In Response 'Outrage over Mass Effect 3 Ending'

http://games.yahoo.c...-173411384.html


Don't worry... there's no spoilers here. This topic is about the debate and not about in-game specifics.

But outrage doesn't even begin to describe this discussion. It's a mad house filled with debateless moaning and whining. This is indeed a deep thought discussion since it involves how far product complaints like this should go and if a company needs to respond with action. I've heard QUITE ENOUGH of this complaining and would like to put my opinion on it and hope some of these people get a grip and consider what they're not considering.

What's the issue? People believe the ending to the Mass Effect 3 trilogy wasn't satisfying enough. They post all over random Mass Effect topics, pages and blogs whether or not the topic or debate relates to the ending. I'm sure you've heard quite enough of it already as well. They claim they spent far to many hours into the painstakingly long series and they deserve better. Freedom of speech, man! Yea... that's what it's all about. It is their opinions, but like a bunch of mindless drones, they complain in masses like they're cleverly proving a point. NO... it's not clever. Nor is it commendable. There is a line between protesting and trolling, and frankly I've never seen a fan base troll in such an irritable way. It makes Mass Effect fans look silly. "But we're fighting for a cause!" But no you're not. Where were you when EA threatened to lay off Bioware staff after they finished the game in January? Where were you when content was removed from the game to charge you an extra 10 dollars on release day in the form of 1st day DLC? You're not supporting any good cause in my opinion if you didn't strike when it was necessary or ethical in that matter.

With that in mind, let me tell you why this entire cause is obnoxiously dangerous. Being a fan of something is entirely fine, but not to the point where it forces you to object against what you're a fan of. Stop being a fan of the product if it isn't desirable instead of trying to change it. This might as well be Harry Friggin' Potter... JK Rolling releases the final book and you don't like the ending, so you and thousands of other people decide to shout obnoxiously at her, "Change the ending!" Here's a good question... should a company fold when thousands of people are in revolt about the details? Honestly, they don't have to... but they want more money, so they will. They know people are such HUGE fans of Mass Effect, they will throw bones at you just to keep these fans satisfied until the next product comes out.

Here's the dangerous part... do you realize what this entire movement will result in? Bioware / EA realizing they control people so well that they can sell more DLC and people will without a doubt buy it. ... What did you expect? They'll just give you a new ending for free? NO... they're going to listen and rub their hands together since they realized they have a great chance to market more game content. I have nothing against DLC, but there will be so many repercussions since EA knows they can probably sell it for more. Oh, trust me... they will sell it as high as they possibly can. But it will be forced DLC. While Bioware had better plans to use their time making more DLC, you the consumer will now be adding onto that or possibly taking away, thus causing us to spend more. DANGEROUS. You're basically saying "We want to spend yet another ten dollars on this game to get a satisfying ending." You're asking to pay a lot more for this game, beyond what it's worth. If you've joined this side of the debates since it sounded sensible, then that is what you're saying.

So what should you be doing if you don't like an ending to something? Either reconsider your ever-lasing fanhood of the product or just accept it... or don't accept it and imagine it went differently... that's fine. Make a little topic to say what Bioware did wrong and tell them what lessons they should learn. That's fair. But people went too far, blindly hoping they would accomplish something... they want to remain fans but possibly can't in what they have received. Do you realize how fanatic that is? That's like saying you like your religion but you don't like the part where bad people go to Hell, so you complain until someone does what you want or if people flat our ignore you. Metaphor in mind: a baby. Mass Effect fans are babies and won't stop crying until they get what they want. Sorry, but that's just my opinion. You shout yours online... I return the favor. But if you keep anything in mind, know that acts like this can end up with you and me having less money in the end. Demanding more content is the most dangerous thing a consumer can do and the best thing a marketer can hear. THINK before you protest you blasted people... just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean it's smart. if anything, that should be evidence on why it is dumb.

Edited by {IP}Pasidon, 21 March 2012 - 01:04 AM.

Gotta agree with it getting pretty annoying(never played the games nor do i intend to). I go on the escapist forums every so often, I went there recently and (not even exaggerating) every second thread was a ME3 complaint thread. I have never seen it so bad. By all means complain about it, but keep it to the one thread >.>

And then as mentioned in the article, some fans in particular are being pretty damn idiotic over this...

Ahh, I love the smell of fanboys whining. It's so fucking hilarious.

Which group of them? I didn't even get the game and the only flames I see are in defense of the ending

Edited by duke_Qa, 21 March 2012 - 01:48 PM.

The ending was terrible, to be fair. It's worse than the ending to the Matrix trilogy.


You'll always get those who won't be happy until their opinion is the one that's deemed right. Just backtrack through these forums and you'll see ample evidence of that, and I'm just as guilty of it.

You also tend to find that every thread descends into a giant troll-war over the course of two hundred+ pages, so a lot of fresh threads emerge to try to distance themselves from that. Every thread starts as a clear, reasoned argument or critique and then basically melts into a few somewhat fallacious arguments of "if you don't like it don't buy it" (the fallacy - especially if you're on PC - being, you already fucking bought it and because it's tied to a gamer account which is licenced, you couldn't even sell it on or trade it in if you wanted to) or "just boycott Bioware in future if you don't like it".

What you also have to understand is that people did invest rather a lot of time in these games. I myself have logged about 90+ hours (and probably just as many £Sterling) to it. 90+ hours I've thoroughly enjoyed...right up until that last ten minutes where the game just drops its own established canon, and also simple logic, and gives you a cookiecutter pile of nonsense with no sense of closure whatsoever.

The equivalent in other media would be, say, if you'd been reading the Game of Thrones series of books by George R R Martin (all of which are long doorstopper books comprising near enough 1000 pages in hardback, at 10-point text), you read through all six (so far), and then on the last three pages the tone suddenly changes from that which you've come to expect to 'And Ned Stark woke up with a deep breath and discovered that everything that happened in the last six (so far) books was all a dream'.
Fans of the series would not be fucking happy. And you could see why.

Sure, (nerd)rage seems to amplify itself on the internet, but this is only to be expected on an anonymous open medium to express one's opinion. None of us is as big a cunt in real life as we are on the internet. And let's face it, every single oldbie on this forum - me included - has been a 24-carat grade-A cunt at one time or another (often more times than we could really accept without utterly mauling our own positive self-image). None of us would behave or speak to one another that way if we were face to face. That includes you, Fen, and you, Pas. It would be unreasonable for us, who see ourselves as being so high-brow and above such petty "fanboy whining", as Fen termed it, to refuse to acknowledge that fact nor to expect everyone else on the internet to be equally above it.

People have opinions and views and expectations. When something doesn't meet their expectations they're going to shout about it. That's kind of why people march on government buildings with placards. OK, the subject is something a little bit less serious in the Grand Scheme of Things than the rising price of bread or getting hammered by taxation but it's a happy diversion, and it's politically rather preferable to have 50,000 gamers wailing at Bioware about the ending than it is about those same 50,000 citizens wailing at the government for giving the banks the reach-around.

So I'll end this, Pas, by using the pro-Ending sentiment: If you don't like it, don't read/post in the threads!

Maybe I want the Mass Effect community to be respectable. I just want to see a few people's opinions on the ME Facespace page on the challenges they issue and artwork they put up and so on, but I don't get opinions of the things I'm looking for... I get a spam of this "Change the ending!" nonsense. I'm in full support to tell Bioware the ending was flawed and they need to learn some valuable lessons, but going as far to demand a different ending is pretentious. My entire argument says why that's a bad thing to ask for, but it isn't even a reasonable suggestion. But sure, express your opinion on the ending but don't be so obnoxious that you have to ruin entire topics on the franchise. The fans have more potential to make me despise Mass Effect more than Bioware / EA at the moment.

One questions keeps coming to my mind, personally... WHERE THE CRAP WAS THIS OUTRAGE WHEN STARGATE UNIVERSE WAS CANCELED!? For Sam's sake... it's not reasonable to ask for a different ending, but by all means, it is reasonable to ask for an ending in general.

Which group of them? I didn't even get the game and the only flames I see are in defense of the ending

Wow... almost anywhere you look. If you have any popular Mass Effect fan page liked on Facespace, then you should see quite a bit of it.

I'm just glad I'm going to wait for Christmas to play this game, maybe something good has come out of this by then. Although I fear, steam-sales on a origin game might be troublesome. And DLC from a big publisher like EA probably won't get discounts before...ever.

Oh well, my condolences to you guys. Pity that you had to start spending energy on this kind of frustration.

K, the subject is something a little bit less serious in the Grand Scheme of Things than the rising price of bread or getting hammered by taxation but it's a happy diversion, and it's politically rather preferable to have 50,000 gamers wailing at Bioware about the ending than it is about those same 50,000 citizens wailing at the government for giving the banks the reach-around.

hehe, yeah, occupy EA would have been a interesting concept. having 50 000 angry gamers out in the streets of NY would perhaps have caused a revolution

Yea, wait until the 'ultimate' edition thing comes out with all the DLC and bugs managed. Multiplayer should still be going on as long as they keep issuing challenges and adding new weapons and characters to keep it interesting for a whole year. I already saw a leak photo of Batarians and Geth character for the future.

What the hell is Mass Effect even about?

Its a space-opera aka star-trek/star-wars but with the current political situation of our world as background-painting, (instead of the cold-war political backdrop of Star-trek TOS klingons for example). Combined with a lot of escapism in the vein of "being the hero that saves the day against massive force of ancient evil" that makes people happy spending time with it. Good characters and background setting, and so on and so forth.

Beyond that, its about its owners making money, and the consumers being angry that they have to buy the entire package that the owners wrap the game to.

Well, Bioware do indeed plan to do something about it, whether they alter the ending or something else remains to be seen. I fully anticipate they'll expect us to pay for it though which is a shame...

Well so that's news. And just as Pasidon predicted... we'll be paying an extra fist full of dollars for this game. So far, for the entire game, we will all probably be spending about 80 bucks. EA and Bioware probably couldn't of made a better financial decision than to ruin the ending of the game.

"As part of their campaign to have the game changed, supporters have raised more than $70,000 (£44,000) for a children's charity."





... UHHHHH.... What?

What the hell is Mass Effect even about?

Space dude, conversation, drama, shooting, robot gods, death, revenge, complain, re-revenge.

Couldn't have made a better decision.

But they haven't announced they are going to charge yet. Chances are they were going to do this anyway. They were always going to release DLC so realistically nothing much has changed by the business model. Though you're right in that they do have quite a sizeable captive audience.

You know, looking at the outrage over a fucking video game ending, couldn't that be put to use somewhere else? Kudos to the children's charity getting some green, but it seems... ridiculous that it was over the ending to a fucking video game. What happened to the days where the best part was getting to the ending? I hate this generation of games and gamers. GOODGOD.WAV

Edited by Beowulf, 23 March 2012 - 10:05 AM.

Sort of makes one regret freedom of speech. Makes people think they should say whatever they about whatever they want. But yea... the masses whining could be put to SO much better use. Can't we get this sort of reaction on things that actually matter?

Edited by {IP}Pasidon, 23 March 2012 - 04:59 PM.

Once the Facebook generation starts growing out of gaming and have to start looking at the real world, something might just happen. People don't have respect for authority these days, but as long as they are distracted and content they are pleased.

The two lines; people expecting more from our leaders and our leaders lining their pockets with loopholes and nepotism, are going to intersect one day. Then this mass-effect rage will just be one of many warmups .

The generational wave of behavior... science. But if we've learned anything from this, people will give a voice to things they want and not to what they need.

Or maybe they just see voicing anything else as a wasted measure. That's why voter apathy is so high - nobody can see a change forthcoming.

Quite worrying when people can see a bigger chance of a video game company acting according to public opinion than they can their democratically-elected representatives. They aren't wrong, though.

I hope voter apathy grows into voter anger. People should make their voices heard when something isn't going the way they want it to go. But I suspect most people deep in their minds, don't overthrow governments just because of alcohol prices going to high.

Once gasoline and food goes that way though, combined with housing, then we might be on to something.

Edited by duke_Qa, 26 March 2012 - 07:12 AM.

You know, looking at the outrage over a fucking video game ending, couldn't that be put to use somewhere else? Kudos to the children's charity getting some green, but it seems... ridiculous that it was over the ending to a fucking video game.

You know what really puts a damper on the good will generated by that charity? The fact that Child's Play(the name of the charity organisation the money was going to) had to ask them to close it down cause so many people were asking for their donation to be refunded.
Yep, apparently a fair few of those dear, generous souls actually thought the charity was buying them a new ending for ME3, and when they found it it was only helping children in need they turned around and took their money back...

Edited by some_weirdGuy, 26 March 2012 - 01:18 AM.