EA stomps around in a Tantrum, threatens to ban People who cheat.

You read that right. If you cheat in a game on EA Origin, you risk losing access. Not access to multiplayer, access to Origin. If you tell someone how to cheat or post those cheats online, you also risk the consequences. Completely ridiculous.

From the EA Origin terms of service:

11. Rules of Conduct

    You may violate the Terms of Service if, as determined by EA in its sole discretion, you:

    – Use or distribute unauthorized “auto” software programs, “macro” software programs or other “cheat utility” software program or applications.
    – Use any game hacking/altering/cheating software or tools.
    – Use and communicate exploits and/or cheats.
    – Abuse or exploit bugs, undocumented features, design errors or problems in the game.

Other parts of legalese allows EA to revoke your “entitlements” to the EA service if you break the TOS as detailed in part 9

“In response to a violation of these Terms of Service or any other agreement applicable to EA Services accessed by you, EA may issue you a warning, suspend your Account, selectively remove, revoke or garnish Entitlements at an Account and/or device level , immediately terminate any and all Accounts that you have established and/or temporarily or permanently ban your device and/or machine from accessing all EA Services or certain EA Services.  You acknowledge that in such an instance EA is not required to provide you notice before taking action to suspend or terminate your Account, temporarily or permanently banning your device from some or all EA Services or selectively removing, revoking or garnishing Entitlements associated with your Account.”

Meaning if you exploit that bug in some soccer game to get an easy goal, you risk losing access to all of your games. Completely and utterly ridiculous, and it’s probably criminal as well. Major companies have gone after cheating devices in the past, such as the infamous Game Genie case in which Nintendo sued Galoob, but Galoob won by arguing that the NES was a computer, that any “derivative works” was fair use, and no derivative works were created in the first place.

I don’t mind people cheating in singleplayer, but multiplayer gaming is a completely different story altogether. If you cheat on a legit server, you deserve to be banned from all legit servers, but not from the entire service. I hope someone with a good lawyer smacks EA around for this, especially on the point about “Use and communicate exploits and/or cheats.”, especially if it happens outside Origin. This could potentially allow someone to get a major player in trouble by impersonating him on an outside website, which is not going to end well for anyone.