Questions Still Swirl Around EA's Origin Bans

[Zer_]

it's no secret that EA's customer support is absolutely abhorrent right now. With the release of Origin they had to hire a lot of new employees, and a large number of them are inept, or they just don't give a shit. It's definitely EA's fault for not hiring the right people, or not hiring competent people ahead of time to account for this, but hey, that's how the business world goes. Cut costs, even if it means you're pissing off paying customers.

As for the whole Forum ban issue, it's a load of bullshit. EA needs to make both accounts separate and that's that. Publicly traded game developers / publishers is the worst thing that happened to the industry.

They need to ammend the EULA, and they need to re-evaluate previous bans before shit hits the fan even harder. Unfortunately, no publishers have ever really been good at that aside from Valve.

 

[Aroth Khashar]

Yes, I know BioWare is owned by EA, but they retain as much (if not more) autonomy in their domains as Blizzard has in its.

EA is all over the bioware website, links et all.

There is not one activision logo or advertisement on the blizzard website family.

Vivendi owned blizzard and then bought out activision, not the other way around.

The presence of logos doesn't really mean jack accept that they are a part of EA as a company. If/when you go onto the BioWare forums (or the SWTOR ones) the developers, forum moderators, and community managers all work for BioWare. Yes by extension of EA's ownership of BioWare that means they also work for EA, but that doesn't change the situation.

By EA forums I am referring to this site - forum.ea.com/eaforum/categories/list.page

By BioWare forums I am referring to this site - http://social.bioware.com/forum/

Every time I read/hear of someone getting permanently banned from an EA game for a forum comment it has been on a game forum that is not affiliated with BioWare. Also, the few times I have read of someone getting banned from the BioWare forums (see second link) and it locking them out of a game, the matter was resolved within a day or two of contacting either a community manager or a moderator on the forums, or by contacting BioWare customer support directly. (And yes, BioWare customer support is a different entity from EA customer support. I have had the two shuffle me back and forth between them on an issue before.)

 

[cieply]

Maybe we should teach EA a lesson and STOP BUYING THEIR PRODUCTS.

Seriously, it's not that hard. Next time they produce something you WANT, remember that it is exactly that, something you want, not NEED. We can live without it.

I dunno, I'm pretty sure I NEED the next dead space game.

I really wanted BF3. But I stayed away from that out of principle. Turns out I'm perfectly happy with RO3. But, I'm afraid I actually do need to see how Dead space 3 ends. And I'm probably going to need to get Mass Effect 3 too. Although I don't tend to buy ME games until they're in some ludicrous sale... Hopefully on Steam.

Funny thing, EA scraped team working on deadspace 3 and deadspace 3 with it. How's that about "dunno"?

 

[MaximumTacos]

I just recieved the ban hammer for 72 hours for an incident that happened to my son on Battlelog. Seems a EA server admin banned him for using the m98 sniper rifle and going 30-0 on a tdm..

Here's the kicker; he wasn't banned from just the server but from Battlelog/Origin itself.

After along heated discussion with EA SUPPORT,they told me he was banned for bad mouthing a EA ADMIN in a game server , not in Battlelog itself. I was like WTF? You mean to tell me you can be banned for talking smack in game? Yes , you can according to Ea support.


This isnt the outragous part. For some reason , a seperate Origin account (mine) that was on the same pc and tied into a different email was banned also. So 2 accounts was banned over 1 incident that happened in a game server? Yup , turns out Origin scans your pc and looks for Ea games , and other Origin accounts. So screw up on one... and even your offline accounts that are on the same pc will not work .. .Now thats one bad a$$ ban hammer.


As of right now, we have 8 EA titles we bought and paid for that we cannot play until this ban is lifted. -ONLY 1 of them is actually using the same Email that is associated with Battlelog /Origin. Now if this doesn't scare the average gamer away from Origin titles... I don't know what will .

Positively terrifying.

 

[boboon]

if this happens to a lot of people, and every single one of them took it to small claims court to get their purchase money back, ea would be forced to either send a rep out to all sorts of different courts all around the country for 50 dollar lawsuits (and it'd cost more than that just in travel $) or be a no show and lose via default judgments, causing them to lose money no matter what they choose.

The only problem with this is that the ToS of Origin, is that unless they have broken a law, you can't take them to court. And the ToS also state that EA controls the license and can remove it if they want... And if they remove the game, the contract is still legally binding.
http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBTERMS/US/en/PC/ See section 2, 3, 9 , 11 and 20... These effectively say, if you do anything, even if you quote someone else, you are responsible, and if any of EA staff don't like it they can remove all your products... and you can't do anything... AND can't use any other EA service ever.

Also for all the people out there complaining about waiting for 3 days to get all the content, it took me 3 weeks for EA to admit that they screwed up and didn't give me the Correct CD Key for BF3, and another week for them to get a correct one... and they only recently removed the Standard edition from my Origin account (It went No Game -> 3 weeks pass -> BF3:SE -> 1 week -> BF3:LE -> Week or so -> BF3:SE removed... And SE was affecting Battlelog, as Origin prefers the Standard edition over the Limited edition)

 

[Furycrab]

Whatever happened to just calling customer support? No, not the lazy electronic means, actually taking a phone, dialing, using dialect. I don't have the full picture, but if you were wronged, just damn call. The people behind customer service of most establishments don't even know what is Reddit, much less know about your campaign.

The only people there likely to hear your message are from things like Marketing and PR, but no one likes being the one to tell someone else they were wrong, so it will take ages for them to trickle down the departments and at the end of the day, all you'll have done is made a memo appear at customer service for EA saying something like "try to be careful with the ban button".

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but in this case you are basically yelling in the wrong ears. Call them, hit zero if needed, ask for managers if they say they can't do nothing and THEN if it still goes nowhere threaten with media... I'm sure at some point down the line someone will either listen to the fact that you've been wronged or just give up and give you back your account anyways.

I swear there needs to be college classes on how to deal with Customer Service, at the pace we are going the next generation will be posting Vlogs whenever a package gets lost in the mail.

 

[Tomwyr]

EA... when I read up a little about their new toy origin I decided to completely cut my relationship with them, no more EA games for me, not that I was a big fan of them anyways.

After some hiccups I finally got this mail :

Thank you for contacting EA Privacy Policy Administration.
I apologize for the improper handling of your previous request. Per your request, your EA account has been deleted.
Take care,
Amy S.
EA Privacy Policy Administrator