You know, I have to wonder if gamers are going to migrate to consoles for all their gaming just to escape inconveniences like registration and copy protection. I have a copy of The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth that I bought a good few years back. Now, I confess to being a moron and losing the CD case, but at the time I had the CD key written down and wasn’t worried about it. Fast-forward 3 or so years and now I can’t read the CD key because it’s so smudged.

I don’t think I ever actually created an EA online account because all of my aliases including my real name were already taken with numbers on the end of them reaching into the hundreds (I’m exaggerating, but you catch my drift), so now for the first time I want to play it online. I was asked by a couple of the guys I met at Fragapalooza to play some BFME and not having my key I decided to buy a key second hand (let’s face it, how many copies of this game is EA producing these days…) for $10. I entered it and it won’t work online because it’s alrady been registered.

Now I can understand if it was like Blizzard where two people cannot use the same key at the same time, or I had basically gotten scammed because the key he sold me was banned or something, but this is just a case of EA making the game hard to play even when you’ve gone out of your way to have a legit copy.

Well, I’ve linked the EA support staff to this post and I’ll be interested to see if they’re willing to do anything. Wish me luck.

edit: it looks like I can send in the disc with $10 and they will send me a replacement product key. Yay.