EA's 'sense of pride and accomplishment' — Reddit's most downvoted comment (2017)

On 12 November 2017, with the highly anticipated game 'Star Wars: Battlefront II' in early access, a player on the r/StarWarsBattlefront subreddit complained that, despite paying for the game, unlocking iconic heroes such as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker required either tens of hours of grinding or spending additional money through the game's loot-box-driven progression system. The official EA Community Team account replied that 'the intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.'

Reddit's reaction was swift and overwhelming. Users interpreted the phrasing as a tone-deaf corporate defense of a system widely seen as 'pay-to-win,' and downvoted the comment on a scale never before seen on the platform. The reply ultimately accrued hundreds of thousands of downvotes — figures cited at the time ranged into the hundreds of thousands and the comment eventually surpassed 600,000, dwarfing the previous record-holder — and the phrase 'sense of pride and accomplishment' became an instant, lasting meme.

The backlash extended well beyond Reddit. Mainstream and gaming press covered the record, organized refund and boycott efforts spread, and the controversy arrived just as several governments were beginning to scrutinize whether loot boxes constituted a form of gambling, particularly given their appeal to younger players. Under the pressure, EA first slashed the credit cost to unlock top heroes by about 75 percent and then, shortly before the game's full retail launch, temporarily disabled in-game purchases entirely — an extraordinary reversal for a flagship title.

The comment's notoriety was later formalized when Guinness World Records recognized it as the most downvoted comment on Reddit. That certification turned a single customer-service reply into a permanent landmark of internet culture and a shorthand, invoked for years afterward, for corporate misjudgment of an online community's mood.

For Reddit, the episode is a defining example of the platform's collective downvote functioning as a coordinated act of consumer protest with real commercial consequences. It demonstrated how a single ill-judged corporate message could become a globally reported event through the site's voting mechanics, and it is frequently credited with accelerating the broader reckoning over loot boxes and monetization in the video-game industry.