Yet another way this problem shows up. A friend of mine had a hard drive crash a while back and is in the process of reinstalling everything on a new hard drive. He has the EA DVD version of Shift 2 Unleashed Limited Edition. When installing from the DVD, before it actually starts the installation, it prompts for an activation code to be entered. The EA Store download version of Shift 2 also uses an activation code, but I don't recall if it required the player to manually enter the code or if the code was automatically entered. Both versions have a de-authentication and re-authentication process. If uninstalling Shift 2, the first step is to do a de-authentication so that Shift 2 can be installed on another system. I seem to recall a limit of 5 authentication cycles, perhaps based on the time between cycles (if enough time has passed, then the count may get reset back to 5).
Other than a different sequence for authentication, it seems that EA DVD and EA Store download versions are the same, and now both versions are no longer able to unlock the Limited Edition content unless a player backed up a save with the Limited Edition content. I also have a Dr Pepper Camaro from a promotion, and it also no longer gets unlocked, but I have backups of saves with the Camaro and Limited Edition content.
I have now tried uninstalling Shift 2 and Origin, cleaning and/or deleting related folders, then doing a download and install of Origin, followed by an Origin download and install of Shift 2 Unleashed Limited Edition, which I have on my Origin account. This did not fix the issue with the missing Limited Edition content, nor did it fix the issue with the missing Dr Pepper Camaro. Worse, the Origin version crashes without explanation on the prologue 2 lap practice run, making it unplayable, but this is because the Origin version needs nvidia/geforce physx installed, even if you don't have an nvidia/geforce video card. Downloading and installing physx fixed the game crash, but I'm still stuck with the missing Limited Edition content (3 cars, 3 events), and the Dr Pepper Camaro.
I reported this to EA support again (last time was back in June 2018). I don't know if anyone from EA reads the stuff here at Answers HQ and reports this stuff back the studio people that might be able to fix these problems.
What I don't understand is that the origin version of Shift 2 is significantly different, (size is 11MB versus EA size of 23MB), with what appears to be significantly enough changes that EA could have just defaulted to including all special content like Limited Edition, promotional stuff (like Dr Pepper Camaro), and loyalty stuff as part of the Limited Edition or just including this stuff in the standard edition, since it's an old and cheap ($20) game.
