Greetings Readers!

Over the last half dozen years or so, I have been known to be quite vocal when it comes to my extreme dislike of Electronic Arts and what it is doing to the gaming industry.  From the fact that it rushes buggy, unfinished games to store shelves, to the lack of support for many of its games compared to companies like Blizzard, to the insane DRM, there is very little about EA that doesn’t piss me and most gamers off.  While those issues will continue to piss me off till either I die or EA does, tonight’s news takes the cake.  Now, if you get banned on any EA forums or in any EA game, you are banned from all EA games and forums.

I will admit that EA has been doing better at making quality games that aren’t part of a series that has a new version every year, they still have not changed their greedy attitude.  From the DRM meant to prevent piracy (which actually does nothing other than screw the honest consumer), to milking the various sports games for every dollar they can get, it is now apparent that they still aren’t rich enough.  Apparently, they have now decided they can make more money if they sell you a bunch of games and then can ban you from all of your EA games based on a single incident.  In this post from Apoc, the Command & Conquer community manager, since gamers profiles are managed under a master EA account, if they are banned in any of the message boards or on any of the games, they are banned on everything tied to the master account.

Essentially, if you break the rules and get on the bad side of anybody at EA, all of your EA games will basically turn into a poor excuse for a paperweight.  You might still be able to play the single player in some games, but you will no longer have multiplayer abilities in your games.  This is complete BS.  While I should have expected this from the greedy bastards at EA, I honestly never thought they would go this far.  Not only is this a cost saving measure for them, but it makes it easier for them to kill off support for older games.

If you have many EA games, you better guard your account with your life as if it gets stolen and somebody uses it to get banned, you will be screwed out of the hundreds of dollars your paid for their games.  It is stuff like this that is why I don’t let anybody have access to any of my accounts, I dont care who they are or why they need access.

EA really needs to rethink this policy.  How are people going to learn from their mistakes if the punishment can lead to their banning from all games?  If I got banned from one game, I would quickly get the hint and not act as such in other games.  There is no reason to make all games useless because of a single incident.

Until EA decides to pull its head out of its butt, where it likely stores all its mountains of cash, gamers have very few options here.  My only recommendation at this time would be to keep all your games under different master accounts so that if you get banned on one game, you dont lose your gaming ability on everything.  I would also recommend taking the fight to EA.  Post your thoughts about this on thier forums, email them, call them, sue them and everything else in between.  I recommend the last option as it seems lawsuits are the best way to get a companies attention when the only thing they care about is counting the mountians of cash they have from creating bad products, much like those infomercials you see on tv at 3am.

Forward this to every gamer you know as the more informed people are, the better!  We must unite and fight EA!

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