Bioware.com forum user v_ware apparently isn’t a big fan of EA, and he probably didn’t change his mind after his Dragon Age II account was suspended.
He said he was banned from the game for 72 hours because on an external website detached from the actual game, he referred to the game’s publisher as “the EA devil.”
Usually in a story like this, we’d expect there to be something more behind the scenes that Mr. v_ware isn’t telling us. But in fact, Bioware has come forth and apologized, saying the ban was an “error.”
The story goes that v_ware posted a message on Dragon Age II’s official forum that read, “Have you sold your souls to the EA devil?”
Not long after that, he was greeted with a message that his Dragon Age II account was suspended for 72 hours for “profanity.”
When v_ware complained about not being able to play his newly purchased game, Bioware responded with a rather blunt response, saying, “Because the BioWare community now operates under the same umbrella as all EA Communities, community members here have all explicitly agreed to abide by and be governed by both sets of rules. Consider it an added incentive to follow the rules you say you’re going to follow … End of line.”
But then the story started going viral, and wouldn’t you know it? Bioware stepped up and made a complete change of face.
In a statement sent to Kotaku, Bioware community manager Chris Priestly said that in this case, “There was an error in the system that accidentally suspended a user’s entire account. Immediately upon learning of the glitch, EA restored the user’s macro account and apologized for the inconvenience.”
At least the company did finally come forward and admit that it overreached (ahem, I mean, it made an “error”), but the idea of banning someone’s ability to play a game just because he said something mean about the game’s publisher on an online forum is pretty unsettling.
