As mentioned above, I sent three questions back to the EA CS person who has been trying to address my problem of not being able to link more than nine UO accounts to one EA Account. These are the three questions I submitted:
- Is there any risk that I will end up being IP banned for having more than one EA Account? I don't plan on associating each as-yet-unlinked UO account with its own unique e-mail address, but others would like to do this and at least one person reported on Stratics that he was IP banned when he reached the point of setting up his seventh EA Account to link to his seventh UO account and another person also reported a similar banning but without indicating how many EA Account she established before being IP banned.
- In the future, if I would like to purchase an account upgrade from the Origin store or additional EA games or perhaps use the Origin forum, which EA Account should I use for that purpose? Will using any EA Account other than my very first one as an "Origin Account" cause me problems in the future?
- If I would like to change the EA Account I have associated with any particular UO account to a different EA Account (either a freshly created one or one that already exists but hasn't yet reached its limit of nine linked accounts), will I be able to make that change and if yes, will there be a cost to me for making the change? It seems like such a change would be similar in many respects to the old Account Access Transfer service that cost $30; wiped the old billing info from the account; cleared warning and misconduct information from the account; and required the active participation of both parties in the transaction for completing and submitting the transfer form to EA.
Upon checking my outstanding questions a few minutes ago, I found a reply, the relevant portion of which I have copied below:
No this will not happen as we are asking that you do this for the time being. As we are requesting you do this you will not get an IP ban for having more than one account. As purchasing these upgrades and other items all provide a code for you to use on the account you want to you can use any account. If it was an item that would automatically add to your account you'd have to use each individual account that you wanted the item for. At this time there is no way to move linked accounts. This is another item our team is working on because of the 9 limit and us now asking you to create new accounts for the rest.
I have no intention of transferring any of my UO accounts to anyone else in the future, so in the next day or two, I will work on linking my other ten UO accounts (most of them inactive and likely to stay that way) to several different e-mail addresses.
If someone else is in a similar situation with more than nine UO/DAoC/WHO accounts or wishes to assign each game account to a separate e-mail address, you may want to consider running your situation through EA Support (log in here with your EA Account login info: support.ea.com) so you have documentation for why you have created multiple EA Accounts. I'm not sure I would want to proceed without such documentation. I can't emphasize this enough, thus the bold type. Please give this serious consideration for your own protection down the road. (Don't think anyone has yet encountered claims of credit card fraud for associating the same credit card with multiple EA Accounts, but am just waiting for that issue to surface as well.) Another reason for suggesting this is that it may also give the support people some valuable information about just how many people actually have multiple accounts when they are working with the programmers and database designers on trying to make the accounting system more flexible.
Also, if you do think you may ever want to transfer a UO account to someone else, you have some thinking to do and possibly additional research to perform before you proceed further with linking UO accounts to e-mail addresses/EA/Origin accounts. It doesn't look like there is any way at this point to unlink UO accounts and I imagine that could be an insurmountable hurdle if you want to put one of your UO accounts (or any other EA game accounts) into someone else's hands for purposes of assigning their own payment information and being able to set the game account password without also giving them access to your other other linked accounts (UO or otherwise), let alone ask for EA help in making sure the new owner takes over the account with a clean slate. In other words, it seems doubtful that the formal Account Access Transfer Program (where you pay for help and a clean slate for the new owner) is up and running at this point or any time in the near future and informal UO account transfers are also pretty much impossible too once you've linked other game accounts to the same EA/Origin Account.
Have fun, folks, and please be nice to the CS people if you decide to submit your situation to them. I think they are pretty overloaded at this point, so some patience and empathy may go a long way in successfully navigating this migration. Remember, those front-line people didn't create this mess, it's just something they have to help clean up in order to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table, and pay their bills.
Edited to add:
Sorry this is getting so long. I submitted another question in my case asking if I'll have to worry about being blocked or something else if I try to assign one credit card to accounts spread over multiple EA accounts within a short period of time (e.g., maybe I'm feeling particularly flush with cash (highly unlikely but maybe I'll win one of those lotteries for which I never buy tickets) and decide to turn everything on at once to claim anniversary or holiday gifts). Really, really don't want to have their system think I'm trying to commit credit card fraud.
