Since I lost one of my hard drives some months ago (which had Battlefield 2 on it) I was just trying to reinstall it. But inevitably, I lost the manual and so didn’t have an activation key.
It’s easy enough to find illegal serials and keygens if you’re willing to sort through porn and viruses, but even barring the illegality of it, the thing is that EA Games need a genuine, authentic serial key in order to be played online, so that option is right out. I’m going to need to either find the original manual (unlikely) or buy another serial from EA.
But I don’t even know if it’s possible. Am I going to buy the whole game again, or can I just buy the serial seperately? Ideally there would be some pay-online thing where I could just give them my credit card number and they would email me the new key right away. (I don’t want to wait until tomorrow, dammit!)
I don’t think you can do exactly what you want. As a sort of unhappy medium, EA has an online service called “EA Link” that lets you purchase and download a chunk of their titles, a la Steam. I strongly doubt that such a purchase would give you a key that lets you use your current install disks, though I could be wrong. It would save you the hassle of acquiring a physical copy, but it adds the hassle of waiting for a several gigabyte download through a kludgy and intrusive client. I used it to get Battlefield 2142 on an impulse, since there was nowhere nearby that I could buy a physical copy. For me, it’s worked well enough to play the game, but only through a rather intrusive and DRM-laden client. Again, think Steam, but worse.
And, for the record, the various sketchy/illegal keys you can find won’t let you play online. There are server checks to make sure you have a valid key, and being caught with a bad key will surely get your accounts shut down.
Yeah I know, I already brought that up. I think I’m just going to have to buy the game again. But, because I have to do this anyway, I’m going to give my insanely cluttered room a military-grade cleaning and hope that the manual turns up.
If you had to register the key online to play multi-player, then didn’t you create an account? Can you email them and give them info from the account and get the key that way?
I’ll try it, though I suspect that just due to the nature of EA being a gigantic company with a huge bureaucracy, I’ll probably be given the run-around.
To prevent such things from happening in the future, do what I do: take a permanent marker, and write the activation code on the label side of the CD itself. That way, you only screw up if you lose the CD itself.