A recent post by an EA Community Staff member on the company’s Command and Conquer message board outlines changes to their policy, stating their intent to link a gamer’s forum account to their EA gaming account. Why does this matter? Because EA is planning on banning those who get banned on their forum from their games as well.

The post by the EA Community Staff member can be seen below:

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.

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 =)

While I am not a fan of fanboy or over the top argumentative banter, this still seems like it is a bit much. Is it just me, or is there a hint of corporate greed in this disciplinary action? Maybe it’s the smiley face after the “harder to get a new serial key” comment that is getting under my skin, but I am not agreeing with this move.

They are essentially saying that if you have the financial means to be an asshole (i.e. you’re rich bitch), you can be as nasty as you want as long as you keep feeding their corporate machine. I have a bad feeling about this.

Aterthought: What do you think of EA’s policy change? Are you happy to see them lay the smack down, or do you think they are going about this all wrong?

Source: forums.ea.com

UPDATE: The community staff member comment has apparently been contradicted by an anonymous EA rep. I’m not sure if I buy it though. Read More…

UPDATE 2: C&C Community Manager has issued an apology for his previous statement, stating that it was all just a misunderstanding. Read more…