Though the story of the Dragon Age II player who was unable to play his game when he was banned from the BioWare forums was fairly quickly resolved when the player's ban was lifted, an odd element of the original story remained. It was noted at the time that the EA Community Terms of Service were said to include the possibility that such a game ban was valid, explained like this: "EA Community bans come down from a different department and are the result of someone hitting the REPORT POST button. These bans can affect access to your game and/or DLC." Rock, Paper, Shotgun (thanks Joao) has a follow-up on this, reporting other incidents where players lost the ability to play their games as a result of T.O.S. violations on the forums, including a player claiming he was locked out of the PS3 edition of the game last weekend. We asked EA for definitive word on whether their policy meant players could be banned from a single-player game based on forum postings, and they repeated their explanation of this being due to a bug:

As noted last week, we have identified an error in our system which can suspend a user’s entire account when our terms of use policy has been violated. We are working to fix this and expect to have the issue resolved by the end of this week. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience -- it is not our policy to prevent customers from playing a single-player game. Any registered player who feels they have been banned inappropriately is urged to contact EA Customer Service at http://EA.com/support.