In what appears to be a totaly unfair practice, it appears EA are banning people from accessing their legally purchased copies of Dragon Age 2 if they were vocal about their displeasure regarding the game over at the official Bioware forums.
One particular case in point is of VWARE, a user who got banned for accusing Bioware of “selling their souls to the EA devil”. He agreed that it was fair to ban him from the forums for 72 hours, however was shocked when he realized that he can’t access his Bioware social account and activate his recently purchased copy of Dragon Age 2.
A Bioware moderator responded to the poster's complaint on the Bioware forums.
Please review the EA Community Terms of Service, particularly sections #9 and #11. There are two levels of enforcement here:
1. BioWare community bans are forum-only and can be for as little as 24 hours. These bans should have no effect on your game, only your ability to use all the features of this website/community. these bans are handed out by BioWare Moderators as the result of our travels around the forum and/or issues reported by fellow community members.
2. EA Community bans come down from a different department and are the result of someone hitting the REPORT POST button. These bans can affect access to your game and/or DLC.
Consider it an added incentive to follow the rules you say you're going to follow.
The case raises questions about the legality of preventing people from using a legally purchased product.
By preventing a game owner from playing their game EA may be violating the implied warranty of merchantability. Under international sales law a seller must provide goods fit for their ordinary purpose. By preventing the user from playing their game EA is violating the ordinary expectations that a buyer would be able to play their game.
It should be noted that VWare's case is not the only one to have been reported on the Bioware forums.
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A moderator has closed this comment topic for the time beingYou know your reply was to a post almost 18 months old, right? That event was widely covered in Spring 2011, and the player (who had made the kind of rant and conveyed the kind of threats that would get someone banned from the Nexus, btw) got access to his game(s) after a couple of days, and EA has revised it's policies and processes to handle this sort of situation better.
Now if you had been commenting on last month's scattershot ME3 multi-player exploiter ban (2000+ and counting!) it would make more sense...
Side Note: EA acquired BioWare in Oct 2007, so almost five years ago now. DAO development was barely begun, and ME2 hadn't even started.
The restaurant analogy is slightly off the mark. If you don't like the food, don't eat it. If they want to make you pay for the meal you only tasted and then decided not to eat, it becomes a different matter.
Still, when offering criticism on games (or any product or service for that matter) can be done in a polite and to-the-point fashion that offers insight into what a person thinks are areas to improve upon to make a product/service better or more customer friendly. I don't see the need to start bashing and thrashing and slinging mud. If you feel ripped off, don't commit your emotional fury to a written response. Try to cool off and later voice your disgruntlement by stating why to you feel ripped off.
If I don't like a mod on the Nexus what would be the point of me venting a flow of verbal diarrhea, instead of stating why I believe there might be room for improvement, or that the mod does not live up to my expectations. I might suggest that I find that the Short and Long Description are too vague concerning what the mod does or does not do. If a mod has certain requirements that are not listed, it seems more appropriate to point out that this needs to be added, than going off on a personal rant against the modder.
So if the person who wrote the comment on the BSN is using all sort of profanity to get his point across, it seems a ban from the BSN is an appropriate response.
To have his game access denied is a bridge too far -but as I hear, it was remedied.
Having a disagreement about anything is bound to happen. The way one goes about it however, can be very different. It can be conducted in a civil fashion, offering constructive criticism Or by personal attacks and insults. There's a huge difference between political correctness and common courtesy.
I loved the Total War series, but haven't bought any since they switched to STEAM and never will. I wouldn't have bought Dragon Age if I couldn't play the game and the DLCs without having to get authorization (beyond the one time activation for the DLCs).
MMOs are a service and ongoing costs for access are part of that model. Stand alone games are a product. When I buy a product, then that product is mine within the bounds of fair use and copyright. For me that is non-negotiable and I am willing to forgo games that otherwise sound interesting.
If a game says online activation required, I might buy it. If it says online account required to play, I won't
Cracked Magazine (of all places) had a good piece on the The 6 Most Ominous Trends in Video Games.
#4 says in part :
The difference between the games you played as a kid and the games you'll be playing in the coming years is the difference between owning a car and having to pay for a cab every time you want to leave the house. In the business, they talk about transforming video games from a packaged goods model to a service model. So instead of buying something and taking it home to use it, you pay smaller amounts, monthly, forever.
#5 in part:
That's the thing -- it's not just about privacy or Big Brother, it's that these online services f--- up constantly. Even before the PSN network took, well, everyone offline, you had horror stories of EA blocking somebody from playing their own single-player game, because they used offensive language on EA's message board.
I had my Xbox Live account locked (unable to make any purchases of games or videos) for 72 hours for suspicious activity. What was the activity? I bought three episodes of Battlestar: Galactica at two in the morning, then came back at 5 a.m. to buy more. What, is that the behavior of anyone other than an upstanding citizen? Were they somehow able to detect that I was nude at the time? And that I kept shouting at the television that I wanted one of them Asian robot girls who light up red when they touch my boner?
Whatever it was, Customer Service couldn't lift the lock, even after I called and assured them that it was me and that the purchases had been made on purpose. It was in the wake of the PSN outage, and they were erring on the side of caution. They couldn't risk Sony's nightmare.
That's your future, gamers. Take a good look at it. It will work like this:
A. Eventually, all gaming must be online in order for publishers to make money;
B. It is next to impossible to secure gamers' online data without many annoying security measures;
Therefore,
C. All future gaming will come with many annoying security measures.
Their bottom line depends on it. But that leads to a different issue ...
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-most-ominous-trends-in-video-games/
1. Anonymity breeds a sense of safety from reprisals
2. People are able to say anything to anyone with near impunity
3. Any social pressure attempt to clean up behavior usually devolves into an all out flame war.
So yes it's great to see that finally something's being done. Maybe people will start to understand you can't do or say anything you want without there being consequences. Hopefully more sites will follow suite.
Thus in the above EA Banning my account and preventing me from Registering my game is completely separate from my purchase.
Whether it was right or wrong, whether it was a mistake or not, is largely irrelevant EA/Bioware is not the sole merchant outlet for the products they publish.
So I ask you fellow players, shouldn't someone start a poll and let everyone they know vote and let every one of their friends to vote? That is the best way to achieve success and connection to bioware I hope.
Elm signing off
My conversations with BioWare staff seem to indicate that the ban was not done by, or because of, anything to do with the BioWare Social Network (the Forums). It was an EA Support Tech who overreacted to what was (according to my source) some pretty explicit, and somewhat threatening language from what was (obviously) a very unhappy customer.
If someone claimed to be ready to launch a denial of service or spam attack against your site unless you acceded to their demands, and seemed serious about, and capable of, doing it, and you knew could cut them off from access to your environment, what would you do?
Again; no one got banned for saying they didn't like DA2 on BioWare's forums, no Forum (or even BioWare) staff were involved in the action at the time, and an overreaction by a junior person, quickly corrected by the organization is the overall theme.
Yes, accidents happen.
But this isn't like losing a piece of paper or signing the wrong form.
One has to exercise critical thinking and ask some very simple quesitons.
Namely... HOW did a moderator of an internet forum have the ability to get a customer's game access blocked? If the moderator had to toss his "ban request" up the ladder as it were, how did ANYONE involved with the forum part of the business get the ability to 'accidentally' block a customer's access to his or her purchase?
And an even simply question:
WHY is there ANY mechanism in place to prevent customers from activating the games they've purchased?
I am far less likely to believe it was some form of "administrative accident", not because I'm of a "rahrah fight the power, corporations are evil by default" mindset, but rather because I am capable of logical thought and possess the ability to call bulls*** when I see it.