If you act like a dick on a forum, you deserve to be suspended or even banned from that forum. That's fine. But when that forum account is attached to an account which manages games you've paid for, and stops you playing them as well, there are problems.
And EA, right now, has some problems.
When the publisher's Origin service launched earlier in the year, there were some issues with people being locked out of games they'd paid for because they received a forum ban. EA said it was an error.
Yet months later, as Rock Paper Shotgun readers have pointed out, it's still happening. People are being banned from a forum for talking about things like tea-bagging, but in addition to that, are also being locked out of video game purchases which have nothing to do with their conduct in a forum.
Is it really an error if it's still happening all these months later? Or is "error" just a smokescreen for a systemic problem EA have found themselves in, where one account can't be banned without banning the other? Because, you know, EA has been saying since 2008 that a forum ban doesn't result in a game ban, and yet here we are in 2011 and people are still saying it's happening...
EA Forum Bans Are STILL Affecting Games [Rock Paper Shotgun]
You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.