A long-overdue change is finally here. At least, that’s what Battlefield 6 announced in the main menu as part of its latest update. But apparently, the developers have since changed their minds.
Battlefield 6hasn’t had it easy: The shooter faced enormous expectations before its release, which DICE was then only able to partially fulfill. Since then, the developers have been trying to keep various groups of players happy, even though those players sometimes have conflicting expectations.
Not an easy task. But with a bug in the latest update, the shooter has now upset virtually all of its fans.
Communication Disaster
Anyone who activates an XP boost in Battlefield 6 needs to hurry: A half-hour boost lasts exactly half an hour after activation, not for the half hour we actually spend in a match. So if it takes us longer to find a server or we take a short break after a round, we lose valuable time and waste our experience bonuses.
Ever since the game’s release, fans have been demanding that XP boosts only count the time actually spent in-game, and not in menus or on loading screens. And indeed, the developers seemed to have addressed this request with the latest update. The following message was waiting for us in the main menu:
XP Boosters now count in-game time.
byu/ohzilla inBattlefield
Link toReddit content
A welcome change for many players, but the joy was short-lived. Shortly afterward, the message disappeared, and the official Twitter account explained that sending the message had been a mistake and that there were currently no changes to the XP boosts. On Reddita community manager from DICE added:
We know that many of you have asked for XP boosters to be counted down based on match duration, and we have continued to pass this feedback on to the team. While we don’t have any news on this at the moment, we’ll definitely let you know if anything changes.
Unsurprisingly, the fact that the developers backtracked like this and then didn’t even confirm that they were working on the feature they had accidentally announced didn’t exactly spark enthusiasm among fans—rather, it left them utterly baffled:
This is the worst PR department I’ve ever seen.
What a joke.
Can they trip over their own feet even more?
I wrote today that I hadn’t expected such a consumer-friendly move from EA and that they get a thumbs-up from me.
As you can see, this consumer-friendly measure has, of course, turned out to be nothing more than a “mistake.” What a load of nonsense, and what lousy decision-makers!
It remains unclear exactly what lies behind this PR disaster, as the developers aren’t revealing any more details. Essentially, however, only two scenarios are conceivable: Either the feature is planned but had to be postponed at the last minute, or it was simply announced too early. Or, DICE has changed its plans at the very last minute and now intends to keep the XP boosts as they currently function.
The fact that the developers are continuing to keep their fans in the dark is only causing confusion and anger among players to grow.
