I am very happy to inform that EA Support successfully restored my access to the lost account.
It was not easy! Two weeks exchanging messages through the in-game help chat. Here's the feedback I sent them:
"I had to exchange messages with too many different advisors, until I found one that understood the problem and gave a solution. It felt like most advisors didn't read my previous messages, and presented instructions that didn't apply to my issue. I had to explain the same thing over and over again, for more than a week. I was almost losing hope, to be honest. I am very thankful though, since I got back access to my once lost account. My suggestion is to have the more complex tickets escalated to higher instances faster, instead of re-starting all the basic questions and having the customers repeat themselves in an exhausting experience."
Things I learned:
1) Write down your Player ID! (And don't share it with anyone else). Support will give you a very hard time if you don't have the Player ID. It's understandable, after all, how can you prove that the account is in fact yours?
2) Be very careful before linking your device to a different account. When the game prompts you to type "DELETE", the new account will over-write your Google Play data, so you'll lose access to the previous account (unless you have it linked to some other Google account -- see the next info).
3) You can actually have the same game profile linked to two different Google accounts. One of the advisors had told me to create a brand new swgoh profile and inform its Player ID (they would supposedly transfer the game progress of the old account to the new Player ID, they even warned me that the new profile would be completely erased/over-written with the contents of the old account). To be extra careful, I linked the new (disposable) swgoh profile to two different Google accounts (using Facebook to make the second link). In the end, they restored the old account's link to Google (instead of transferring the progress to the new Player ID), so I ended up with both swgoh profiles working (nothing got lost, not even the brand new "disposable" account).
I hope this might help someone facing the same problem. It was a long run, but with a happy ending. Thanks to everyone that showed interest in helping. MTFBWY
