Okay, so not so long ago Electronic Arts had come under fire for an unscrupulous measure that sees forum misconduct on the EA forums resulting in bans from the forums and from the attached Origin account, including restricted access to purchased games.
The forum/Origin ban has created quite a stir, enough for EA to actually respond to the situation explaining their stance on why forum bans will result in you being banned from accessing your Origin account, and subsequently your games and paid-for content. If you aren’t pro-EA you probably won’t like their response.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun has been adamant about keeping up-to-date on the Origin bans, and after diligently seeking a response from EA they finally got one. The question was pretty simple: why are people getting banned from accessing their Origin account and games on their account if they’re being banned on the forums? And here’s the response from EA’s head of corporate communications, John Reseburg…
“With every game and service EA offers, we take the satisfaction of our customers very seriously. We discourage cheating and strive to maintain a high level of integrity in both our games and our forums. Therefore when someone violates our Terms of Service, we are forced to take actions that can include suspensions and other measures. We do not take those decisions lightly – however the integrity of our services and the satisfaction of our customers requires a clear set of rules…We have listened to our customers and are planning a policy update which will include more equitable rules on suspensions – we want to make sure the time fits the crime. As with all technology updates, these changes take some time to implement. Meanwhile, we urge any user with a question about suspensions or our policies to please contact us at (866) 543-5435 so we can address their specific situation.”
I was pretty sure I already predicted an update to their end user license agreement update out of this whole debacle. Of course, it’s going to take some time to implement and alter the changes. I imagine the update will be similar to when they updated the EULA to let people know that Origin does spy on your PC and collects and sends data back to EA.
Nevertheless, the above statement from Reseburg still doesn’t really address if forum account bans will no longer affect Origin accounts and all purchased content attached to the account, but the wording certainly doesn’t hint at it at all. Instead, it seems to imply that most of the policies that result in a ban may be levied so that users aren’t banned quite as easily, though the bans may still span from a forum account to the user’s Origin account access.
As already mentioned, this was the typical corporately influenced PR response we were all expecting and they were guaranteed to spout out in a scenario such as this. It would have been nice if EA at least pretended to treat the situation as if they were addressing real people and not cows that can be milked of digital dollar bills.
Regardless, we’ll keep you posted on any further updates regarding Origin and the bans. You can check out the full report on the findings over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Long live the corporate entity of gaming *sigh*
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