This might just be me being nostalgic and reminiscing about the good ol’ days of the simple act of purchasing a video game, but I miss the simplicity of it all. You walk in, look at the cover, see an anthropomorphic bandicoot or a purple dragon on said cover, pay and walk out. Nowadays, there are user agreements you have to agree to before you even play the game and unwritten rules about the game you could potentially be playing. Sometimes these unwritten rules cause serious detriments to a company’s reputation or severe backlash from the pre-existing fans of “x” game. Electronic Arts has had a mixed history with gamers but what I have seen this year has completely changed my views of the company.
I was fortunate to come across an interesting topic on the GameTrailers.com forum about mistreatment one customer had with Electronic Arts. The original poster in the forum referenced RockPaperShotgun.com as their source. “We are receiving information from a number of gamers who have received forum bans for a variety of reasons who are finding they're unable to play Battlefield 3 (or indeed any other game tied into the EA user account), and worse, when they try to contact EA for help sorting this out, they are either ignored or told it's tough.” One user caused enough of a sting on the Electronic Arts forums that he was permanently banned from their site. But what was not expected was that he was unable to play any of his games that were tied to the account that was banned.
RockPaperShotgun.com vouched for James (the permanently banned user) saying that, “he was polite and courteous with the EA Live Chat person, who had pointed him toward the email form to request further help… the next day he received an email in response saying, ‘Please note that your account [email] has been permanently terminated from the Electronic Arts Online service for violating the terms of services. The account will no longer be accessible in any way, and all property, items, and characters associated currently are or will soon be deleted.’" Upon further reading, it appears that James had discovered that there was a glitch that charged his account for a game that he had already paid for and that was what he was trying to get fixed.
So how do we know the claims about how he was courteous and polite to the EA Live Chat person were true and not the exact opposite? It just so happens that James made his own account on the website to explain his side of the story to the other users saying that they didn’t believe he was polite, giving justification for his ban. James explains that, “the guy on EA chat was simply not interested, at one point they even offered me a 20 percent off coupon on Origin (EA’s digital download store) just to try and get me to be quiet and accept the ban (this was when the ban was for 72 hours, the permanent ban email came through the next morning), I never accepted it.”
We have now reached the point in the video game industry where you can pay up to $60 for a game and still not technically be the owner of it. I am simply raising awareness for this atrocious abuse of power that EA constantly wields. Sound off below with your opinions of Electronic Arts and whether you think their actions against James were justified.
