Maybe the Internet really is serious business - being banned from Electronic Arts' support forums may carry more serious consequences than previously thought. According to a post in the Red Alert 3 forum by 'eeapoc' (Apparently, C&C Community Manager Aaron Kaufman) EA is implementing a new policy that will tie your forum login to your Master EA Account. If you get hit with the ban hammer for misbehaving in a forum, you could find that you are locked out of your purchased games as well.

"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 =)"


Neither the Forum Help or EA's Terms Of Use page list criteria for behavior that may get you banned. EA have been contacted for comment and we will update as soon as we hear word on whether the company really plans to take away your ability to play a game you purchased for not playing nice in a forum. Re: New C&C.com Website Q&A - What you need to know about the launch [Thanks to Pugnated for the tip]