Yeah in theory you'd,
Need to allow all of these through a firewall (I understand wanting to play the game though)
Yeah, I completely agree with your sentiment there. The main reason I switched to Linux was to get away from shady sh*t like that. I had a hard time justifying the game until my brother purchased it, so we could play together.
I don't allow Steam to run in the background, so maybe that could be causing problems because the EA app thing is launched through Steam. I will try messing with that when I have time. If that really is the problem, then that is very sketchy on EA's part, but it would not surprise me.