Thursday, October 30, 2008

Look Out - EA Forum Blacklisting Gets You Banned From All EA Games

Kotaku points out a new policy at EA games: If you're banned from any EA forum, you're banned from all the EA games you own. It's explained in the quote below made by EA Community Manager Aaron Kaufman (aka APOC).

"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."

As with many things EA does, I can't figure out what their end goal is. Drive away customers? Anger as many gamers as possible? Maybe they are helping the average gamer to save money in these hard times by encouraging them not to buy their games.

5 comments:

Ball Lightning said...

It is sad when forum moderators can ban you from playing your games you rightfully bought.
Here is just one sad case when someone got banned for commenting "badass" on a creature in the sporepedia:
http://sporedum.net/2008/10/28/badass-ea/

Anonymous said...

That's pretty sad, is there no process to appeal this sort of problem?

Ann Asher said...

There's been no update to the Kotaku article, and the writer said s/he would update when they get a reply from EA. I guess we'll find out soon, and if not, I'll look around and try to figure out what a banned user can do.

Ball Lightning said...

--Itwy said...
That's pretty sad, is there no process to appeal this sort of problem?--

That guy tried, but they denied him and gave him a ban of 30 days from the game, up from his original 7.

Anonymous said...

That's really obnoxious of them, I'm glad I haven't bought any EA games recently. I don't know if I can hold out from every game they may ever make, but I can say this sort of thing is points against them on games I might consider buying.

 
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