A Story About A Hacking:
A couple months (November 2014) ago my Origin account got hacked. I contacted EA/Origin and thought everything was fixed, new password, and money refunded. But a couple weeks ago I got a message saying that my account was banned. I’m still working to resolve that.
This hacking issue inspired me to open up this site, a way to collect information about account hacks and how to defend ourselves from them.
January 30 update: still no word on my Origin account lock. A bit over two weeks now. I can access Origin just fine, but can’t play my favorite games. On the good side, I have plenty of non-Origin games. On the bad side, the Battlefield Hardline open beta is coming up, and I’d love to play it on my own account.
February 3: about three weeks now. Hardline looks pretty good and plays OK, just wish I could be playing it as Metallicat95 🙁
February 7: I’ve put up some posts about things other than Battlefield and Hardline. But for now, all my new posts are listed under Battlefield 4. I plan to organize the set up of my site, but am more concerned about getting useful content and info out there now rather than waiting for it to be perfect. Plus, this is still the Hardline Beta weekend and I’m playing 🙂
February 10: Hardline Beta is done, never got to play as Metallicat95. No news from EA accounts people in almost a month. I guess maybe they’re really busy 🙁
February 18: Still no news from EA. I suppose I could call them up. I have other games to play, and we have more than one PC and account to play on at our house, so I’m not locked out of gaming entirely. It is still odd and frustrating to have to wait so long for EA to respond.
February 27: Still no response from EA. Over six weeks waiting now.
In the meantime, this has given me time to work on this site and add more information for both Battlefield 4 and Hardline.
March 2, 2015: Contacted EA Help, was able to get account issue resolved, Very nice help person. I still advise everyone to update their account security to avoid problems like this, or worse.
All in all, it was a frustrating situation, thankfully solved now. It had one positive result: I started this site to try and get the information out to people, and give me a place to put the game information and news I liked to put on our forums, all in one permanent place.
Web Site Appearance vs. Content
I have focused on creating articles here rather than on adding imagery and other bling to make it more stylish. That is mostly a matter of available time, but also that I believe that the main point of a site offering information is to actually provide that information, not eye candy. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to do more on the artistic side. It just isn’t my focus, or my area of expertise.
Do people read gaming web sites, or are Youtube and Twitch channels a more effective way to reach an audience? I’ve done some videos but don’t have the time I’d like to do good ones. I would pretty much present stuff like that in my articles here, and would love to actually have good video content to support it, rather than just random gameplay. Still, people watch random gameplay with comments, right? I know that I do.
Games Old And New
I play a wide variety of games but tend to stick with and play over and over just a few of them. Battlefield — any version — is one. The GTA series is another, and I’ve had lots of fun with GTA V on PC. The best value for games comes from those which are worth playing even long after they are new releases.
Summer Break
Ordinarily, I would have taken advantage of my free time during the summer to play more games, and write more about them. This year (2015), it didn’t work out that way. I not only didn’t have time to write more, I barely played any games. Whether I will have enough free time to play as I’d like is hard to say, but I do intend to put more on this site in the future.
