If you own the games Spore or Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 and have been a malcontent on the associated forums, an EA forum moderator says that you may not only be banned from forum activity, but you could be banned from the games that are linked to your Master EA Account.
EA forum moderator eaapoc stated:
"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 recommend people play nice and act mature."
This is not the first occurrence about the threat of banning of individuals from their game accounts due to inappropriate forum behavior. When the controversy about the DRM (digital rights management) scheme on Spore surfaced, many Spore forum members complained about it.
During these incidents, a forum moderator responded by threatening to ban members who discussed the topic. EA later clarified its position and said that the moderator was out of bounds and "absolutely not true or in-line with EA’s moderation policy."
One EA forum member, Faylor, challenged the legality of such a ban by saying:
"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."
This recent attempt by forum moderator eaapoc to take things into his or her own hands will no doubt, be disciplined for threatening EA forum members and trying to set company policy.
[via shacknews]
