Because I know how much you love having to scroll and click when accessing things. *grin*

Strike the first comment, actually, because there will never really be “fair” on a company owned and moderated forums, which, back to your original article, sucks.

As an aside we both know that there are jerkoffs that will fly off the handle and deserve to be banned because they lack any sort of tact or social etiquette, but just like EA’s famous DRM, it is the legitimate users that tend to get screwed in EA’s “efforts”.

It’s not like EA is kind and understanding in any other area, so I can’t assume forum management would be any better.

1) TOS/EULA’s are *typically* available online before purchase. Not that anyone would read them before buying anyway, (or read them once they are bought) but that is the counter argument to the pre-purchase TOS/EULA woes.

2) I am supposing you would have to be a really, really big asshole to get banned off the forums in the first place. Being anonymous on the internet isn’t a free pass to treat minimum wage customer support personnel like they are pieces of skunk terd. If you treat them like a piece of shit, because you are mad at EA, then you deserved to get banned. If you break forum rules on purpose, then yes, you should get banned. It really isn’t that difficult to get a point accross without regressing to a complete jackass, and typically, if you try it being polite, logical, and intelligent, CHANCES are (big emphasis on ‘chances’) your issue will get resolved faster and by much happier people. Send your Steak Dinner back after yelling at the waitress and they will spit in your food. Politely explain the issue about the steak and it gets fixed right.

The blurred line here is consumer right to product VS service. We buy stuff, we want to be able to use that stuff – because, hell, we BOUGHT it. Seems as though video games aren’t commoddities any more, they are being treated as “services”, and since it isn’t a necessary service for survival it can be yanked at anytime.

Buyer beware, and you would think EA would have learned by now. I still think it is a vocal minority taking big issue with this (although it should be a vocal everybody) and obviously EA isn’t too worried about it.

Prediction: All games from EA in the future move to an account/authentication model as their only form of DRM.

This may be a small distinction in the shadow of such a draconian policy, but their invasive DRM makes it an even larger problem than it would otherwise be.