I've been on the phone with customer support off and on for the day, and I've written enough e-mails to be absolutely exhausted with explaining myself so I'll just copy/paste some of the highlights of today's festivities.
IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING PAYING FOR STAR WARS THE OLD REPUBLIC BE WARNED:
"Dear Bioware;
I have now sent out three separate e-mails and contacted your customer service line, with absolutely no results.
I purchased your game last night because I support Star Wars. It took days to download your game, as 8.1 will not allow the quickplay feature to work. I tried the game out to level 10 and then decided that I liked the game enough to want to pay for it. Honestly, you guys should have been thrilled.
I was. I rerolled my character onto The Ebon Hawk (Jedi Knight was really a great game in its day) and made him a silly white person because Marilyn Manson definitely deserves his own alien species. I played your game… the exact same quests I had just spent two days completing…. for 5 hours straight. Then I went to sleep, woke up at 9am and took my girlfriend to her job. I raced home, did 70mph on Wertzville road - I don't get a lot of time to myself, you see - and powered up my laptop only to find that you had canceled my account altogether.
This is frankly unacceptable, as I have done absolutely nothing wrong and instead have chosen to disregard the obvious similarities to World of Warcraft and finance your little operation. As a way of showing thanks, you kindly took my money and kicked me out of your virtual theme park."
I have received no correspondence from Bioware's customer support and no real explanation as to what I did wrong to warrant an immediate ban aside from an e-mail that vaguely accuses me of intending to purchase or sell a character (I'm not doing either, my highest character in the game was L10). To me, this is blatant theft. Maybe I'm missing a piece of the puzzle, but it somehow feels like a complete scam to play a game that is by default free, and then have my characters held hostage as soon as I pump money into the company. So just be warned.