Perhaps I was a bit harsh on the now-gone post, so I'll reiterate more politely...
1. By using any payment plan other than Game Time Codes, you DID specifically authorize Recurring Charges. You are given ample opportunity to read this, especially in the new account system - especially if you did three accounts. It's been 7 months - by this time, everyone has had to deal with the EA Account/Mythic Account systems.
Your choice to not read the pop-ups that came up for each of them as you authorized the first payment does not amount to "not authorizing recurring payments", because by choosing the payment plans you chose, you DID authorize them. That's why people who don't wish to have these payments recur remove their CC info, or change it to a card where the authorization will be denied due to insufficient funds, after the payment clears.
Prior to the changes, the text about recurring charges were buried in those two long agreements you had to accept in the old account management system. They were made much more clear in the current one, with a much more shorter, direct, pop-up of terms, every time you change your payment plan. How they could be missed 3 times in the new system by one person, without the person simply not reading the text, is hard to imagine.
2. One of the recurring issues for at least 3 years (maybe even 5 or more) has been ALTER.NET & Level3 ignoring EA's/Mythic's requests to fix problem routers, especially for the East Coast shards, but all the US shards have had issues with the former (and even the game support servers such as login & housing, to a point, which makes it an issue for all shards worldwide).
Once you hit the internet backbone, you have little choice as to where the internet routes you through. Once your signal leaps off of comcast, or twc/rr, Hughes satellite, or any of the dial-up or DSL carriers that isn't a phone company (and even that doesn't always help), you're at the whim of the internet. USUALLY, it will stay with one backbone provider, but I've seen traceroutes jump mid-trip between att or alter.net or sprint or level3, without any rhyme or reason apparent to a home user. In a couple cases, switching involving alter.net caused a route that had already gone west to Nashville or St. Louis (from my location in KY, heading to Lake Austin's location in the EA Los Angeles server farm) to backtrack to ATLANTA after jumping companies, when I know that both companies involved could have just continued west without the detour to Georgia, even after a local switch of providers.
Yes, EA is a big company - but there are a LOT of big companies using the internet in that volume, and very few of them for games. Plus, EA has gateways from all the major providers specifically to spread the load (and not require an extra hop at the destination). But neither the provider of home service nor EA has any real say on which path in is used, on any given connection. It would take having dedicated lines from the hubs of every ISP directly to EA for there to be a set means of communication.
Hence, why trace routes even exist as a diagnostic tool.
There's a neat set of web-based tools for the sprint.com parts of the backbone I used to have a link to, that would do city-to-city traces between their hubs/nodes, and had a list of scheduled maintenance (and to a lesser extent, unscheduled emergency maintenance that was underway), and looking at it, most stuff to "fix" things was scheduled months in advance. It took total failure or packet loss (not just massive lag) to get anything done on an emergency basis. I'm pretty sure all the internet backbone providers are the same way, and I don't think alter or level3 have the same deep pockets as Sprint or AT&T for preventive maintenance.
