How can they ban him from playing his games? An internet connection is not required to play any BW games.

Isn't this how Steam works? If your account is banned for some reason you lose access to all your games, single-player included. Why is it more of an issue when Bio/EA do it?

The focus here is not what he did, but what EA can do.

Imagine if I called you a ___ ___ ____ ____ ____ _____ _____ and got myself banned from these forums. Would it be justifiable to also prevent me playing Morrowind and Oblivion, for that same infraction, with no other cause?

The media and a very specific license is what is being sold in the store. You are purchasing the right to put the companies software on your computer.

There is a separate use license that you must agree to during the installation to actually use the software.

If you refuse to accept, or violate their license, they have every right to deny you access to the software You are still free to install and remove the code and resources to and from your machine as many times as you'd like, and that is what you paid for when you purchased it.

How can they ban him from playing his games? An internet connection is not required to play any BW games.

Isn't this how Steam works? If your account is banned for some reason you lose access to all your games, single-player included. Why is it more of an issue when Bio/EA do it?

But calling a company "devil" on their own forums still is a sure way to risk your access to that board...

Isn't this how Steam works? If your account is banned for some reason you lose access to all your games, single-player included. Why is it more of an issue when Bio/EA do it?

Actually, DA2 requires you to log in once to your EA/Bioware account, to verify your legal purchase. After that, you'll not need to log in at all. But this one time binds the serial to your account, thus locking you out of the game in case you are banned from the game account part of your EA account.

...or when your purchases are found out (with a fallible mechanism, mind you) to have been not quite legal. Bad credit cards or something like that.

Good question. Steam should get the same flak for it, IF we're talking about a user being banned from posting in the forums.

Despite that I got a BioWare account, I was just wondering of something then. If I bought Dragon Age 2, I would not be able to play it at all since I cannot be online with my 360?

Actually, you never have to log in. You just have to enter your serial key during the installation process. The first time you run the game you see a login menu but you can just press escape to ignore it and play the game. You won't have access to any DLC or online features though.

I wouldn't have a problem if he only got suspended/banned from the forums, but stopping him from playing a game he bought with his money that is single player is not fine. If I called Bethesda the devil on these forums, sure, I may get a warning from the mods, but there's no reason why they should stop me from playing Morrowind or Oblivion or New Vegas.

OK, so http://www.shacknews.com/article/55656/ea-not-banning-game-access it was all a misunderstanding and forum bans should not deny you game access.

Except enforcing a contract which the buyer never gets to see until he pays for the product is illegal. Good luck trying to return it if you open it and read the EULA during install and decide you don't agree with their terms.

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.

Right, but then how do the out side parties know the truth? You could have called me a whiny [censored], but what might have happened is you creepily started to forum stalk me and threaten my life. Hell even finding a way to track me down through the online steam feature in New Vegas. So they lock you down and the police are on the way. I dunno, and the people watching wouldn't know because neither party can say anything. All they get is the "HELP MY CIVIL LIBERTIES ARE BEING OPPRESSED" angle.

Edit
There comes the logic in that article. A misunderstanding, you people were calling for blood. Sometimes I have to wonder who the "good" guys really are. One mistake and before any party can attempt to say what's going on and you want some blood. :violin:

Despite that I got a BioWare account, I was just wondering of something then. If I bought Dragon Age 2, I would not be able to play it at all since I cannot be online with my 360?

Steam bans do prevent you from playing your Steam games, but those bans are rare and never without reason.

This was a genuine mistake made by an individual. And clearly there was a failing in the system that actually allowed them to escalate this directly to a full lockdown of the account contrary to how it should flow.

This was never an issue that warranted an account level ban (which, I have to call out is incredibly rare in any case), but normally this would never go beyond a temp ban of the forums with zero impact to games. Trying to portray this as a purposeful or vengeful act 'just because' is immature, not to mention inconsistent with how we actually operate if you care to observe.

As I mentioned before this is a serious issue that we need to fix - as in properly fix, as you suggest. It is not acceptable that something like this happens accidentally, even once.

The purpose of this system is not to feed our egos and dangle axes over player's heads in some sort of power trip - it is there specifically to protect players. To maintain some structure and order to our communities so they don't degenerate into what many other forums look like, and allow you to have a place where you can have a reasonable discussion, or ask a game related question without a some kind of explicit picture being thrust in your face, and yes - in very extreme cases to distance persistent, deliberately malicious individuals from other players IF necessary as a last resort (or at least until they realize it, cool off and get their act together).

Still, that person is supposed to be able to continue to play offline. The goal is to close off the online features where this extreme measure is needed (again, this should be extremely rare). But what we realized with this incident is that while you can completely keep playing offline with an existing game, you can't register a new game since when you login to register the account comes back as invalid. This is new for us, and not intended.

Anyways, long story short (as its late here) - before we rush in with our torches and pitchforks, we need to properly figure out what happened. That will take some time to sort out.

In the meantime, what I've already heard is that the EADM team is going to start working on a fix for game clients to ensure that players will at least be able to register and play offline, even in these rare extreme scenarios. That won't be an overnight fix, but it's a start.