It is quite common practice for online games to use a hard-coded certificate issued by the publisher's CA, largely to prevent cheating. Seeing how much effort

It is quite common practice for online games to use a hard-coded certificate issued by the publisher's CA, largely to prevent cheating. Seeing how much effort EA have put into preventing piracy of this game (to the extent that it hurts their paying customers a great deal), I would be very surprised if they made so silly a mistake.