This will be a day long remembered.

@Valar81MorghulisAre you telling us that random lootcrate stuff was actually any good? I didn't feel that way.

I think most people agree that the later variant of unlocking it by playing the classes was better in all ways. I don't see anything great in a potentially eternal grind that rewards me with stuff I already have and won't give me that starcard I need for another year. 

Unlocking random stuff one after another would've been fun probably, but the duplicate loot card stuff made me nope out. Glad that it was entirely removed when I returned. I prefer to unlock stuff based on my play time with that certain class, XP and skill, not luck.

They included BB-8 for the same reason as they included the caped Kylo and Palpatine's eternal Sith skin, the movie launches just seemed too good to miss out the opportunity to get new players because of the movies and hype players for the movies in return. That's the whole mystery I guess.

Upon removing the lootcrates, BF II was basically a dead cow for EA because how are they supposed to get any more great money from it after the desastrous launch and microtransactions reduced to cosmetics? It's not like they included another monetization concept, all these new content updates were free DLCs and they probably let DICE made their thing to polish up the image, which kinda worked.

For real, if they had left the game in launch state with lootcrate progression and no supremacy mode I would've never returned.

Mind that DICE had to cluster together all that new stuff in that time, probably knowing that EA was counting downwards on the life of the game.

This game could've been improved much more with continued support, a pause for new content and focus on bugfixing instead, but well, it was in fact EA's decision that this isn't something needed to be taken care of any further. Mind the articles and youtube videos praising the redemption of BF II.

DICE was clumsy and there still has been work to do all the time, yes, but good luck when time and money work against you.