I haven't played the newest Call of Duty, but isn't the progression system in Battlefront II objectively better? Is a big part of the backlash not necessarily the system but the confusion of how roundabout it is?

In a traditional Call of Duty game, you need to achieve X level to unlock a specific perk. This means you'd be forced to level up many times, and earn many perks you don't intend to use, before you can earn your desired ones.

In Battlefront II, each Lootbox gives you enough Crafting Parts to unlock a Starcard, or perk by another name, of your choice. So each time you earn 4,400 credits (or 2,200 if you buy a Hero crate), you essentially "level up" and can purchase a new perk of your choice. While grinding matches can take awhile, the heft of low-level achievements mean that you earn plenty of Lootboxes, or "level ups", right at the start. In the Quicklook, Dan has about 220 Crafting Parts, meaning he could unlock 6 perks of his choice that he has chosen not to.

This means that if you want to unlock the Killstreak Infiltration perk for your sniper, you can do it right off the bat. Want the Ion Turret for your heavy? You don't need to unlock 3 different grenades you won't use until you get it. Want to unlock a more damaging main cannon for your Starfighter without an ability upgrade your always forget to use anyway? Go for it. When you account for achievement points, the random cards you get from Lootboxes are actually just a bonus compared to the Crafting Parts you get.

Does the system have problems? Sure. Duplicate cards should upgrade your card level, not refund you some credits. Level 3 and 4 card upgrades become very expensive and can require quite a bit of grinding (perhaps the only case where spending real money would have made a big impact), but the difference between level 1 and 4 cards, especially the Trooper ones, are never substantial. The inability to buy Hero cards with Crafting Parts feels like an oversight. Could the game do a better job of telling you that buying multiple level one cards is what allows you to unlock extra perk slots for a specific class? Sure.

But on the whole, isn't the ability to pick whatever perks you want right off the bat instead of waiting to hit an arbitrary level requirement the better way to go?

I haven't played a Call of Duty game online since Modern Warfare 2, so maybe the time it takes to hit 1st prestige and have everything unlocked has gotten worse, but if the time to unlock everything in Call of Duty is shorter than the time it would take to unlock everything in SWBF2 then I'd say Call of Duty is doing things better. Maybe having the choice of what you want up-front is an early benefit, but the scale of cost for the upgrades gets much steeper as you mentioned and the early star card benefits also have their limits. If we are continuing to make parallels between the two progression systems then the character unlocks should also be included as they are comparable to using a kill-streak or whatever they're currently named in Call of Duty WWII. Character unlocks where a part of the frustration surrounding SWBFII stemmed and even with the reductions in cost the number of them available, each character not being available on each map and their associated star cards to rank up and the comparison begins to fall apart quickly.

Like I mentioned previously my experience with the Call of Duty franchise is likely out of date so it may have changed significantly at this point. I'm also the kind of person that didn't ever prestige because the thought of going through the process of unlocking everything again for a new icon next to my name was really stupid.

Nah.

follow the money

Well now I know I should never play Call of Duty either. Thanks duder.

They both fucking suck. But anything with randomness is worse. Just let me play the game like I want to from the start.... I'm all on board for being nickled on cosmetics, but goddammit I have no patience to jump through hoops to get a gun I enjoy using.

I would rather have a linear progression system than one based on random drops. It works for ARPGS and co-op stuff like mass effect 3 but if you lose a competitive edge because someone got a lucky drop that sucks worse than losing that edge because someone put in more time. (both suck though and progression should be left out of competitive multiplayer IMO)

I feel like Battlefront II is finally making people recognize that vertical progression systems are inherently unbalanced. It seems what most people's gripe is though, is the fact that it takes too long as compared to the systems they have been accustomed to in Call of Duty or Battlefield, which compounds the balance problems even further.

Like, I paid 60 dollars for this game, why can't I use a red dot sight on the gun of my choice out of the gate in Call of Duty? Oh yeah, vertical progression.

Is it for sure true that everylootbox gives you enough crafting components to buy a card? I thought part of the commotion was that crafting materials were random from the boxes; you could either get lucky and get a good amount or end up with none. I know that duplicates will give you crafting materials but even that requires a fair amount of investment in the system for the most part (unless you get lucky RNG and all that).

@coryukin: But the well studied endorphin hit of getting enough kills and unlocking the Skinner box with the ACOG scope in it for my M16A4.

People like having carrots on sticks; I do too (hell, I quite like the systems in Shadow of War, lootboxes be damned). Hearing the progression system of BF2 described like three times it still doesn't make sense to me, though. It just sounds way too convoluted and complex. But hey, I'm probably just an idiot.

Overwatch was a breath of fresh air for me. I liked that I just wanted to play more of it because I liked the game and how it played, not because I was chasing after another unlock.