Battlefield Hardline Ban for Changing Hardware 5 Times in One Day

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