EA getting Stricter with Players that are Banned
Posted by Altered Confusion on October 30, 2008
Apparently EA means business when they ban you for misconduct on their forums. It has been disclosed that EA will be tying your forum account to your Master EA account, and if you misbehave you may find yourself not able to play your EA games.
Here’s a quote talking about just that.
“Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you’d actually be banned from your other EA games as well since its all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It’s all one in the same, so I strongly recommend people play nice and act mature.”
I wonder if this is EA’s way of coping with the fact that players are still screaming and yelling about Spore, and EA’s DRM practices. If this is their solution, there might be an interesting backlash that occurs. Now if this is a move to stop people being complete douches and not trying to convey their message intelligently, then that’s a different think completely.
Altered Confusion™ 
shabibity said
I think most people can agree, some people on the internet just suck. If companies want to do something about that and enforce some common decency when individuals cross the line then I don’t see anything wrong with that. but according to this blog which quotes an EA Forum moderator, simply talking about their DRM will get you banned from even playing single player versions of spore. If this is applied to all EA games equally, then it would seem you would lose the ability to play all EA games you own that requires your EA account.
I wish these big companies would realize that DRM doesn’t prevent piracy, it encourages it. If you’re going to treat us like criminals we might as well play the part. Instead of banning people for telling you about a problem they have with your product, you should try and come up with a real solution. The people you’re hurting are not the ones pirating your games, they’ve got the cracks to bypass your crap anyway, it’s the people who payed for it.
alteredconfusion said
Well in that case I believe that there is going to be a backlash. The one thing that EA has going for it is the fact that they own what seemed to be half the industry, so you know that they are going to have good games from time to time. What really frustrates me is that they then get a superiority complex about it and screw the people who are actually willing to pay for their product.
I’m not saying that starting today or tomorrow that everyone is going to boycott EA products, but if you start pissing off enough people there will be a wave that will start, and it will continue to gain steam and all that wonderful business will go elsewhere.
I have to say that I was never a big fan of EA to start with, but this is a new time low for them. Don’t silence the voices of your consumers, try to fix what is happening.