Ars Technica reports that for 3/4 days users have been "unable to play" their DA:O saved games because EA servers were down - "incompetence and malicious neglect".
I myself have known the pain this type of DRM causes as I have had my Mass Effect 2 career 'suddenly forget' I had completed The Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC because the authentication failed - once - which also 'wiped' the other DLC adventures.
"Thanks to a combination of DRM idiocy and technical and communications failures on the part of EA and Bioware, I (along with thousands of fellow EA/Bioware customers) spent my free time this past weekend needlessly trapped in troubleshooting hell, in a vain attempt to get my single-player game to load," wrote Ars Technica's Jon Stokes.
"The problem, it turns out, was the Bioware's DRM authorization servers, and as of Tuesday afternoon, the situation still is not resolved. For four days now, those of us who made the mistake of shelling out for Dragon Age:Origins (especially the Ultimate Edition) have been unable to play the single-player game that we paid for." No official response yet.
"I have to admit, I was pretty livid to find out that I had spent so many hours troubleshooting the game, only to find out that it was a server problem and that this server problem had gone completely unannounced." He's not opposed to all DRM just stupid ones.
"...my beef is with buggy, poorly-thought-out DRM schemes that have legit users sniffing around torrent sites to see if they can get their hands on a working copy of the game they paid for. The fact that DA:O has to reauthorize my DLC every time I log into the Bioware server is just nuts, and it sets users up for all sorts of problems."
"Then there's the fact that, again, EA/Bioware didn't address this issue for three whole days. For three days, users were locked out of a game that they paid for due to these server problems, and there was no notice posted," he continued.
"Not only that, but they either don't monitor the Bioware forums, or they don't care enough to participate in them, because no one from Bioware showed up during this period to even acknowledge the issue informally. This mix of incompetence and malicious neglect is startling to me, but it's apparently par for the course for these two companies."
Check out the full righteous rant from Ars Technica's Jon Stokes. Have you been on the bad end of DRM authorisation from EA/BioWare? Should they be limited to one-time checks? Hopefully a new approach will be adopted by the time Mass Effect 3 releases.
