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Gamer Banned From Dragon Age II Over Forum Post
RogueyWon writes "Kotaku is reporting that a Dragon Age II gamer banned from BioWare's forums for an allegedly inflammatory post has been locked out of the (singleplayer only) game for the duration of the ban. This is a consequence of EA's backend systems, which link forum accounts to the accounts that players use to access their games. This would appear to be a worrying new development; while trolling forums has led to bans from massively multiplayer games in the past (arguably with some justification), the extension of the principle to singleplayer games, where an abusive player cannot affect the enjoyment of others, must surely be a step too far."
Submitter here - thought I ought to make a quick reply:
On your first point - the effect of the ban was to prevent the user from installing (and hence playing) the game. It wasn't that they prevented the user from buying the game (which would have been stupid, but arguably less evil) but rather that money had changed hands and the user wasn't able to access the game due to the ban. Given the space limitations on story titles and summaries, this felt like a fair summing up to me.
On the second point, I had first hoped, when I read TFA, that this was due to a backend bug. However, the response from Bioware makes it fairly clear that from their point of view, this is "working as intended".
Your ignorance and know it all attitude is appalling.
Digital purchases offer many advantages that physical media does not have.
I own over 200 games on Steam. I can play any one of them anytime. I have purchased well over 1000 games over the course of my life - except I can't find majority of them, the rest have scratched up disks, lost CDkeys, lost manuals and hard to find patches.
I can go on travel bring nothing but my laptop and play any game I own from the hotel room.
I have reached the point where I REFUSE to buy physical media because of the inconvenience of actually using it. Need the disk to play, need to carry disks with me for every game I may wish to play, need to manually patch everything.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
Except that you're wrong. Follow the first link in the summary, scroll down to the last post:
1. BioWare community bans are forum-only and can be for as little as 24 hours. These bans should have no effect on your game, only your ability to use all the features of this website/community. these bans are handed out by BioWare Moderators as the result of our travels around the forum and/or issues reported by fellow community members.
2. EA Community bans come down from a different department and are the result of someone hitting the REPORT POST button. These bans can affect access to your game and/or DLC.
Item 2 kinda says it all, doesn't it?
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley