I'm going to make this reply as short as possible (also throwaway account because what I'm saying is probably completely against EA's Tos).
I have a friend in Iran (U.S. here) who I've been working with to try to find a workaround for this issue for a while (though the particular game is TS4, probably not anything relevant to this thread in terms of what games). Issues and fixes so far are as follows
Issues:
- Some users cannot create a new Origin account or download origin if user does not have origin prior to when access in certain locations was cut off.
Workaround:
- user within geographic confines creates or shares account for/with individual outside geographic confines user emails origin download file to user. This includes creating an email for the user in question, because emails created outside acceptable geographic confines are automatically on a blacklist, or so it seems.
Drawbacks:
- still cannot access Gallery (in TS4), but could, feasibly, access origin updates and possibly expansion packs. I think this would probably nix the hopes of users looking to play live versions of games; there just doesn't seem to be realtime/net access at all. However, I would encourage trying.
- you'd need to have someone within accepted zones who is willing to jump through some (extremely small, in my opinion) hoops, and who you trust implicitly and vice versa.
To be clear, this likely wouldn't work for live versions of any games. And I'm aware that this isn't monumentally helpful. We haven't tried everything yet; the individual I'm working with had to take a step back for a while due to frustration when it was clear that despite playability, they couldn't access the gallery. If that changes and this account isn't deleted and my IP banned, I'd get back to you. This isn't just an issue with EA/Origin. Games like Aion Online etc, are facing similar problems and it's frankly disgusting.
Edit: We haven't really played around with account transfer (i.e. if you have game data you want transferred from one acc to the other.) Mostly because this involves directly contacting EA and the chances are very slim. I'm also aware that having to create a brand new account just to play offline games is ingloriously subpar but it's the best I can come up with for right now.
