Enormous Fabricated Ability: Boosting in the Battlefront II Player Community

This paper examines "boosting," a family of collusive player practices in which participants cooperate to accelerate in-game rewards such as trophies, levels, and league ranks, using Star Wars: Battlefront II (DICE 2017) as its primary case. Its central argument is that boosting reveals a dissonance between two goals in competitive play: victory, which is winning a match, and ability, which is achieving easy dominance over other players. Boosting pursues ability at the expense of victory, creating what the author terms a ludo-ludic dissonance, in which the practice simultaneously counters the game's designed competitive intent and accelerates goals the design itself encourages.

The analysis identifies three related playstyles that deviate from the Battlefront II community's notion of "playing the objective": boosting itself, which includes organized group methods and paid boosting services; killstreak maximization, in which players prolong matches to record long kill sequences for online audiences; and celebrity-bullying, in which viewers stream-snipe popular content creators. The paper argues that these practices stem from the game's "super-agonic" design, which includes features that turn ability development into a grinding task. Unlike other titles where playing away from victory has diluted a "toxic meritocracy," boosting in this context is portrayed as harmful, inflating impressions of dominance and encouraging unrealistic expectations of gameplay among audiences.

The study draws on forum threads, YouTube comments, and videos from the English-speaking Battlefront II community, with a few prominent creators as focal points. Its monolingual English scope is acknowledged as a limitation, given the game's multilingual player base. The work is a qualitative discourse analysis rather than a quantitative study, so its findings describe patterns and perceptions within a specific community instead of measuring prevalence or effects across the broader player population.