"Sense of entitlement" is one of those words that smart people said once, and stupid people heard it and went "I can use this for ANYTHING!"  It's like the duct tape of dumb people's arguments.

 

You know, kind of like "toxic."

Or "projecting!"

I had one warning point, that simply would not go away, to my eternal and lasting shame on my original account. Then I lost access, created a new account and have no warning points. I have no friends, no likes and no record of posts, but I do not have any warning points. Yay?

Look at the bright side.  A couple months from now, we'll all have no warning points, no likes, no friends, and no record that we ever said anything at all.  You're a trendsetter!

That literally ripping off the ending to Deus Ex was ingenious.

Hey, hey, now, let's not jump to conclusions here.  We don't know for absolute sure they ripped off the ending to Deus Ex.  They might have actually been ripping off the ending to Transformers: Beast Machines.  Assuming they were ripping off something good might be giving them too much credit.

The happy moment when you find people with more post count than yourself!

The not happy moment that follows when you realize that Bioware has decided that in a couple months, both those counts will vanish completely.

I must just have some sort of superhuman processing or something, because for the life of me I can't figure out why anyone is surprised to see Glassdoor posts of this nature.  I mean, in the past 4.5 years, look at how Bioware has dealt with consumer adversity - how pretty yet clearly disingenuous their words consistently are, and how far apart those words are from their actions.  Look at the people they've lost, and the rate at which they've lost them.  Look at their overall decisions, both in the development of their products and the way they're operating as a company.  Look at their lack of friendly presence and consistency in their places of public outreach, notably BSN itself.  Everything this company has said and done since the ME3 ending debacle has pointed to a few hard points: the people in charge think very highly of themselves, do not like to be questioned, and don't really know what they're doing.  Those Glassdoor reviews reflect this: the higher-ups know what to say, but not what to do, and they will NOT allow themselves to be questioned by anyone, be it fans or employees.

You didn't make one.

Han, just gonna point something out...if you'll notice, for the last couple pages, we've all been studiously ignoring this person.  Well, that, or no one can parse out what he/she is saying well enough to respond; I'm not too proud to admit that I myself am only picking up bits and pieces of gist out of the crazy.  Anyway...it's your choice if you want to engage, but I wanted to at least point out that it's probably not gonna wind up being especially worth the time and effort for you.

That has been the general consensus of the past 141 pages, yes.

Although personally, I don't believe either one of them. I think it is a monetary decision, and I don't believe Priestly on anything ever for any reason.

If it's a money decision, then Bioware's in some pretty desperate financial straits.  The cost of maintaining a forum - even a large and active one - is considerable from the perspective of a single individual, but to a company, it's utterly negligible.  The yearly cost of maintaining this community probably amounts to Bioware's office supply budget for 1 - 3 months.  Consider the returns of an active forum community: theoretical returns like extra micro-transactions when you pump them up for an online weekend event and attachment to community keeping several fans loyal consumers to the company longer than they would have been otherwise, and actual, hard returns like actively using your fan community's ideas and in-jokes to create a product for them to buy (such as ME3's Citadel DLC).  These are profit opportunities that can only be lightly touched on using social media and Youtube venues, and Bioware's not even very dedicated to those platforms to begin with.  Long-term, even medium-term, a fan community with as much of a history and presence as this creates far more income than it costs to maintain.  The only way this could be a monetary decision would be if Bioware was so desperate that they can't survive in the short-term, and have to sacrifice the much greater benefits of the forum for quick cash.  It'd be like...being so close to death from starvation that you had to sell your fishing pole for a meal, because even though the pole represents endless future meals, you don't have enough time left to spend catching a fish.  Unless Bioware's on a real, actual verge of bankruptcy, the decision to close this forum costs them money, not saves it.

No, this is a situation with the distinct odor of someone important in the company (or EA, though I think we're a little too trigger-happy to blame the corrupt overlords when the underlings are just as corrupt) seeing the fan community as a threat to his or her ego.

Future 'Fan interaction'  with EAware in a nutshell.

Oooh, thanks for posting that. I've been hoping I'd run across that one again.

Yeah, the writing was on the wall about how Bioware actually felt about their fanbase and their craft with the ME3 ending fiasco: Ego before integrity, Money before art.  Really, the surprising thing is that there was someone in the company who cared enough and actually believed their HR script about valuing fan input that the forums have stayed up for this long.

So, in summary: "We want to talk at our fanbase, not with them."

OMG, thanks everyone who had a helping hand in this creation. I'm not a crying kind of person but, when the only ending I could get after many attempts was a DEAD HEROINE. I was furious, mad, sad, heart broken, and many emotions not printable.

 

Now I cry with joy and happiness . I wish you all a big hug for making the game what it should have been from the start. THANKS!

 

BB1

Almost 4 years later, and fans are still being saved by your work, Mr. Fob.

Here's hoping that rainy weekend comes soon, Mr. Fob.  I've decided 0.6 will be the version I finally install and play, so I'm just itching to experience MEHEM firsthand at long last.  But I've waited years now, and I can wait as long as I need to for this game to finally be complete for me, so take it at whatever pace you need to.

Having contributed to this project in even the tiny way I did is like as not to be one of the prouder moments of my life.  Some day I'll be pointing my name in the MEHEM credits out to my grandkids.  Thank you for being generous enough to include me in there, Mr. Fob.

Having 0.5 at last is wonderful, sir, thank you greatly for your long and tireless work to restore the honor of Mass Effect.  If I may be so bold and callous as to still look into the future even at this precipitous moment of modding triumph, I would ask what plans you have for the future?  You've mentioned that 0.6 will be primarily functionality tweaks as 0.5 was, to make more content addition smoother, but is there any set idea as to what that content will be?

This may be, but you know, that's actually very okay.  When all is said and done, creativity is not a factor in what makes a good and respectable ending to a work.  The creator has had the time for the entirety of the work until that point to be creative; it's too late to start right as the work is concluding.  An ending's job is just to conclude the work, and to keep that conclusion properly aligned with the spirit, tone, message, and themes of the work.  To be creative is to be different, to be singular, to think and tell your story in a way that the audience is not quite expecting--so the more creative you get with your ending, the less likely it is to be properly connected to the story it's concluding, and that destroys its ability to perform its primary function of conclusion.  Bioware got creative with their ending to Mass Effect 3 (creative as long as you're not familiar with Deus Ex, that one Transformers show, and Isaac Asimov's works, that is), and completely disconnected it from everything that had led up to that ending, in the process destroying the protagonist's character, clumsily murdering several major themes and messages of the series, creating logical paradoxes all over the place, and greatly cheapening their universe and characters retroactively.  Was the ending unexpected and different?  Certainly.  Was it a good ending?  Not even remotely.  Because (among many other reasons) it wasn't true to the work it was concluding.

Don't ever worry about making an ending creative.  Creativity is for everything before the ending.  Just worry about making an ending right for what came before it.

Just having a tentative release date area is great, sir, whether or not you make it.  I was sure you'd say something like next summer or so, so even allowing for it taking more time than you expect, this is good news for me.

I understand that art cannot and never should be rushed, but out of curiousity, do you have any general idea of when 0.5 will be ready?  I'll wait as long as I have to, of course, but waiting's always easier for me if I have at least a partial idea of the general wait time.

If not, don't worry about it.

Good to see you're still fighting the good fight, Mr. Fob.  We still anticipate 0.5 with baited breath.

I'm sure that things are just busy for him.  Mr. Fob is a dedicated fan of Mass Effect, like the rest of us.  He's committed to correcting Bioware's arrogant blunders as best can be done.  We just have to sit tight and wait for him to finish, difficult though that may be.

MEHEM, because I give a **** about the art and spirit of Mass Effect, even if that comes at the expense of the precious, fragile egos of Bioware.

The ending of Mass Effect 3 is still as much a betrayal of the series, the fans, and the writers themselves as it always has been.  Time doesn't change that Bioware threw away their artistic integrity in order to destroy what could have been the greatest science fiction series ever conceived, then childishly shut their eyes, covered their ears, and screamed to ignore every demonstrable piece of evidence and every basic rule of marketing and interpretation of statistics that measured their audience's dissatisfaction.  The wrong and the stupidity are as present now as they were before.

So no, I'm not at peace with Mass Effect 3.  When the Mass Effect Happy Ending Mod releases its fifth iteration, I will be able to satisfy myself with moving on, but at that point, I will be at peace with "Mass Effect 3 with MEHEM," as a product that is true to itself as reshaped by someone who has an actual pride and love for the series.  I will not be at peace with just plain unmodded Mass Effect 3, nor the careless hacks at Bioware that made it toxic at the moment when it should have shined the most.  I am a customer they lost, a formerly loyal patron who eagerly purchased their goods who now will make it a point not to support the company with a single dollar more.  And as I won't return until they fix the ending, and apologize for their utterly repulstive handling of the fiasco, I'm likely to stay a lost customer.  No matter--there are other RPG developers out there, and with the increasing rise of Kickstarter games, there are plenty of other creators I can support instead, ones who actually care enough about their product to keep it trut to itself, and appreciate the people like me who make their vision possible.

Bioware can surround itself with artless, tasteless yes-men all it likes, but it's still falling, and I'm not sticking around to watch it go splat.

I'll wait as long as I have to for 0.5, sir.  It's hard to be patient, but for this, it's worth every excrutiating moment.

Very good of you to do this.

I'm also considering Samara by request since you can sort-of romance her in Citadel.

I thought that part was quite well done, putting the tiny almost-not romance of Shepard and Samara way above several of the "real" ones in quality and how emotionally true it felt.  It'd be a nice touch, I think, since they never adjusted anything else to reflect the Citadel events regarding that.  Not that you should necessarily care about the opinion of some random forum person such as myself on the matter, but them's my 2 cents, all the same.

MrFob wrote...
That's really all there is for v0.5 so it shouldn't take too long, once I get started (after Harby is done). My main problem is that I simply don't have much time for modding these days, so it won't be before March for sure.

CommandBenX wrote...

symbiotics wrote...

Ironhandjustice wrote...

The RPGenius wrote...

So. What if in Version 0.5, if we beat the game with a huge EMS, we get a shot of Shepard and the Space Hamster doing a leaping high five?

Think about it.

With glowing yellow eyes and SHOWING YOU TRUE POWER of hamsterish high five?

Scary.

and ending with a music concert in true 80's saturday morning cartoon style

@symbiotics
You Mean like This 
www.youtube.com/watch