While I've spoke with high hopes before of Electronic Arts turning themselves around, a second instance of one of their forum moderator's acting 'overzealously' has me considerably less optimistic.
The first came last month when a mod threatened users with risk of banning for talking about Digital Rights Management and Spore, a hot topic at the time. A team member of Maxis later countered the statement, saying there was no issue with such discussion, and closed the thread. One would hope that would be the end of that, but alas..
Now, this instance was by no means a threat, which is nice, but just on its own, what's stated is likely worse than before. Speaking about the new Command & Conquer website and forums and the respective changes to come with them, a moderator or team member for the game, going by the name eaapoc/APOC, stated the following:
Well, its actually going to be a bit nastier for those who get banned.
Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you'd actually be banned from your other EA games as well since its all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It's all one in the same, so I strongly reccommend people play nice and act mature.
All in all, we expect people to come on here and abide by our ToS. We hate banning people, it makes our lives a lot tougher, but its what we have to do.
Those banned will stay banned, but like most other internet services, its not that hard to create a new fake e-mail account. However, its a lot harder to get a new serial key =)
Avatars should be back within 2 weeks of the launch.
-APOC
Note that it's all well and good between him and the users up to this point, but immediately following this we see a post from 'nodsolidergirl' who states quite bluntly: "APOC = FAIL". 'Marzillius' takes it even farther, saying: "Well, that makes it. I'm never buying an EA game again. I don't tolerate being banned here and in the same time being banned from all EA games that exists. That is just wrong."
Shacknews was tipped off to the happening by reader Pugnate. He asked, "What if some moderator goes off on a power trip? Does he seriously have the right to block access to software you legally purchased?" Writer Chris Faylor responded:
To reiterate my previous stance, I certainly sympathize with the plight of those that have been tasked with watching over a game's official forums. But I really can't believe that EA has allowed this to pop up once again.
Apart from scaring posters into submission and causing even more controversy, I can't think of one reason to even bring up the idea of removing a consumer's ability to play their $50 game because of a questionable forum violation.
I can understand removing a user's posting privileges--I'm sure this has already happened multiple times--but the idea that there aren't varying levels of privileges--ie, separate posting and game access--to these accounts is an obscene oversight.
The implications of preventing owners from playing the $50 game they legitimately bought because of something they posted on the forums are mind boggling, and I really, really can't see this policy flying once the press runs with it and the higher-ups are made aware.
What do you think? Is this going too far, or is it a reasonable rule? Will this affect your purchases from EA?
