f13.net

Posted here (http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Giant-Realms-Cool-Blog-for-Attractive-People/EA-Invents-Entirely-New-Form-of-Evil-re-Spore-CC3#comments)

In short:

For future titles and currently Red Alert 3 and SPORE, if they ban you from the forums, you can't play your game.

lol

Is this even legal? This has got to be stretching the bounds.

I guess they saw what dissenters could do, with the mass-vote-spore-a-1 on Amazon and decided that it wasn't worth worrying about. Now they're going for the gold.

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/201105/mother_brain_nes.gif)

On one hand, this has to be one of the most blatantly retarded and illegal policies I've ever seen a game company make.  I'd take this to court in a second if it happened to me, or baring that, would immediately resort to firebombing the homes of EA employees.

On the other hand, I think its actually kind of funny to see a forum take such measures that they can cause real monetary loss to you for being a retarded duchebag on the internet.  Might actually make the forums decent!  Plus, I'd actually pay to see the the reaction of various forum retards when they use it on them.


Hmmmm.

I believe they're saying you can't play your game ONLINE. I don't recall logging into Spore and I'm pretty sure you don't have to log into RA3 just to play the single player.

I think this is AWESOME.

The more you tighten your grip, EA, the more customers will slip through your fingers.

They did almost the same kind of thing back when they ran the official forums for UO. A ban there would ban your account. And a single account ban would automatically kill every UO account attached to that credit card.

I'm still waiting for Blizzard to do this.

As someone who doesn't douche it up, I'm only concerned about this On Principal.

I would never be affected by this, and will laugh at anyone who is.

They'd lose 99% of their subscribers in two days.  :awesome_for_real:

Way to over exaggerate. Jesus. Thats just blowing it WAY out of proportion. Be more realistic. It would take 3 days.

... and this was a bad thing?

I'd say a significant number of them are too stupid to operate forums. Those guys will be safe forever.

Generally, it wasn't but it was very difficult to get banned from those forums. You had to be a major asshole.

This doesn't seem to be the case with the Spore forums though. For a while all you had to do to get banned there was talk about the forbidden topic of DRM.

I'm of two minds about this concept as well.

Yes, it's legal--at least until we get more case law behind EULA and Terms of Service agreements. There is no "Right to be a Douchebag" inherent in a purchase, and it's about time people begin to realize that. Have to give EA props that they feel they are secure enough financially to put their foot down regarding ToS, EULA, and just "be nice to others if you want to be in our community and play our game" enforcement.

In some ways (for argument's sake at least) it could be considered ethical--at least for those that respect the ToS, and others with regards to the use of forums. Now, the various rumors of being banned for talking about DRM (in a constructive way mind you), and other extremely arbitrary reasons for banning are going way over the line, but as I said above, your $70 doesn't buy you the right to be an asshole to others. For those that do "play by the rules", and are generally acceptable in the game forums, this could be viewed as someone looking out for them.

Of course, it's going to be a failure of epic proportions in our entitlement based internet society. At least the class action lawsuit soon to follow if they enforce this will help to close down the ambiguousness of Terms of Service enforcement.

I think this is important - if your ability to play the game you've bought online is dependent on the whim of some forum mod who may or may not have had a bad day, especially when there's likely to be no easy way to contest a ban, then you're going to get some mighty pissed off people.

They backpedaled... (http://forums.ea.com/mboards/thread.jspa?threadID=457006)

"His bad". "flame moment".

Right. I'm sure he invented it from whole cloth in the heat of the moment.

ur doin it rong

I think somebody with deep pockets really needs to bring a case law challenge against overly ambitious deployments of EULAs and refuse any offer of settlement. Sooner or later, there has got to be a line drawn in the sand or games and maybe other digital media are just never going to be capable of assuming their rightful place in the cultural future.

Let's imagine that in the late 18th Century, print publishers had asserted a right to control all printed reviews, discussions, reactions, satires and other work created in response to a written work that the publisher owned, and let's imagine moreover that somehow it had been technologically possible and economically feasible for them to exert such control. This may sound like a fantasy, but the first part isn't a hypothetical. This is precisely what publishers and some authors tried to do in the early history of mass printing and the evolution of copyright, to exert control over all citations and references to a work which they owned, to control all discussions and derivative content. It wasn't technologically or socially possible for them to do so, and thank god. Without that, we wouldn't have anything remotely resembling the vibrant and hugely complex expressive culture that we have today--nothing like modern literature, art, films, etc.

People who maintain forums are totally entitled to manage discussion in those fora as they see fit, though I'd argue that "best practices" always involves the widest, most diverse conversations that don't descend into pure douchbaggery. Publishers of software are totally entitled to enforce norms of play in multiplayer environments. But crossing those streams? NEVER cross the streams, Venkman.

The loliban are the awesomest terrorists.

No its not legal and as a developer you need to stick your expertise into developing game and not law.  What EA is doing here will be a lawsuit and they will lose.  This is a property rights issue now since they are moving the goal post and crossing the line from virtual worlds to real life property.  It really is just that simple.   Don't give us no BS about ToS and EULA here.  People who bought Bioshock or Mass Effect didn't explicitly agree to this "new rule" upon purcahse of the game.  What EA has done here is retroactively changed a fundamental rule of commerce.  That rule being you spend money for property that is assumed to work as advertised.  To say other wise is either intellectually dishonest or it shows a severe disconnect between developers like yourself and the people who buy your games.   I think its time more people who think like you lose their jobs in a severe consumer backlash against the industry that apparantly underappreciates them.





In no way can this be considered ethical even by the greatest stretch of social morays that make up our laws.  The simple fact of the matter is ethics isn't changeable upon whim.  EA is fundementally changing the terms of their service on a whim and they need to be held accountable for it for people didn' t puchase the game simply to be banned from the said game after a spat with EA or after someone at EA arbitrarily decides they don't like what that person is saying.  Again this is a very simple question of ethics.  Its not ethical for corporations to steal from consumers.  Depriving consumers of property rights they legitimately purchased with an after the fact fundamental change in the rules of commerce is in no way ethical.  To defend this in any way or to state that this is in any way ethical shows a fundamental disrespect of the customers WHO PAY YOUR SALARY.  You are in fact advocating the theft of their property rights and that sir is just as much theft as any person who goes to the torrents to download pirated games.





You really don't appreciate your customers at all do you?  In all honesty it makes me sick to think that there are probably a good deal more people like you whose salary I am paying when I purchase video games.  Statements like its an "entitlement based internet society"  speaks volumes for your disregard for us the people who buy your games.  Let me spell it out to you, since again you have missed the point in your shiling for EA.  When the customers that pay your salary purchased the games that support your industry they purchased it with the explicit understanding that they were getting property and liscence in return.  That is how commerce works.   Again I sound like a broken record but consumers purchased games with the understanding that this gave them property and a liscence to play the game.  Moving the goal post here now because you don't like their speech on your forum is not ethical period.  What is being done by EA is nothing more than corporate theft.  THEFT, this is what this DRM crap was originally about wasn't it?  What an irony.

Plaintiffs Davidson & Associates, Inc. d/b/a Blizzard Entertainment ("Blizzard") and Vivendi
Universal Games, Inc. sued defendants Internet Gateway, Inc., Jim Jung, Ross Combs, Rob
Crittenden, Yi Wang, and John Does 1-50. (http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/Blizzard_v_bnetd/20040930BNETDOrder.pdf)


That's pretty on point there regarding enforcement of and application of EULA/ToS. As I said in my comments, until we get additional case law, as much as we (as purchasers) want to claim EULAs and ToS's are invalid, they are valid.


what property exactly?

And the license can be revoked...which is exactly what they are talking about doing (although as has been observed, they are backing off).

Regarding respecting customers, you couldn't be more wrong--in fact, the entire reason it's important to be able to revoke a license in certain cases is because you are protecting your other customers (the ones that are playing well with the rest of your customer base). It absolutely needs to err conservatively, and needs to be a last step of correction, but especially in cases where forum use is part of a product or service, it's critical to be able to protect the interests of correctly behaving customers.

Personally, I think it's ridiculous to tie forum participation with game participation, and would never in a million years recommend a strategy where they were 100% tied with no other preventive measures. A much more appropriate solution would be "bad on forums, muted. bad in game (multi-player), loss of multi-player".

WTF are you talking about?

Actually, there is plenty of case law enforcing shrinkwrap hidden EULA's.

When a corporation does it, it's not wrong.  Commie.

edit: Ack! How did this reply end up in THIS thread? Moved.

No, the Constitution buys you the right to be an asshole. It just doesn't protect you from the consequences of being an asshole.

The constitution say you wont be imprisoned for being a harmless asshole.  No such protection for harmful assholes.

It also says nothing about other people treating you nice when you are being an asshole.

Constitution can't save you from yourself.

This is not a bad idea.  It puts some weight behind the remedies available to forum mods, and game-key bans have been employed by companies before for cheating, harassment, and general assholery.  Those communities are often too large and anonymous to be self-policing like F13, and EA is looking to impose responsibility on the players. 

That said, if they're throwing bans around for speaking ill of the game in restrained ways that's unreasonable.  People go to the developers forums for the express purpose of sounding off about problems with the software.  In the case of EA's new software, the excessive burdens put on legitimate purchasers by their DRM is a legitimate problem that they should expect gamers to be raising on their forum. 

If they're going to kill their community by banning game keys for speaking critically of the software, then they might as well just shut down the forum entirely.  They should create an entire DRM subforum and move those threads to that if it's clogging up their game discussion, and they should address these mass complaints by gamers instead of waving around the ban hammer and telling everyone to go away.

Either way, it's not an issue for me because I won't buy their software due to the burdensome DRM restrictions.

Please note I am not saying that their ToS or their EULA isn't enforceable.  Schild started this by saying that future titles and Spore/Red Alert is going to be under this new scheme ( I didn't realize Red Alert was out, but since its an EA title there is no way in hell I would ever buy it).  The problem I have with it is not the future titles part.  As a person, EA has the right to do anything it wants with future properties, just like I have the right not to buy it from that corporate parasite.  Its the part about titles that are already purchased getting the deluxe anal raping treatment that violates property rights and is thusly neither ethical nor legal.  My point is that the people who bought these titles should not have the rug pulled from under them after the purchase.  Neither should they be forced to accept such radical changes after the sale at virtual gun point, especially if the initial EULA or the ToS did not explicitly reserve the right to have a corporate overseer arbitratily revoke property rights because they didn't like the speech of another.  This diminishes the property value the consumers own and is thus neither ethical nor does it conform to the most basic principles of commerce.  In any other industry someone wanting to alter the terms of a completed sale days, weeks, or even months after money has changed hands would simply be laughed at.

I have a feeling that if you had a crystal ball and told people that EA would do this, they would immediately dismiss you as an idiot and would think even the idea of such an action was simply too rediculous to even contemplate.  Which is of course exactly where EA is.  EA is the finest example of a company getting way to big and jeopardizing the market with the rediculous immensity of its bulk.  They certainly have greatly hurt the PC gaming market and due principally to their immense size are now hurting the PC gamer seemingly every month their name is mentioned.  There is no finer example of a company that needs to be immediately broken up before the next wave of anti consumer bat shit crazy hits.





The materials that came from the box qualifies as property and I would count as an asset their liscense to use the software.




Well if you respect your customers so much Stephen please explain to me the use of the term, "entitlement based internet society".  I ask because its not about people feeling entitled.  When they purchased Spore's Creature Creator for instance they got property in return.  Entitlement isn't the issue at all, property rights is the actual issue.  Again people that have already purchased EA's games did so with the very reasonable expectation that they would be getting a useable game in return.  No one ever told them and I doubt many even dreamed that they would try this overseer forum ban == game ban change.  Certainly the customers didn't know this switch was going to occur when they were baited into buying the game.




If that is how you really felt why didn't you come out and say it.  It seemed to me that earlier you had no problem with it.  I believe you even used the term, "ethical" to give "props" to EA's anal raping of their customers.  Again issues about ToS and EULA are irrelevant.  They are irrelevant because the overseer anal rape wasn't a part of their purchase. 




I will withdraw this based on your clarified position.  However I originally wrote it thinking that you thought such a position was "ethical" instead of the "rediculous" you have later clarified.

Zepp is probably correct.  People have been getting themselves banned from online games for as long as there have been online games, and there have been online games whose developers shut them down, thereby revoking access to all existing players.

Blizzard has acted against hundreds of thousands of World of Warcraft accounts for cheating and dealing in commercial gold farming operations.  Every online game that runs through a centralized, developer run matchmaking system has banned CD keys belonging to players who misbehave online, mostly for cheating.  Blizzard also has a policy of temporary suspensions of game privileges for less serious misbehavior, such as harassment and exceptionally profane trash-talking. Enough infractions can lead to a banned account.

Further, they've stripped PvP gear off of characters who they found had a habit of "afking" in battlegrounds; parking a character in the zone to soak up honor while not playing.  And they stripped arena gear of off players they found had "win traded."

Many other games have similar policies.  None has ever been challenged as far as I am aware.  Games aren't very expensive, and it's really hard to argue that the purchase of a game confers a broad set of rights.  Game companies cannot market their games as broadly as they'd like to if they have no mechanism for punishing certain in-game behavior.  If you go to the movies, and you scream and throw popcorn during the film, and they throw you out, they're within their rights.  People have routinely misbehaved on airplanes when their takeoff was delayed, and they have been ejected without refund or compensation.  The zoo can kick you out after you paid admission if you throw rocks at the penguins.  A nightclub can bounce your ass after you paid the cover charge because you are ugly or poorly dressed.  The weight of precedent supports the banhammer.

What's more, the $60 (at most) you spent on the game cannot create an enduring obligation on their part to keep an online component up and running.  If an MMO fails and the company that makes it goes out of business, they'll probably shut the servers off, and your virtual property will be gone forever.  I have a hard time imagining that any court would force the company to keep the lights on for you.

Your "rule" that a product is assumed to work as advertised is actually an invocation of an "implied warranty," and there is no implied warranty of not pwning your ass with the banhammer for being a douche. 

That said, Zepp is a little off point in thinking that the power to ban you from the game is connected to the issue of the enforceability of a "click-through" or "shrinkwrap" TOS agreement.  The fact that they put you on notice that violation of the rules is punishable by banning bolsters their position, but even if you could establish that your "clicking through" is insufficient to manifest assent to the TOS, the bannhammer would likely be upheld anyway, because there is no implied warranty of perpetual and unconditional video game service. 

The principle argument is probably that the developer has no obligation to provide the service, not that you agreed to be banned.   

It totally makes sense for 20-year-old hourly employees to be able to brick your purchased product on a whim.

We all know that GMs and forum mods are nothing if not highly professional. It's impossible to anticipate any problems with this policy...

... and yet people are unhappy when people are dicks to them on forums and then are dicks to them in-game.

Going, "Well, that's just the internet" really shouldn't keep excusing such behaviour. If people want to move beyond the internet fuckwad theory, there needs to be consequences for actions.

There already is though. You just get banned from forums.

Banning someone for being a dick in-game after complaints have been lodged by other players is very different from banning them because they were banned from a forum by a mod.

I was banned from Waterthread for stating that Homeland Security and Bush were a joke in a thread devoted to politics. Guess it's a good thing I didn't purchase Waterthread: The Game.

And how easy is it for the troll to come back to an online forums? Very. So that's not a consequence of any impact.

If the forum account is tied to the game purchase (which it would have to be for this to even be an issue), then no, a ban is pretty permanent unless the troll buys another copy of the game.  Bricking the game therefore would not do any more or less to stop the troll from posting.

What I find curious about this thread is that the same people who traditionally liken pirating a game to stealing a car have no problem with the equivalent of Honda repossessing your fully paid-for Civic because you were rude on the phone with them.

Once again, I don't think this is a good idea. However, that doesn't change the fact that it's legal in accordance with the case law we've seen so far.

I also think (and my original point was) that while EA currently doesn't have a game where this matters, in some games forum participation is part of the game experience (shadowbane politics, as shallow as they may have been would be one example), where actions on forums could be considered part of game play.

In that case, I think there is an argument for developers being responsible for both aspects of game play, and holding their players to standards in both aspects. Just as we don't see games banning players from parts of game play if they abuse another (they get banned from the whole game), I again see a possible argument for complete suspension/banning.

It's also becoming more and more obvious that several people can't see the difference between debating a topic, and swearing undying resolve to implement and support all possible logical conclusions of that topic simply because someone recognizes the merit of a particular argument or perspective.

To answer your analogy Sam, a better example would be if the DMV/Police replaced Honda, and that the person that your are indicating was driving that Honda on sidewalks, running people repeatedly off the road, breaking the flow of traffic, and otherwise drastically inconveniencing other drivers.

The person is breaking the law, and the entity that has the ability to enforce the laws should do so, especially if it is impacting the experience of others.

Um... no?  EA isn't a government agency, the forum isn't part of the game (your hypothesizing about future EA titles notwithstanding), and being a meanie on the Interwebs isn't in any way comparable to running over old ladies.

You forgot to tell him that the analogy doesn't hold water because Spore doesn't have tires.

Game makers regulate their games' online components and their forums.

I don't know how EA manages its forums, but it isn't hard to buy another EA game if that is all it takes to access the forums since EA releases a lot of titles.

Also, gaming software isn't like a car. This kind of thing is like getting kicked out a sports club you pay membership fees to for pissing people off, then also not being allowed to play for the team anymore. It's not completely out there as a concept in the real world.

This can't possibly be legal and it totally not ethical!  You piss off some unpaid mod who is in a bad mood because he got herpes from his grandmothers toilet seat and you can't play your game anymore?  Someone needs to kick someone in the junk!

It's legal, it has its ethical defences and YOU JUST CALLED HIS GRANDMOTHER A WHORE AND WANT TO KICK HIS INFECTED TESTICLES. You'd be sooo banned.  :grin:

I know of business orientated applications with licenses that cost thousands of dollars a year who would be quite willing to pull the license and blacklist you if they felt you were violating their TOS and being abusive on their forums. For a commercial company to go down a similar route isn't unforeseeable.

As such, the easiest thing to do is not be abusive on the forums. It isn't that hard.

And I also think a lot of this fallout is because it is EA doing it (or maybe considering it, given that there appeared to be some backpedalling). If EA gave out free unicorns, people would see it as a conspiracy to somehow ruin video games involving horses. (Of course, said free unicorns would actually turn out to be donkeys with broomsticks glued to their foreheads, but that's another issue.)

Definitely a much better analogy. Another in that line might be getting booted from an indoor soccer league for verbally abusing the ref, and further having your membership revoked from the club, which indirectly removes you from any other leagues you were signed up for at that same club. You're not getting refunded, and you aren't going to be let back in--and it's both legal and "ethical" (in an abstract sense).

The overall point I am trying to make personally is that the game provider (developer/community manager/whatever) is responsible for the game experience of the entire customer base, not just the guy being an asshole. If the asshole decides he can't play within the rules, and the game provider feels it's enough that it's hurting the game experience of others, they have a responsibility to do whatever they feel is necessary.

Again, I think tying forum ban and game ban together is in 90% of the circumstances a bad idea, but given the right conditions, it's a valid one. As Unsub mentions, this is not unusual at all in some software circles.

Eh.

What it comes down to is that forum jacktards have had zero accountability, and now that it's possible they may now be held responsible for being jacktards, it's only natural they're going to protest it the loudest.  They're not used to having real consquences to their actions (or words, as the case may be).  Note that people that DO mind their manners and DO keep it civil and DO keep it on an even keel don't give a rats ass one way or another, and are probably saying 'About time'.

Act like a jacktard in the movie theater?  Get tossed, possibly banned from the theater. 
Act like a jacktard in a bar?  Get your ass beat by a bouncer and/or possibly the guy you're being a jacktard to.

Act like a jacktard on a forum?  Have your forum account banned.  Make a new one.  Rinse repeat as necessary.

If it went through the way that was original posted, I'd say "Good for them".  Now that they're relaxing a bit, I'm disappointed.

And if they brick your game, you buy a new one as well.  You're agreeing with my point.  Bricking the game does no more or less to stop the troll, because whether you brick the game or just ban the forum account, the troll needs to buy a new game to get back into the forum.  The difference is that in one case you're doing what's necessary to stop the bad behavior for the good of your community as a whole, and in the other you're being punitive just because you can.


I agree, it's a completely shitty analogy.  Buying a piece of software is nothing like buying a physical object.  But if we were having a conversation about piracy the same usual suspects would be defending that same ridiculous analogy to the death so that they could draw a simple equivalence between piracy and theft of physical goods.

I'm torn between my hatred of EA and my hatred of douchebaggy retards. 

And the same entitlement driven children would continue to claim piracy isn't stealing. But we're not talking about piracy, so go pick a different thread please if you want to talk about that topic.

This is a thread of shitty analogies. Simple and plain, there are enough fucking idiots running around, like HRose, who get off on pissing people off repeatedly. When you slap a monetary value on their actions, much like fines that police give out, they tend to think twice. When they don't? They incur a penalty. Holy fuck, it's just like the real world.

I agree that bricking the online component of the game won't stop all trolls from coming back. But it is a much more severe penalty than just banning the forum account. The hard core troll won't worry that they can't play any EA game online if they are willing to burn all those bridges. A douchebag, on the other hand, might think twice the next time they want to insult someone's sexuality on the official forums.

Well, someone earlier up the thread commented that all it takes to get banned from EA's forum is a post about their widely-detested new DRM on Spore, Bioshock, etc.

I don't post on EA's forums, so I don't know if that's true.  But it does make sense that the inconvenience they've imposed on legitimate customers through their new measures would generate outrage on their forums, and it doesn't strain credulity that they might engage in extreme measures to quell that response.  

How does the douchebag ever get a next time if he's just been banned from the forums?  Remember, we're assuming that he has to buy another copy of the game to get back on the forums, and that the douchebag (as opposed to the troll) isn't willing to do that.  So simply banning him from the forum keeps there from ever being a next time.  Bricking the game is unnecessary because the forum has already been made safe from the douchebag.


The problem I have with this whole thing is that EA isn't the police, nor are they judge and jury.  Banning someone from your forums because they were a dick on your forums, that's fine.  Voiding someone's subscription because they were a dick in your MMOG, that's fine.  Banning someone from every game they've purchased from you because of something you allegedly did that has no bearing on any of those games?  That's kind of troubling.

If being a dick on the Internet is so terrible that people need to face "real-life consequences" for it in the form of fines, imprisonment, or whatever, we should make it illegal and issue warrants for people who are suspected of posting tubgirl or whatever.  And give them their day in court.

What it comes down to, for me, is that the palatability of this type of policy is entirely dependent on those who are doing the banning- namely their impartiality and the reasoning behind each case.

If, in some perfect universe, there would be able to look at each ban and be in consensus as to whether or not it was deserved... then it'd be fine. Protect the customers you want, fuck those who ruin things for everyone else. I'm okay with that as long as it doesn't get any deeper than that.

Once you start mixing in companies like EA trying to save face on their forums, then I do have issues with it.

If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.

Do you look as good in a flight suit?

Given this is EA, they release a lot of games. So perhaps they can't play C&C online anymore, but have learned for when they fire up Madden or whatever.

I'm not completely comfortable defending EA on this issue, but I support the principle. MMOs can ban someone completely because of how they behave on the forums, although most prefer to just ban the forum account and let the game account continue. Is that okay? If I'm offensive enough on the WoW forums I can get banned out of playing the entire game. With EA's policy, at least I'd still have the offline verison to play.

Can you get your Steam account banned for being offensive on the Valve forums? That'd be a similar issue too.

I'm sure a lot of this comes down to EA doing the banning. If it was Stardock, who released a press release saying how they were protecting player rights to a grief-free play environment I'm sure they'd get a lot of accolades from the community.

I'm pretty sure you can't.  I actually thought about VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) in relation to this issue, because that's a form of player banning I wholeheartedly support.  Important differences:

1) Banned players are prevented from playing on "VAC secured" servers, but it's up to individual server operators whether they want to run "secure" servers or not.  So Valve isn't "banning" so much as "blacklisting".  If you're banned from secure servers for cheating, you can always start up your own cheater-friendly server and invite all your cheater friends to play with you.  The Steam service itself won't shut you out in any way (apart from letting secure servers know that you're a cheater).

2) The "bans" are only handed out for using cheats in-game on secure servers, which is an activity that significantly devalues the game for everyone else playing it.  They aren't handed out for just being a tard on the forums, or every TF2 server would be empty.

About the whole 'banned for complaining about DRM' thing that's being brought up, I don't know what the actual posts in question said (obviously) but, as someone who's seen a lot of 'whaa-whaa I was banned for NO REASON!!!' type posts from the other side I would be honestly surprised if someone was actually banned for general discussion of DRM. I can see however that EA would not want to be hosting a conversation about ways to circumvent the DRM or ways in which potential buyers could get a DRM free copy of the game.

There's three major reasons those types of posts exist on official/unofficial forums/fansites for a game/company:

1. The rules aren't clearly defined, well-stated, or possibly even read by anybody.
2. Moderators aren't properly keeping the enforcement of rules in line with understood policy which not only reasons in shitty posts but also a culture of disrespect and animosity.
3. The forums are run badly.

Yes,  in some cases the poster as the IQ of a winter melon, but honestly it's up to the administrators and forum members to keep things proper and prevent that shit from happening. And frankly, identifying the winter melons from the possibly human posters is not that hard.

I am 99% sure EA violates all three of these rules in their forum management and general community culture. In short, this situation will make them aware of problems they didn't even know they had and this rule will fall by the wayside in the land of forgotten bad decisions. Too bad the internet never forgets. Oh, finally, it also helps if you give a shit about your community, and I don't think EA does.

I have zero experience of EA's official forums so I won't claim any insight into the community there or how well the mods/admins are doing their jobs. You did however miss a big reason for those kind of posts (and, to be clear, I'm talking about the 'whaa I got banned' posts not the 'DRM discussion' posts). That is that the poster has done something they know to be wrong and wants to make controversy. It's amazing (or perhaps not considering this thread in particular) how many members of the community will immediately jump to support a random forum poster with no corroborating evidence and innately assume that he is telling the truth in his screed about injustice. EA are particularly easy to demonise in this regard, but no companies are really immune to it. Tell a horror story with at least a ring of truthiness about it and a lot of people will simply accept it as likely true.

Like I said, I've seen a lot of whine posts from people who have been banned where I've known the precise circumstances of the ban, and in general the reaction to their whine posts is 'OMG those jerks!' rather than scepticism and appeals to reason.

Of course all this arguing is moot because someone didn't check to make sure the policy actually existed and wasn't just an over zealous EA employee (http://forums.ea.com/mboards/thread.jspa?threadID=457006).

HA!

I'm very confident that if the original policy hadn't stirred up a huge fuss that it would have been implemented. I don't believe that forum mod was being "over-zealous." I think he's just taking one for the team right now.

:tinfoil:

Now you're just finding a reason to hate on a policy that really never existed and still doesn't exist. Doesn't matter how long you sit here and bitch about it, it didn't exist outside of a forum post.

When EA is involved in the matter, there is a big difference between finding reasons to hate them, and making guesses about what actually happened based on their history.  This mystery policy that everybody is talking about really does sound like the kind that would be used by EA, and while I know everybody would agree that it'd be nice to have more meaningful ways of dealing with forum trolls, people don't like hearing that customer complaints about a product can very well equal being prevented from using said product as was intended.  Any company with management that's worth a shit will tell you that customers who complain are, potentially, your best and most-needed customers; better to have a customer tell you why they are upset than to simply move on and refrain from ever again doing business with you.  EA's big problem in that regard is that they think they are big enough and have enough control over their corner of the game industry that they don't have to listen to their customers when they complain until it physically hits them in the face.