[SteMot]

This is what I've just e-mailed to PC Zone UK games mag:

Hi There PCZone,

I'm sorry if this is not the right address an e-mail of this type should be coming to, but I didn't know which one to use.

I'll get right to the point.....EA. More specifically, their DRM on Spore.
I'm sure by now you've had plenty of people contact you about their poor DRM servers, and the fact they can't log on.
That's not what I want to talk about, I want to talk about the fact that you can't have more than one user account for one CDKey, even
though in the game manual, on page 62, it states clearly you can, the quote is " You may have multiple Spore accounts for each installation of the game".
Now, some internet forums were not clear on exactly how this was supposed to come across, so I e-mailed the EA customer Support about me not being able to have more than
one account log in to the game.
This was their reply:-

"Hello Ste,

Thank you for contacting us here at Electronic Arts Technical Support. I understand that your wife wishes to use a different account for SPORE™.

Unfortunately, code registration is restricted to 1 legitimate entitlement creation per code only. We apologise for any disappointment or inconvenience that this causes you.

Should you require further assistance about this or any Electronic Arts games in the future, please visit our website and review our extensive Self Help knowledgebase (http://electronicarts.co.uk/support).

Thanks!

Anne
EA Support Centre, UK and Ireland"

I thought that was a little starnge given the information in the manual, so I let them know about that, to which I got this response:-

"Hello Ste,

Thank you for contacting us here at Electronic Arts Technical Support. Due to the nature of your issue, I will be escalating this to our Senior Support Staff. I apologise for any prolonged delays this might cause, but please rest assured that we are trying to handle your issue in a timely manner. During this time, you may still update your incident with additional information that might help us resolve your issue without causing any additional delay. To update your incident click the link above that says, to view or update your question from our support site, click here.

Should you require further assistance about this or any Electronic Arts games in the future, please visit our website and review our extensive Self Help knowledgebase (http://electronicarts.co.uk/support).

Thanks!

Anne
EA Support Centre, UK and Ireland"

Which struck me as a little strange that the support stuff were confused by this too. A day went by, then I received this e-mail:-

"Hello Ste,

This is Canon from Electronic Arts Customer Support. I understand that you are encountering issues with the Spore game.

I deeply apologise for the inconvenience; contrary to the information displayed on the manual, it is indeed not possible to entitle your Spore registration code to more than one account. Therefore, at the moment, only your account would have the necessary entitlement to be able to access the game's online features.

However, as a special consideration to your case, if you have a second e-mail address that you would also like to use for creatures, kindly provide this to me in your next response. I will continue looking into your case from there.

Best Regards,

Canon D.
Electronic Arts™ Customer Support"

Now that to me was an admission that the text in the manual means what we thought, and that EA were depriving us of a feature the game should have. The bright side to this of course, was the offer to add an extra address to my installation, which I took EA up on and submitted my extra account info.
I received an answer a couple of hours later:-

"Hello Ste,

As per your request, I have now entitled a Spore code to your account name 'xxxx@xxxx.com'. You should now have full access to the online portions of the game, as if you owned a second copy of the game. Do let me know if I can be of further help.

Best Regards,

Canon D.
Electronic Arts™ Customer Support"

That`s good of them I thought, what a nice thing to do. So I loaded up Spore, tried to log in with this new, apparently entitled account, only to receive the same error I did before he supposedly entitled it.
I sent another e-mail saying it did not work and got no reply, I sent another, more aggressive e-mail to let them know I was tired of being messed around and what I would do should I hear no answer, and still nothing, so I am doing it, I am getting in touch with PC Zone to let them know exactly how EA customers are being messed around.

I am not the only one maddened by this as you will see if you check out this link on EA's support forums:-

http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/spore-technical-support/335416-you-may-have-multiple-spore-accounts-each-installation-game.html

I just want what was promised to us as a feature, I couldn't care that I can only activate 3 times, or use on 3 PC's, we were told that before purchase, we were never told we would not be able to run more than one account from installation, with the Creature Creator also supporting multiple accounts, there was never any question of not being able to do it on the full version.

I just hope you can mention this somewhere in your magazine so we can at least get a real response as to why this farce has happened,

Thanks for your time,

Stephen Moitie

I'll sent it to another magazine tomorrow