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Banned Accounts for Activity on Other Social Media?
Calico45
Posts: 2,038 Member
First and foremost, I have no idea what is true here and what is not. However, I am seeing some claims that accounts can and have gotten banned for activity on sites not associated with the game and it has restricted or eliminated access to said game. I plan to flag this thread and ask for official clarification, but is anyone else seeing or know of this kind of thing?
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Like, someone gets banned on twitter for something unrelated to sims, and then they're losing access to and can no longer play the sims? That's....weird.
In my experience, companies don't care if you are little bit negative, even if you say that the game is bad you are still talking about the game and creating publicity. If people have somewhere to talk about things that they find annoying too they often don't take those words into action, they complain, and then they go back and play the game. If they don't have any platform to do that they tend to take those words into action and stop playing, which is bad for business.
So I don't think EA would bother with banning accounts unless you have broken their terms of service or something.
What EA might conceivably ban for is an indication that someone is distributing pirated games. I have never heard of it happening, but in theory, the Code of Conduct does specify that they reserve the right to rescind access to games. I imagine piracy or even targeted harassment might do that, even if on a third party site (like Twitch, etc.) There is an entire branch of Customer Support that ONLY handles Code of Conduct/Terms of Use violations - probably with the assistance of corporate lawyers. That EULA is in fact a contract.
Though I can’t imagine whatever you do on one social media can get you banned from the game, unless you promote and post yourself using the mod mentioned above. If anyone uses that mod they deserves to get banned.
The closest thing I can think of was about 10 years ago or so where someone got banned on one of EA's official forums and that got him locked out of his account and was unable to play his games. He appealed, was told, basically, "tough" so he went to the press. EA, realizing that the court of public opinion was not on their side, reinstated his games but kept him banned from their forums.
Edit to add:
They're saying this, but they really can't tell what mods you're using just by you using them. The only way they could do this is via uploads to social media and somehow linking them to your account. Too bad. The mods you're talking about should get you banned from everywhere.
You know in the options how you can send data to EA(they sometimes release stats ex: # of woohoo s for the year (lmao)) I’m sure that’s what they’re using to detect it. Or it’s some script written into the game.
I sincerely doubt that anyone *could* be banned here for things they said on social media if they were unrelated to the game. It's hard enough for the moderators to know who you are in "real life" let alone what you're called on social media. Now if someone uses their forum name as their social media name (such as on Twitter) and starts talking about how they've modded *TS4* with forbidden mods or that they've been using a pirated copy, that would be worth going to all the trouble to figure out the link between them here and on social media. Otherwise, it would be far too much trouble to even bother.
I did moderating for TS2 and I can tell you that it was hard enough just to track down people who had made multiple forum accounts (which may be harder now) and were using them for illicit purposes. We never could get their "real names".
Because the gods of sims hates me lol. I had one family have three, three, sets of triplets in a row, and then in a different save (same month I think) I had a couple have triplets, twins, triplets, twins. It's agony.
In my most recent save two ladies, different households, that I was playing also had triplets. I'm not playing them anymore! One set of triplets is the offspring of my sim's husband, and the other is a result of MCCC. I used to have it where my sims could have quadruplets, and I changed it down to triplets because I thought maybe that was the culprit. This was changed before the twins, triplets, twins, triplets family, so I don't think changing my settings affected it at all. *facepalm*