 credits for a white card, and 400 credits for a green card, you're essentially paying to get nothing. There's a totally plausible scenario in which you spend 4000 credits for a Trooper crate, and get three duplicate white cards and a 60-unit crafting bundle. Which means, after factoring in the 600 credits you get for those duplicates,. And the fact that becomes more likely the more you play is downright shameful.After spending $100 on 60 Trooper loot crates, this is what we walked away with:Since Electronic Arts have decided to temporarily disable premium currency in Star Wars Battlefront 2, you're not going to be able to spend money on these crates for the immediate future. But this is still good information to inform you what you're going to be getting when purchase a crate using in-game currency, and for future reference when premium currency comes back.

Brandin Tyrrel is an Editor at IGN. You can talk to him on Twitter at @BrandinTyrrel