No Dragon Age 2 for Suspended BioWare Forumite - UPDATED

[5mj7R7yf4Dwr3gdZyyu9PeGNwYjlNrjzuh3iTXQG]

Now, EA's ToS clearly states that when EA terminates your account there's no refund. So, when it comes to digital distribution, or any other form of distribution where you can't return the game and playing requires "dialing home", the publisher can cancel their part of the deal, but you can't...Is this legal?

Only when actual federal or state laws apply. As of this time, EULA's and TOA's are not legal documents and not enforceable in any court. To get them enforced EA would have to send you an actual contract to sign with legal witness to hold it up.
That would be a lot of legal bills.

samsonguy920 has it right. So far, it appears that EULAs[footnote]Note, no apostrophe on plurals, even with numbers and acronyms. Apostrophe only on possessives and skipped letters.[/footnote] have only seen enforcement between corporations, and when regarding copyright laws. We've not yet seen cases between companies and consumers.

Of course, in order for a consumer to see justice, one might have to sue and fight a mean unkindness of lawyers.[footnote]Murder of lawyers? Parliament of lawyers? Betrayal of lawyers? Slaughter of lawyers?[/footnote], and these companies count on the cost and intimidation that comes with having one's day in court. If you're lucky, activist organizations might fuel your defense in order to set some end-user friendly precedents.

The whole point of this thread and this affair is the fact that contemporary DRM schemes have instilled in the companies a lot of power, and the responsibility to use this power only for the purpose for which they hold it, namely, they can stop you from playing if they have strong cause to believe you are an unlicensed user, and no other.

If you pirate their game, EA can deny you access to that game.
If you complain about EA's DRM, that doesn't justify them killing your license.
If you troll their forums, they still let you play.
If you make crank calls to their tech-support, nope: you still get to play.
If you draw mustaches on the EA logo and post them on 4Chan...that's right. You still get to play their games.

Only if they think you're pirating their game (and have just cause to do so) can they cut your gameplay.

Only.

Once that changes, for any reason, it not only proves that EA cannot be trusted with that level DRM, but that no company can be trusted, since, y'know, EA might buy them out, or the iron-fisted CEO may move to a new company and enforce his dickish policies there. It would mean that Microsoft cannot be trusted with the Vista / Windows 7 kill switches they currently hold.

Which is why I genuinely think EA never came across this as a problem (namely someone being blocked from activating or playing, due to a forum moderation) before, and their webmasters have just realized that forum status and account status need to be separated...and maybe (hopefully) lighter penalties for moderator action enabled (e.g. probation, suspended from thread, etc.)

I suspect also, that it is only because it caused such a ruckus that they responded so quickly, but this is still progress.

 

[technotica]

sounds like he answered his question to me.. its all EA's fault. /thread

but we dont want any trouble now do we? so it must have been a "mistake"

 

[carpathic]

". He claims the reason is that he asked, presumably in a forum post, if BioWare had "sold your souls to the EA devil?" It's a pretty thin reason to suspend someone,"

I've been put on probation here for WAY less than that. A mod found a post I made three days earlier and decided I didn't have enough content. I was congratulating someone for passing the 1000 post mark.

I just thought it was pretty funny that this ended up here.

 

[death525]

I saw this same story on another site and they dug further into it.
I t turned out he was banned for calling the moderator "f***ing idiots" in those words exactly not for claiming EA sucked.

 

[Darkauthor81]

Funny how the comment that got him suspended is given credence by Bioware's response.

I was just thinking the same thing.

DON'T BUY EA GAMES!!

 

[Ajna]

IMO if someone speaks an unpopular opinion on a forum it should not infringe upon anything else but access to the forum.

Maybe you misphrased that, but from what you said, that sounds like a very Orwellian forum.

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

It's not clear how this jibes with Stanley Woo's explanation that the loss of game access was a valid part of the suspension, except possibly that some forum transgressions do warrant it but v_ware's in particular did not.

If this is the case, Bioware really has sold its soul to the EA devil. And that devil is a lot meaner than I had thought previously.

Also, the legality of letting people buy games and then preventing them from playing them due to such a ban seems really shaky to me.

 

[Callate]

That's a good way to end up with an empty forum fast. "Mistake" or not, who wants to risk losing the ability to play the game they paid real money for?

 

[reachforthesky]

This is what the gaming community gets for being apathetic about DRM. I don't care about why it happened, who was responsible, or that it was an erroraccident. The fact that someone can, and are legally allowed to, deactivate a game you have payed for should have had everyone up in arms since the invention of SecuROM.

 

[Thedarkness77]

As long as it fxed and he can play the game, you should not buy 60 dollar games online when you can get them in the store.

 

[Ellen of Kitten]

yaknow, this is probably the one place I'd advocate piracy. I know you're looking at me with those scowling eyes, but hear me out. I'm thankfully a good soul, and shouldn't have to worry about such a thing. But if I drop money on a game, a single player game, my standing in the community shouldn't have a say in the matter. It's isolated. I know the above article is reporting on a system error that banned the guys everything- but still, that's overkill terminating offline single player experiences.

If that happened to me, I would at that point consider turning to game hacking/pirate friends to find a way to get to play the game. Heh, piracy to play a legit copy of a game. Now that's insane.

 

[SyphonX]

There is probably an untold number of people with banned games, that either don't know it because they don't play the game anymore, or didn't have the luxury of getting their voice heard.

Either way, it's pretty pathetic.

It reeks of some sort of fascist, Orwellian, worship the corporation 'or else', nonsense.

 

[HerbertTheHamster]

There is probably an untold number of people with banned games, that either don't know it because they don't play the game anymore, or didn't have the luxury of getting their voice heard.

Either way, it's pretty pathetic.

It reeks of some sort of fascist, Orwellian, worship the corporation 'or else', nonsense.

Human revolution really fits into that description

OT: I don't really know what to think of Bioware anymore, I've seen another thread on their forum about a guy getting his PS3 version of the game banned due to a forum ban. All I can say is END OF RINE.

 

[Aureli]

Things like this are the #1 reason why I refuse to buy games digitally. If I'm going to spend $40+ on a videogame, there's going to be a disk involved so they can't tell me whether I can play or not.

 

[crazypsyko666]

This is utter bullshit. If it was an in-forum service and broke the terms of agreement within those forums, then the moderators have every right to remove those features. As it stands, He has purchased the game separately, which have nothing to do with the forum he's been writing in. This would be like getting suspended from school and the school taking away your car keys. The school doesn't own your car, they have no right to take away your car. You bought the car with your or your parents money, only they have the right to take that away.

The more I hear about bullshit like this, the less incentive I have to buy games from these publishers, which is kind of sad, because I like Bioware's games.

Who's up for boycotting EA and Activision?

 

[Sticky Slick]

Pirate the game, and be done with it. You paid for it anyway.

 

[Gaming King]

So saying "devil" is using profanity? Fuck you, EA. Fuck you, BioWare.

 

[Gaming King]

Pirate the game, and be done with it. You paid for it anyway.

Yeah, in THIS case, totally justified.

Fuck digital distribution. Shit like this happens way more often than you might think. Why? Because digital distribution is SHIT and relies entirely on not getting banned, and you can get banned for NOTHING from a LOT of services. Happened to me on PSN. I had shit stolen off my account by some asshole(s) and herp derp, carpet bombed.

 

[Gaming King]

This is utter bullshit. If it was an in-forum service and broke the terms of agreement within those forums, then the moderators have every right to remove those features. As it stands, He has purchased the game separately, which have nothing to do with the forum he's been writing in. This would be like getting suspended from school and the school taking away your car keys. The school doesn't own your car, they have no right to take away your car. You bought the car with your or your parents money, only they have the right to take that away.

The more I hear about bullshit like this, the less incentive I have to buy games from these publishers, which is kind of sad, because I like Bioware's games.

Who's up for boycotting EA and Activision?

Actually, I already don't buy Activision, nor Crapcom. This involves sacrifices like Goldeneye 007 and Okami-den, but it's what gamers have to start doing, and fast, or the industry is fucked except on Nintendo.