54 réponses à ce sujet

[xI extremist Ix]

Zulu_DFA, go outside.

[Black Raptor]

[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...

You tell me. Can be anything, really. Like, "All keepers, attack and kill the residents of the Citadel". Don't say I haven't warned you, when Keeper 20 comes chargin' at ya.
[/quote]
So in other words, you have no explanation and it doesn't fit in your theory.


[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...
How the signal could be present, if the Reapers had already finished their business and gone back to the dark space by the time the "12 scientists" even awoke, let alone came to the Citadel to study the Keepers?
[/quote]
Because it's the Citadel sending the signal, the Citadel is there and so are the Keepers. 


[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...
Not only that means creating an entire new subspecies of the Keepers - an irresponsive to the signal one - but also elimination the former, the responsive one. That requires a hell lot more of insight into the Keepers' genetics, than randomizing the genetic pool of a population of your own species.

That, and, once again, inbreeding could not be an obstacle to repopulating the galaxy even without gene randomization. Because it would only require to cull (kill) the defective infants, which would only be about one in four of them. Given the state of emergency, I can't see how that could be a problem with the surviving Protheans.
[/quote]
A: no it doesn't
B: how do you know the surviving members weren't all the same gender? There doesn't need to be an explanation as to why the Protheans didn't attempt all your wacky ideas, other than the fact they didn't.



[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...
On the other hand, your claim that the Reapers didn't bother with more than a sloppy job runs counter to Vigil's own tale about the hundreds of years it took for the Reapers of systematic and thorough work.
[/quote] 
I never claimed that. It's referenced on many occasions that remarkably little evidence of the Protheans existence is left behind. Shepard simply found the bits that still did.  

[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...

Yet, the Keepers don't touch the Conduit "statue". Why not put a sign on it? A placard?

BTW, why don't the Keepers remove the "statue"? Were they altered to ignore it? Then they could be altered to not touch any other Prothean things, including "Beware, Reapers!" signs and placards.

[/quote]
They probably were told not to interfere with Mass Relay technology lest they accidentally stop the Reapers from using the Citadel relay. 
There are far simpler explanations than the ones you come up with. Occams Razor again...

[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...
See above. And, you know, it's always bugged me: why would the Reapers need Keepers to activate the Citadel, huh? Why not activate the Citadel directly? Why not make the signal go to a hidden receiver that is linked directly to the portal openning switch. Like, you know in 20th century TV sets' remote controls?

Answer: Vigil was lying. The Keepers were never supposed to activate anything.
[/quote] 
If it was that obvious, why didn't Vigil just lie and say the Protheans when back and changed part of the Citadel rather than the Keepers? If the keepers are truely unimportant (unlike what Chorbans evidence suggests) why did Vigil feel the need to mention them at all in your version of events? 

Simply put, the Keepers were above suspicion.

[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...
With the Reapers gone, there was no point in hiding the "key how to stop the cycle" there. Especially when "he key to stop the cycle" was on the Citadel already... Wait.. how'd it get back to Ilos without the "12 scientists" going back there?[/quote]
Vigil had the Citadel override key, that's all. That key enabled Shepard to open the Citadel arms and let the Fleet have a chance at stopping Sovereign before it was too late. The surviving Protheans would have already known about the Citadel relay and thus left the override before using the Conduit in anticipation that the events of ME1 would be one of many possibilities they needed to account for.


[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...

Once more, repeat after me: Saren with his evil intentions would have been 2000 years late.

If the "12 scientists" wanted it, the Keepers would have leaft the VI alone, just as they leave the "statue" alone.
[/quote] Why? Sarens job was to take control of the Citadel and close the arms to protect Sovereign. If he had known about any Override key, then he would have done something about it. The Key only works for a short time before Sovereign would have regained control anyway. It's not like they could've installed it in preperation for Saren and the Geth.

There are many reasons why the Keepers left the statue alone short of Prothean interferance.  





[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...
1. According to Vigil's tale, the "12 scientists" were able to alter the Keepers in any way they liked.
2. The Keepers do not touch the "statue", which is a hard fact.
[/quote]
According to Vigil, the Prothans were able to block the signal telling them to open the relay. And there are other reasons why they didn't touch the relay monument.




 
[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...
Why weren't they willing to take the other risk? Of staying active? Since they had no way to tell which risk was more risky?
[/quote]
Erm, I'm pretty sure it was obvious which was most risky. Staying active=highest chance of being detected by the beings hell bent on destroying you. Hibernation=smallest chance of being detected. How is this not obivous to you?
[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...
Once again: they isolated the planet (but Vigil somehow managed to observe the reaping process, hmmm...), [/quote] Is "the news" something you haven't heard of yet? It's this thing where other people tell you about important events that have happened/are happening without you having to be there. Vigil and the Ilos scientists merely had to listen to the prothean extranet to gain knowledge of what was happening.
[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...
and that was their best bet. If the Reapers came to the system, there was no way they could miss the facility on Ilos. With such a thing as the Conduit (and thousands of active life support pods), it had to give them a hell of a spike of anomalous readings during the planet scanning minigame, know what I'm talking?
[/quote] 
If they detected the planet yes. While in hibernation, their chances of detection were lower and thus the Reapers never realised the planet was occupied, so they never bothered to look closer.  

[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...
With the Reapers, going underground is not "well hidden". There was no f*cking point to it.
[/quote] Why not? The Reapers want to kill you, you hide, Reapers don't find you, thus you don't get killed. If you can't see a difference between being killed and not being killed, I question your critical thinking abilities. 
[quote]Zulu_DFA wrote...
OK, that's it. I have only so much patience when talking to a wall so dense as yourself. One more thing though:

Occam's Razor is applicable only to working hypotheses. Vigil's tale is not working on so many counts, it's ridiculous.[/quote]
Getting frustrated at how easy it is for me to bat down your hairbrained ideas?
You've yet to provide any evidence to show that Vigil's version of events isn't true and still fail to provide any reasoning behinds Sovereign's actions and Vigils actions in your theory. 

How did Vigil know what Shepard knew? (how does what he say fit in exactly with what Shepard had found by that point even though Vigil could've had no way of knowing)

Why did Sovereign lie on Virmire and tell Shepard that he was going to get his buddies and wipe out the galaxy when instead he was going to do something else (unexplained and unknown) which was going to wipe out the galaxy without the help of the other Reapers?

Why did Vigil tell Shepard about the other Reapers and not simply lie and claim Sovereign was working by himself?

Why does Chorban find evidence about keepers and signals (which repeat every 50000 years, coinciding with the extinctions) when there shouldn't be any signals to do with the Keepers?

Why is Sovereign rogue? What is his plan? 

What is the point of the Citadel?

Why can't you answer these questions, and why doesn't your theory make any sense? Everyone else here can see it's completely bonkers.
 

Modifié par Black Raptor, 03 août 2011 - 08:19 .

[Zulu_DFA]

midasear wrote...

Zulu_DFA wrote...

According to Vigil's tale, the "12 scientists" were able to alter the Keepers in any way they liked.

This entire line of argument has been bugging me since first reading it.  And last night, while completeing a playthru of ME1, I confirmed why.

Vigil does not claim the research team altered the Keepers.  He claims that they altered the signal emitted by the Citadel, the one that orders the Keepers to make preparations to open the Mass Relay to "Dark Space".  He also claims that over millions of years, the Keepers had slowly evolved  so that they only obeyed signals coming from the Citadel, and not from the Reapers themselves.   Presumably the research team used a software hack developed on Illos to penatrate Citadel Control...a copy of which Vigil provides to our intrepid hero.

Hmmm... All right, that would make moot my point about the "12 scientists" being definitely capable of genetic research and manipulation. However, the point remains that Vigil's claim that 12 was not enough to restart the Prothean race is an obvious hambug. It really could lie better than that. Especially given its stated dedication to the survival of the said race, that had supposedly been put into it by the most brilliantest Prothean minds before they inexplicably decided to go into stasis instead of maintaining the population, since Ilos was a secret to the Reapers anyway... Vigil would only have to factor the reproductive health of the subjects into the pattern of the power cuts, and at least some of the "12" would have been able to breed, once the Reapers were gone.

midasear wrote...

A better question is why do the Reapers rely on the Keepers to reconfigure the Citadel instead of installing and signaling a mechanical or AI controlled system?

That's right. The "Reapers send a signal to the Citadel, so that the Citadel can send a signal to the Keepers, so that the Keepers can activate the Citadel" scheme appears a bit too unnecessarily complex to be true, as opposed to (for example) "the Reapers send a signal to the Citadel and activate it". Quantum entanglement FTW!!!

And there is a whole lot of other questions. Including the one in the title of this thread. And the one that comes with your suggestion that the "software hack" to the Citadel controls was developed on Ilos - how was it possible, if before the Reaper invasion the Protheans had not suspected such a hack would be needed, and after the invasion they did not return to Ilos? And the most important one: why would the Reapers need the scheme with the Citadel at all, if they can just fly back in a negligible amount of time and launch a surprize attack on any number of places in the galaxy they want, including the Citadel itself?

midasear wrote... 

But is Vigil's explanation really unreasonable?  The Citadel needs to be useful for it to function as a trap for the starfaring civilizations the Reapers want to attract.  And the Keepers make it useful.  By acting for centuries as an extremely useful, relatively docile, but highly eccentric interface to the inexplicable technologies on the Citadel, the Keeper's activities eventually fall beneath notice, let alone suspicion, to the Citadel's inhabitants.

Maybe the Reapers could leave a sophisticated VI behind to serve the same purpose.  But the VI's failure to explain what happened to the previous inhabitants is going to leave it under a cloud of suspicion that will never really go away.  Those who discover the Citadel are either going to view the eccentric VI as broken, and in need of upgrade and repair, which will lead to all sorts of questions about how does this doo-hickey interfacs with this stuff over here that the Reapers don't want thier future victims asking.  Or the VI is going to be suspected (quite correctly) of complicity in the former inhabitants dissappearance, which will lead to questions the Reapers would view as even more undesirable.

The Keeper race makes for a better stooge.

Frankly, I think the start of true efforts by the target civilization to understand the Keepers is what triggers the Reaper invasion at the start of each Cycle.  Chorban and Jahleed's discovery of a medical scanner that worked on the Keepers, and their clumsy efforts to compile data on the Keepers, did not go unnoticed.  It is what convinced Sovereign it was necessary to act NOW.

I think the true secrets of the Citadel are yet to be revealed - in ME3. But they probably sound like something along these lines.

As to the Reapers' decision about when to invade, they use the Collectors - or, more precisely, the observations conducted through the Collectors - to determine it. Sovereign's activity was an entirely unexpected variable and, despite its failure (due to the Mu Relay's supernova), potentially detrimental. It forced the Reapers to initiate the active phase of the cycle a little bit early this time around. But they are still on their "Plan A", and there is no such thing as "Plan B" for them.

midasear wrote...



Chorban is thus the most consequential individual in Citadel space.  All the death and destruction is on his head.

Ha-ha, nice one! Goddamn you, Chorban!!!

Modifié par Zulu_DFA, 04 août 2011 - 06:39 .

[midasear]

<i>And there is a whole lot of other questions. Including the one in the title of this thread. And the one that comes with your suggestion that the "software hack" to the Citadel controls was developed on Ilos - how was it possible, if before the Reaper invasion the Protheans had not suspected such a hack would be needed, and after the invasion they did not return to Ilos? </i>

As I said, the surviving researchers developed the hack on Illos itself, where they had access to Vigil's assistance.

And elements of the Prothean society clearly DID suspect something was suspicious about the Citadel and the Mass Relay. That's why they built a secret base on Illos looking to duplicate the technologies, and were able to swiftly destroy all records of its existence when the Citadel was attacked.

We can surmise the Protheans had their own version of Cerberus or the STG floating around. Why not? All the successor races do. Actually, for all we know, they are still active, and still manipulating the successor races...whom they were studying and perhaps genetically modifying even before the arrival of the Reapers.

People think the Hanar's Church of the Enkindlers is a big joke, They don't realize it's a front for the Prothean Special Investigative Unit enclave currently headed up by acting supervisor Vigil@Kahje. It was Vigil@Kahje who ordered the relocation of the Drell in order to have a supply of organic field agents better suited for wetwork on...uh...dry land.

[Black Raptor]

Zulu_DFA wrote...


Hmmm... All right, that would make moot my point about the "12 scientists" being definitely capable of genetic research and manipulation.

You'd find that a lot of your points are moot if you actually bothered to think about them.

Zulu_DFA wrote...
However, the point remains that Vigil's claim that 12 was not enough to restart the Prothean race is an obvious hambug.

How do you know? For a start, you don't know how many genders protheans had, or how many of the survivors were different genders. Vigil wouldn't have had to mention the total number of survivors if he was making it up. 

Zulu_DFA wrote...
It really could lie better than that.

 Yes it could. There would be very little need to go into specifics as to how many Protheans survived, how they survived, why they went into hibernation etc had Vigil been lying. The fact that he does explain all that is proof that he wasn't trying to hide anything.

Zulu_DFA wrote...
Especially given its stated dedication to the survival of the said race, that had supposedly been put into it by the most brilliantest Prothean minds before they inexplicably decided to go into stasis instead of maintaining the population, since Ilos was a secret to the Reapers anyway...

They couldn't know Ilos was going to be kept secret. Suddenly the Protheans are up against a race of sentient machines who only seem to target them (ignoring all other life in the galaxy). They do not know exactly how they go around looking for the Protheans so they decide to risk going into hibernation in case the Reapers have some way of detecting Prothean lifesigns over vast distances. They didn't know how long the Reapers were going to stay so Vigil was programed to shut down non critical systems and stasis pods to conserve power rather than give the Reapers a chance to detect prothean life.
If Vigil was lying, he wouldn't even have had to mention hibernation or anything, just say that the Reapers didn't find Ilos because it was top secret.

 

Zulu_DFA wrote...
Vigil would only have to factor the reproductive health of the subjects into the pattern of the power cuts, and at least some of the "12" would have been able to breed, once the Reapers were gone.

This is explained in the game. Once the Protheans realised that the Mass Relays and Citadel was a trap, their focus shifted to stopping the cycle instead of self preservation. The 12 scientists were the experts on Mass relays and were needed to finish the Conduit and stop the cycle.

 

Zulu_DFA wrote...
That's right. The "Reapers send a signal to the Citadel, so that the Citadel can send a signal to the Keepers, so that the Keepers can activate the Citadel" scheme appears a bit too unnecessarily complex to be true, as opposed to (for example) "the Reapers send a signal to the Citadel and activate it". Quantum entanglement FTW!!!

Then what is the signal detected in the Keepers for then? Why does it repeat every 50000 years, coninciding with the extinctions? 

 

Zulu_DFA wrote...
And there is a whole lot of other questions. Including the one in the title of this thread. And the one that comes with your suggestion that the "software hack" to the Citadel controls was developed on Ilos - how was it possible, if before the Reaper invasion the Protheans had not suspected such a hack would be needed, and after the invasion they did not return to Ilos? And the most important one: why would the Reapers need the scheme with the Citadel at all, if they can just fly back in a negligible amount of time and launch a surprize attack on any number of places in the galaxy they want, including the Citadel itself?

All these are answered already, or are answered from actually playing the game. 

Keepers are programed not to interfere with Mass relays. Overide key was developed after the Reaper invasion but before they left. If that doesn't suit your tastes, then remember that it is "software" and can be sent via the interwebs without needing to travel there. 
Citadel is the central goverenment of the galaxy. Taking them out first in a surprise attack and wiping out the biggest fleets at the same time would make their job much easier. 
They wouldn't be able to attack the Citadel from outside as it is too easily defended. 
+there could be any number of reasons why they didn't go to the Alpha relay first. Maybe they just didn't want to waste the energy when they could jump straight behind the enemy lines. 

midasear wrote... 

But is Vigil's explanation really unreasonable?  The Citadel needs to be useful for it to function as a trap for the starfaring civilizations the Reapers want to attract.  And the Keepers make it useful.  By acting for centuries as an extremely useful, relatively docile, but highly eccentric interface to the inexplicable technologies on the Citadel, the Keeper's activities eventually fall beneath notice, let alone suspicion, to the Citadel's inhabitants.

Maybe the Reapers could leave a sophisticated VI behind to serve the same purpose.  But the VI's failure to explain what happened to the previous inhabitants is going to leave it under a cloud of suspicion that will never really go away.  Those who discover the Citadel are either going to view the eccentric VI as broken, and in need of upgrade and repair, which will lead to all sorts of questions about how does this doo-hickey interfacs with this stuff over here that the Reapers don't want thier future victims asking.  Or the VI is going to be suspected (quite correctly) of complicity in the former inhabitants dissappearance, which will lead to questions the Reapers would view as even more undesirable.

The Keeper race makes for a better stooge.

Frankly, I think the start of true efforts by the target civilization to understand the Keepers is what triggers the Reaper invasion at the start of each Cycle.  Chorban and Jahleed's discovery of a medical scanner that worked on the Keepers, and their clumsy efforts to compile data on the Keepers, did not go unnoticed.  It is what convinced Sovereign it was necessary to act NOW.

This. 



 

Zulu_DFA wrote...
Ha-ha, nice one! Goddamn you, Chorban!!!

You've yet to explain why his evidence fits so well with the actual plot and disproves your version of events. 

Modifié par Black Raptor, 04 août 2011 - 03:21 .