4 years ago

Xbox Game Pass vs EA account disaster

Hear me out and let me know if I'm being unreasonable here.

I have a long running EA account (like 7 years with countless games bought etc) that at some point, several years ago, I linked to a temporary Xbox gamertag that I used briefly for Xbox 360. Never used that Xbox gamertag again. Probably just for one game or something cause I had a borrowed Xbox 360. I didn't even remember I had that gamertag linked to my EA account.

Fast forward to today. I now have a proper, also long running, Xbox account on my PC, with Game Pass Ultimate, linked to my Microsoft account, Office, PC login, Onedrive all of it. I want to use EA Play (officially launched yesterday) with my Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on PC. But I cannot. Because my EA account, log in to which is required to use EA Play via Xbox Game Pass, was previously linked to currently unrelated, obsolete and forgotten Xbox gamertag back in 2014, under another email address.

So that means that I cannot take advantage of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with EA Play on my PC because eons ago I had it linked to some old Xbox gamertag. Does that make sense? I contacted support and the person was like a broken record - "you can only have one Xbox gamertag linked to EA account in its lifetime". But why? I mean seriously - why can support not break the link and allow another Xbox gamertag? Delete the that old Xbox gamertag data for all I care. My goodness. What a disaster.

I know I can create a new EA account and play my EA games via Xbox Game Pass Ultimate but I already have a blooming EA account and want to keep progress and achievements of loads of games I played using my current EA account using EA Play subscriptions on Origin in the past. Am I being completely unreasonable here for thinking that this is a completely unnecessary obstacle?

Thanks for reading!

35 Replies

EA_Darko
Community Manager
4 years ago
Hey @javathehat for issues such as this you will need to speak with one of our phone or chat support advisers who will be able to advise you further.

You can contact our live support at help.ea.com.

To speak with a chat or phone adviser:

Click on your product Origin

Then select 'PC

Manage my Account'

Can't log in

Finally, you can choose to begin a chat or request a call back.

Darko
javathehat
4 years ago
@EA_Darko Hi. I wholeheartedly invite you to read my post where I do mention that I reached out to support. It was them who said that EA cannot fix this simple account linking issue. Obviously I'm not looking for help with my account on the forums. My post serves purely to highlight that not only it's a ridiculous problem that you refuse to try and fix but also that other people have encountered it. Poor experience with EA.
EA_Darko
Community Manager
4 years ago
Hey @javathehat as we cannot help with account issues on AHQ all we can do is direct you to our live support team.

Darko
menarche
4 years ago
@EA_Darko Can you please up channel this growing population of players who are unable to play EA Play to someone who cares?
Zilego_x
4 years ago
That would definitely be nice. EA support resorted to lying to me just to get me to go away. Surely there's got to be someone in all of electronic arts that can actually unlink accounts.
EA_Darko
Community Manager
4 years ago
Hey all, if your Gamertag is linked to an Xbox or EA account on which you are unable to verify that you are the account holder then our team will not be able to assist you in gaining access to or making any changes to that account.

We are not able to assist with any account related issues on AHQ.

Darko
Herjar85
4 years ago
Please read his post. This has nothing to do with not having access to an account. It is EA that has a ridiculous rule that in the lifetime of your EA account it can only be linked to one Xbox account. So even if you unlink your Xbox account, you cannot add a new one.

Here is an image for some proof. Apparently my EA account was linked to some old Xbox account back in 2007, so now I can never link my Xbox account with gamepass...
javathehat
4 years ago
@Herjar85 I don't think they are reading our messages. None of us here are expecting @EA_Darko to fix our issue. What we want is for EA to acknowledge the problem in the backend, get a global fix going, and allow people to freely link their accounts as they please.

How is it that I can link xbox / ps account to multiple EA accounts (of course with only one link at a time) but not the other way around. How come Microsoft and Sony figured out a way to break the link to EA account and EA can't do the same from their end?
javathehat
4 years ago
@Herjar85 BTW - 100% exactly the same issue as mine. Mad stuff. I ended up creating a new EA account just to play a few games from xbox game pass. But now I have multiple EA accounts with different progress / achievements between them which sucks big time.
menarche
4 years ago
@javathehat Agreed. We get it. AnswersHQ is not able to fix it. However, anyone in EA should be able to upchannel these compounding issues with linking accounts. @EA_Darko needs to do this, and let us know they are doing this. @EAHelp on Twitter needs to acknowledge this officially to show that EA cares.

Instead, we keep getting canned responses, run around with unhelpful chat technicians.