Okay, here is my thought for today.  This is a situation that I am going through and welcome any comments or feedback.  I intend to send both positive and negative feedback to EA games in the hopes they will hear our comments and act on them.  How else are they going to get the picture?

Basically in late 2006 I bought Battlefield 2142.  I registered it with EA, as required to even play the game.  I played it non stop for probably a month or so both on and offline.  Soon after I just stopped playing.  This was probably my stint on Counterstrike Source that caused me to log some crazy hours.  I want to say 6 months went by and I just uninstalled the game for lack of use.

Recently I listed a lot of my games on my profile, and I figured I would play a little BF2142.  I had to blow a little dust off the box, and reinstall, but thought all was in order.  ERRRRRRRR .... wrong!  Turns out that I obviously could not remember the login information used to register the game.  It had been well over a year, so I guessed.  No luck.  I tried contacting EA about it, and was told that I had to provide basic information and submit that before help would be rendered.

It has been nearly two weeks of email bouncing between myself and EA Games.  I have provided a list of emails and none of them match my initial registration.  This is crazy.  I’m in the tech industry, so I do change emails at times.  Who knew you were going to have to log everything you ever registered to it?

In frustration I finally went into my email archieves after I submitted a picture proving I had possession of the DVD and key for it.  Thank God I am a little too ’CYA" at times.  I managed to recover the original email I received upon registration.  Get this ... it was back from Sept. of 2006!  Who would normally keep stuff like that?  It was a fluke that I did!

I feel that this system of registration for life is too buggy.  We spend good money for a product and expect to be able to enjoy it.  To have to turn around and put this much work into something just to play a game takes the wind right out of your sails.  It certainly will cause me to rethink buying another game from EA while they use this system.  We should not have to keep a seperate log somewhere on what games are registered to which account, etc.  I feel that the larger gaming manufactures sometimes lose the contact with their customers they once had in switching to these "cold" customer service measures.  Security is important; that I will admit.  However, there has to be a balance between security and customer service.  Perhaps just having a security reminder question would have solved two weeks worth of drama.  Any thoughts?

I agree with you, I understand to some degree why they do this, but in the long run it does more harm then good.