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…

This is probably going to go down as our easiest giveaway yet. In honor of our newly launched forum, simply sign up and introduce yourself in the area titled — “introduce yourself“. Everyone will immediately confirm your greatness, welcome you to our community with open arms, and your name will be entered into a drawing to win two — no, make that three videogames of your choice for the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, or PC!

Contest ends midnight on March 31, 2008. If you have already introduced yourself in the forum (and you are not a member of the ripten staff) then you are already entered! So start thinking of the three games you want, because you are so damn lucky you are bound to win. Happy trolling!

Update: I decided to make things more interesting — why the hell not. If you refer your friends to our lovely forum and they mention your name in their introduction — not only will they be entered to win, but your name will be entered into the drawing again!! How many friends can you refer? As many as you want, so get your ass moving!

Join our forum and introduce yourself right now

As you can tell, we’ve made some changes to the look and feel of Ripten recently. Read on for a list of some changes and a chance to tell us what you think.

The most obvious change is to the aesthetic and color scheme. We think this new look is pretty eye-catching, and if you click around through the different consoles, you’ll see a different color background for each. We’ve also added a new retro section, where we’ll put stories about anything from previous console generations. This includes everything from the Atari age all the way to the PS1 and Xbox generations.

In addition, we’ve widened the viewable area for stories, to give our articles a little bit more breathing room. A handy A-Z game index will let you jump straight to the titles that you want to read about. But the best new feature for Ripten will be our forum — a place where you can go and shoot the shit with other readers about our breaking news, in-depth reviews, and first-look previews.

We hope you like the redesign, and we’d like to know your opinion. Leave us a comment below to let us know what you think of the new look! Thanks for reading and keep checking back for daily updates in the world of game reviews, interviews, previews, trailers, events, and news.