Reviewers and extreme users around the world have run into trouble with the new Battlefield Hardline as EA introduced a nasty method of DRM protection for the game. Replace your hardware five times within a day and you get locked out of your account, at least temporary. A reviewer over at Guru3D was testing a handful of graphics cards with the game and suddenly found himself locked out of the game and got the message “We’re sorry, an error has occurred. Too many computers have accessed this account’s version of Battlefield Hardline Digital Deluxe recently. Please try again later.”
While the ban is temporary and just lasts 24 hours, it means that EA is using similar hardware monitoring and information collection as Ubisoft did with Anno 2070, uncool. While Microsoft for example also uses such techniques to keep Windows safe, all it takes is a call and enter a row of digits to get it activated again. EA offers no support, just a 24-hour timeout for you.
This intrusion on privacy could backfire a lot on EA, not only by bugging their users. It could effectively mean that hardware reviewers around the world could stop using EA’s games altogether for their work. There are enough games on the market and it might simply not be worth the effort it takes to work with them.
What’s your take on this? Is it okay for EA to monitor and collect information about what hardware you use when?
Thanks to Guru3D for providing us with this information
It’s EA, I expected nothing less
I blame people who pirate games all the time, that’s why they take these measures in the first place
Punish the pirates, though, not the legitimate users.
And to do that they have to implement it into the software, which they did…. you didn’t really think it through did you 😛
Ummm… no, I don’t think you really understood my comment, did you?
My point was that anti-piracy, or in this case anti-account sharing measures should not affect legitimate users.
Yes I did understand you, but to beat the warez user they have to implement their stuff into the software…. which will be a part of the legitimate user also.
How else did you think it would happen?
Either you are completely missing the point, don’t understand what I mean by ‘legitimate user’ or you’re playing a very good troll-hand, but in case the latter isn’t true…
Restricting people who are trying to share their accounts with friends by tracking user hardware configurations affects people who are benchmarking various different pieces of hardware, correct?
Are these people benchmarking hardware sharing accounts with friends? No, they are not. So, they should not be caught out by anti-account sharing measures. Thus, this is a shit anti-account sharing measure because it is punishing people who are not sharing accounts, it is punishing the legitimate user.
Just like Ubisoft’s Always Online DRM; to combat piracy they require you to be constantly connected to their authentication servers, thus you must always have an internet connection to play your game. This is a shit anti-piracy measure because it means that you and me cannot play certain games without an internet connection, even if they are singleplayer games that do not have any online features.
If you do not have access to the internet, you cannot play your game – why should this be the case? If your internet goes down for a couple of days or you take a laptop traveling and don’t have access to the internet, why shouldn’t you be allowed to play the game you have bought and paid for? This is the legitimate user being punished again.
Things like the above should not happen, if your anti-whatever measure impacts people who are not your target, you are doing it wrong.
It’s not hard right..
“Punish the pirates, though, not the legitimate users.”
That is your first post the one I replied to, to punish the “pirates” you have to add in measures into the game/software for them to get it, which would be there for the normal users.
Which is what Origin is doing, it stops people account sharing by memorizing specific hardware IDs in specific PCs connected with the account.
As for the internet authorization, for years the cry baby warez users used starforce etc as an excuse and said “if we had say online authentication we would buy the game”… and lo and behold… they cry about that too.
Either way my reply was valid to your first post.