Electronic Arts have “won” the title of “Most Downvoted Reddit Comment” thanks to their response to the Star Wars Battlefront II loot box controversy.
For those unfamiliar, Star Wars Battlefront II was plagued by lootboxes and micro-transactions giving those who paid a clear advantage. It was later discovered that unlocking everything would take around 4,500 hours, or $2100 in DLC and micro-transactions.
While all in-game micro-transactions were later removed, the outcry was so great, it was one of the contributing factors to starting the debate by governments whether to ban or regulate lootboxes.
On November 12th, 2017, the EA Community Team representative of the Star Wars Battlefront subreddit posted the fateful comment. It was in reply to a topic where a user complained having to pay around $80 to unlock Darth Vader.
“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.”
The Reddit community then proceeded to execute Order 66 on the post’s score. Posts on Reddit can be “upvoted” or “downvoted”- usually so the community can help curate which posts help discussion or should gain more attention. Posts with a higher score appear higher up in the thread.
On September 6th, user “-amasha-” posted a thread on the Star Wars subreddit, noting that the 2020 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records had added the aforementioned post as the “Most-downvoted comment on Reddit.”
While the above image notes the post had 683,000 downvotes- As of this time of writing, the post currently sits at -667820 points. Curiously, the post also has several “awards” (a way for users to gift Reddit Premium membership and Reddit Coins to each other awards for what they have posted).
On June 11th 2018, Reddit user “KingErth” compiled the results of the top 10 most downvoted posts on Reddit into a graph.
At its peak, EA’s comment received 658,667 more downvotes than the second most downvoted comment- just over 28 times more than second place.
Even when based on the research conducted by the “List of Comments” subreddit (featuring more comments in the top 10 with higher results)- EA’s post was miles apart from those those asking to be downvoted, political discussion, abusive behavior, and other incidents of a community reacting to posts made by moderators or representatives of a brand- usually making excuses for a controversy or even being abusive to them.
In the past, EA has also won the Golden Poo award two years in a row– voted by blog The Consumerist as the worst company in America in 2012 and 2013.
