Game Won't Launch – EA Server Authentication Failed Error
Ok, I'm going to try to keep this brief as I can, because it's been going on for over a week now, but there's a lot and several places people might have advice to give me. (I've bolded some key points to help those who are understandably skim reading all this).
Precipitating event: On 15th September I contacted EA to ask if a very old copy of Mass Effect on Steam could be linked to my EA library, because it didn't show up there. After a long conversation during which the advisor clearly didn't understand what I was asking and went through all the Mass Effect games in my library, we decided it was just too old. Fine.
Problem 1: However, when I went to open Mass Effect Legendary from Steam a couple of days later, it wouldn't open. I went to my EA library and all my ME games were gone. After finally getting support chat to work at all, they told me all my Mass Effect licenses had been disabled (and did not explain why). I got ME3 and Andromeda reinstated, because I had those in physical version with serial keys to give them. But I have Mass Effect Collection (ME1 + ME2, digital deluxe version) on Steam, along with Legendary, and they still won't open. The first advisor I spoke to after everything went wrong told me he'd reactivated the licenses that he could, and did ask for proof I had bought Legendary on Steam to do so, but then said I had to contact Steam about it, which was weird.
In fact, several of the advisors have told me to contact Steam to fix the problem, but they obviously can't help because the games are fine except they start opening and close at authentication due to a problem authenticating with EA's server. I did ask Steam support just in case, but they categorically assured me they can't do anything and it's all about EA's servers. When I tell the EA advisors that, they just tell me again there's nothing they can do and I have to go to Steam. They also tell me that only Steam can tell me why the licenses were disabled, which doesn't sound right. How Steam could have affected games not purchased through Steam (ME3, MEA), I don't know.
Problem 2: I have managed to get them to try transferring me to a "dedicated team," but every single time I'm transferred, the chat just hangs at "transferring" and never connects me. On my first attempt to do this, the case's saved chatlog showed that someone had connected on the other side and was sending me messages, but they hadn't appeared on my screen. I count that we've had 9 attempts to transfer at this point.
Solutions tried for problem 2: Those attempts look like: two on Firefox and two on Chrome (one each normal and logged into my EA account, and one with cookies purged and in incognito mode and without being logged in), three times in Edge (two with the same criteria as the other browsers, plus one more after turning all popup blockers and tracker blockers off in Incognito/InPrivate), and then one on my husband's computer, one on his phone using the Samsung browser (both times going into support chat without logging in). These are all the solutions I can find for this problem through search engines and Reddit, and none of them have worked. I have a friend offering to try through Safari on his Apple machine, but what I've seen online tells me Safari has worse problems than everything else.
Solutions tried for Problem 1: I've tried everything the help page suggests to fix the authentication issues, like flushing the EA app cache, uninstalling it and reinstalling it, etc, multiple times. Nothing changed. I also tried unlinking and relinking my Steam account this morning. It didn't help, but I did relink them straight away.
Advice I want: Would leaving it longer before relinking help? Unlinking them, uninstalling the EA app to delete all its data and then trying again? I'm afraid of losing my Steam game progress and achievements, but maybe it's a risk I have to take to get my games back.
I know no one here can fix this for me, but if anyone can think of anything I haven't tried either to fix my games or make chat transfer stop crashing, I'd be grateful.
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