"Password Does Not Meet Requirements."

[Reap3r412]

So recently I had to change my password, and spent a couple of hours struggling with this maddeningly unhelpful error. After an hour or so on chat with a pretty helpful EA rep, he finally suggested trying a plain, short word and seeing if the reset would go through. Lo and behold, it worked!

After some fiddling with it, it looks like the restriction is at most 16 characters, with a seemingly arbitrary list of allowed special characters.

I'm curious - why is there such a stupid restriction in place? Saying "that is just the way our system is set up" is a ridiculous answer, especially for a company as large as EA. It also makes me wonder what other stupid systems they have in place, like maybe not storing passwords in any way properly protected/hashed?

Are you guys going to be the next Sony or OPM? If nothing else, can we get an actual answer on what is/isn't permitted in the password field, as it's almost impossible to set a decent password when you're having to guess what characters are allowed.

[EA_Barry · Accepted solution]

@Reap3r412

Your password needs to be between 8 and 16 alphanumeric characters, and needs to include one lower case letter, one upper case letter and a number. Alphanumeric characters only, no special characters.

[EA_Barry · Accepted solution]

@Reap3r412

Your password needs to be between 8 and 16 alphanumeric characters, and needs to include one lower case letter, one upper case letter and a number. Alphanumeric characters only, no special characters.

[urqckfqtsd0c]

Why are these specifications specified? "Password does not meet requirements" does NOT help the user understand which characters are required. We should not have to go to a completely different page just to know this essential information.

[FatheredPuma81]

Hilariously I just ran into this issue as well.

Guess i'll be sticking with some very terrible short easy to crack passwords.

Love you to TrashA.

Now time to go change my password on Steam to a 100 character impossible to crack password.

[DakuHonoo]

could you please include special characters? why should we lower the security of our passwords for ea?

[Ichirella]

This just inacceptable nowadays, a password maximum length wt*, hash algorithm allow you to store a fixed byte length in your database no matter the length of the input. What's the point of this restriction, I just can't understand it. You're just making our account security worse...

[jkmartindale]

I'm adding this reply in case someone else finds this in the future through Google or whatever.

After a useless conversation with EA Support, I did some experimentation on my end testing out all the characters I can easily type on my US QWERTY keyboard.

Supported: '{}[]()<>$%_@;-=`:!#^&*

Not supported: ."|\/?~,

[llamahuzzah]

I concur with jkmartindale.

[LordCatzorz]

While I hope it is the only reason that such backward password limitation have been put inplace, it might be to keep support for game-specific login page.

Imagine you want to log in an old game where the password field was limited to 16 characters. It would be a shame to have to change password to a shorter one.

This is a situation that I have actually faced on other software from an other company. The new sign up field accepted an almost arbitrary number of character and almost every character possible. But, some login page elsewhere did not accept AT ALL characters used in HTML.

[Doodelala]

Yup, the password complexity is BS. I have met all the requirements (at least one lowercase letter, one uppercase, one number, and 8-64 characters) just fine. Still nothing.

Please bear in mind that I'm trying to use a password generated by my cyber security tech school a few years ago and was trying just to see if it'd work after seeing this thread. Thanks EA, just wanted to play Mass Effect.