Oh dear. Cunning gentlethings found a way to hack/mod the Battlefield 3 open beta’s map – Operation Metro – to enable support for up to 128 shooting men. Officially, it only allows up to 32 shooting men, though the full release version may well raise the headcount. That’s not what I’m actually oh dearing about, though. It’s DICE/EA’s response to this that is troubling. In an official statement on the forum – which now appears to have been pulled, but we have a screenshot of it as-was below – they claimed that playing on the hacked servers “can cause your account to become compromised, stats to be altered or other issues to arise which may lead to having your account to be banned by EA.” In addition, horrifyingly, “if your account does get banned it means any other EA game you have on your account would also be unavailable.”(more…)