[All4All]

What's most wild about all of this to me is that EA has claimed for years a "technical impossibility" to unlink an existing Xbox account and re-link with a new one. (See https://www.reddit.com/r/XboxGamePass/comments/12gsy4i/ea_xb... and many other forum posts on EA). I ran into this wall and after spending hours on support calls with EA they were unable to link a very old Xbox account I had, meaning I can't login to any EA games on Xbox, making the majority of them unplayable on the platform. Yet, here, we see, it is very much possible.

[Nition]

Reminds me of in 2004-2005, I had my typical Hotmail account with 4MB storage, but Microsoft was rolling out a free upgrade for everyone to 250MB. For some reason they were taking an incredibly long time with my account, and I emailed support several times over a year or two about it. Each time they assured me that Microsoft was upgrading accounts as fast as they could, but it was just such a big job that it took years.

Eventually I read on a forum somewhere[1] that you could partly trick the system by temporarily closing your account and re-opening it, which got you a slightly larger 25MB. But still not the promised 250.

All this 2-4MB for existing accounts, 25MB for new accounts, and years-long rollout to 250MB gave the impression that finding spare storage was a huge struggle for Microsoft. Then a few months later they were having to compete with Gmail and they decided that everyone should get 2GB, which was rolled out to every Hotmail account including mine all at once! I can only assume aliens landed and delivered a UFO full of hard drives.

[1] Here's an example of an old forum post about the trick - complete with reply praising the brand new GMail: https://bimmersport.co.nz/topic/5232-hotmail-upgrade-2mb-to-...

[wilkystyle]

> isn't Gmail still Beta?

If only they knew...

[mvdtnz]

This attack shows us it's possible to change this link and play games, but it's impossible to say what other effects this would have outside of the easily testable scenario laid out in the article. Maybe this change of link invalidates data stored in a billing system, messes up a monthly report that goes to Microsoft's XBox division or causes an internal admin page to crash on load.

I'm not excusing EA but I have worked on plenty of complicated microservice systems and it's not always so straight forward to change the structure of data in one place.

[CoopaTroopa]

Most likely they were in the process of adding this feature to fix your issue when it was sadly exploited before they could announce it

[jonwinstanley]

Hahaha!

[ajvpot]

> Unfortunately game entitlements, friends, and game save data for newer cross-platform games like Battlefield 2042 are stored in the EA account itself, not the persona, so that data isn't transferred.

[sharpshadow]

Probably it’s technically impossible for the customer support to do it.

[loa_in_]

I call these things technically inconvenient. Like things that make temporary workers share a security badge to go to the toilets (sic!). As a hard hitting quote from Chernobyl series says: "because it's cheaper."

[stepupmakeup]

Likely a bureaucratic problem and much easier for these social media PR teams to pass it off as a system issue

[Aeolun]

The tech team doesn’t want to give them the ability because it causes too many escalations. The legal team doesn’t want it because what if something goes wrong and someone sues? The customer experience team… wait, customer experience team? We don’t got no stinkin customer experience team. Those suckers only exist to give us money, and it’s been proven beyond a doubt that no matter how much we fuck with them they’ll keep buying the games anyway.

[Thaxll]

Linking account with first party etc ... is pretty complicated way more than what people think. The whole cross play story is also a nightmare to support.

The third level of complication is to support China.

[slightwinder]

From the description, we only see a database-value changed. But we don't see this field used outside the account(?)-site, like when installing and starting an actual game. It's quite possible that there are additional checks or dependencies with steam, which would demand action from Valve for a complete link-change.

[TechDebtDevin]

EA level 1 support probably doesn't have access to these controls. They probably stuck whatever tools EA has given them :/

[Aeolun]

If working for a large enterprise has taught me anything, it’s that the front end has no clue what the tail is doing.

[YawningAngel]

"Impossible" tends in my experience to be a bureaucratic euphemism for "we don't want to bother".