This story came up a while ago when a moderator on Electronic Arts' official forums decided to shoot his mouth off about how a banning from their forums could result in a ban from playing Spore. Now, its back in full effect, this time Shacknews is posting that again, another moderator is saying the same thing.
Quote:
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 reccommend people play nice and act mature.
So it looks like it wasn't an isolated thing after all back when Spore dropped.
It's probably going to happen to the people who revealed that Chris Hecker is responsible for the complete fuck up fragglerock crap that spore is.
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This is an interesting development. I can see how it all ties together with accounts / forum posts and does illustrate further reaching repercussions as the online dynamic and community participation become more and more uniform. I wonder if its as easy as just making a new account and re-registering your product or if you would have to then "transfer ownership" of the account through the EA bureaucracy to do that and still lose your previous character profile.
I could see something like this resulting in a lawsuit based on how far the terms of agreement for the use of the license for your purchased copy is vulnerable to censorship and revoking the "privilege to play." While this sort of thing is welcome with those who are banned for using online exploits, getting banned for a trolling forum post seems excessive but I do not know the specifics so its hard to comment either way as far as whether this is justified. It does set a rather disturbing precedent and would also make me reluctant to participate in any formal publisher run community forum tied to my gameraccount. Although I doubt anything I would post would be a problem and trolls are annoying and should feel some of the pain of their actions.
I call bullshit. EA won't ban people from playing a game they bought. Not after the fiasco that was their DRM policy.
It seems clear to me that the top brass at EA had to learn a hard lesson about treating their customers as customers, and not criminals. It's just taking a long time for that to filter down to the grunts with the bansticks.
And then developer ask why people don't buy their games and instead they just pirate it..
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I strongly suggest people just let the EA forums die. EvAv, Somethingawful, and the penny arcade forums fill this niche just fine, and without the opportunity to get banned from playing games that you own.
Additionally, you know what would probably fix getting banned from a game you paid for? Cracking it. I'm not sure if that's ironic in this context, but it's certainly sad.
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Just another example of how buying a PC game from Electronic Arts is just a rental.
Exactly, you purchase license agreements and activations, then, once you're beyond all the draconian bullshit, you get to play a port, if it even works and doesn't require a patch (that will either be delayed or never even made).
Why yes, I bought Mercenaries 2 for the PC, how did you know?
lol what the fuck is this about? So I guess everyone that complains about lackluster games from EA will be at risk for being banned. Oh well I guess they thought this was the easy way out from avoiding another storm of upset customers after the Spore release. Oh well I guess I will never go to the ea forums anymore then.
