Due to my own experiences with Customer Support at EA I tend to believe this, though they didn't threaten to ban me, they just played "pass the buck" and then started ignoring me because I was inconveinent. I've told the story before, and can do so in detail if anyone is really interested, but basically it revolves around a bad product key, a correction, making me create seperate accounts to use the new key, and then never bothering to follow through on letting me merge them so I'm left juggling multiple EA/Origin accounts.
That said, I do kind of see the issue. Launches of these kinds of products never go smoothly, which is kind of stupid because after all these years you'd expect companies to have started taking them more seriously and ensuring a smooth launch. If nothing else I'd expect there to be an "open beta" sufficient to simulate a launch and put stress on the servers before they start charging money. Over the years people getting POed over the state of online game launches have gotten increasingly focused on rallying to demand refunds if the product is crap/non-functional right out of the box. Plenty of launches accross the entire field of gaming have come with mass demands for refunds, and it's become pretty typical for companies to refuse to honor them, after all if they do they are likely to lose a substantial part of their profit/user base before the game ever launches and works. They generally figure people will calm down and be happy afterwards, so they might as well act ambigiously in the short term since they are not likely to be called on it.
To be honest I can't think of many cases from any company where someone has demanded a refund during a bad launch and gotten one. The customer service guy acting like he did probably also had a lot to do with tons of people demanding the same basic thing at around the same time.
Really the only way this is going to change is if a lot of people with the same problem decide to all make an issue even after the game is fixed, and decide to pursue it legally. Something that is difficult with the increasingly common EULA-rider that users will not engage in collective legal actions, forcing them to entirely self-finance and pursue seperate cases.
It could also change of course if companies started taking their launches more seriously, but I don't see that happening. Betas have increasingly turned into a sort of "free preview" than an actual testing mechanism, and there has been increasing concern about letting too many people into the betas, especially as marketing has increasingly become about deception and hiding the facts of a product until release. To be honest it doesn't seem many products undergo anything close to proper pre-launch stress testing anymore.
