Well as a lot of past games Digital Restrictions Management has yet again made a return in Battlefield Hardline. DRM is built into products with the aim of limiting use after purchase.
In this case (Battlefield Hardline) it limits your hardware changes by blocking you from playing!
Guru3D writes. “EA don’t just verify the number of PCs you work on slash use, nope .. they dare to monitor hardware changes inside your PC now, which I am sure is a privacy breach on many levels.
So once we insert new hardware (CPU / mobo or graphics cards) the hardware id # hash changes and if that happens a couple of times they are rendering your activation invalid.
From what we now have learned, you get to have 5 hardware changes per license. Use them up and access to the game will be blocked for 24 hours per activation.”