445 réponses à ce sujet

[teh DRUMPf!!]

Taboo-XX wrote...

Who dare I ask think it's a mercy killing?

Eh... lots of people, but no one particularly important. 

[Redbelle]

I wouldn't kill the Reaper's out of mercy. Sure they are the mutilated remain's of civilisation's buried under Reaper form and not allowed to express their individual trait's as to what made that civilisation great. Making the Reaper form a coffin that kills people............but.

I'm going to have to go with the argument that I'd kill the Reapers because they are the coffin's of dead civialisation's that commit galactic genocide once evey 50k year's.

[Megaton_Hope]

The repeat genocide angle is definitely why I lean toward getting rid of them, yes.

Removing individual minds from the Reaper collective might be acceptable, if, let's say, the Geth had a means by which to do so.

[DarthRic]

Modifié par DarthRic, 26 mars 2013 - 09:57 .

[teh DRUMPf!!]

DarthRic wrote...

the codex specifically states that the number of reaper capital ships attacking Earth

It says no such thing.

ME Codex wrote...

At Arcturus Station, more than a dozen Reaper capital ships engaged the Alliance's Second, Third, and Fifth Fleets. This was mere screening for the main force. Dozens more capital ships continued through the Charon Relay, where the First Fleet had been lying in wait but was soon destroyed. The Fourth Fleet, near Earth, had a few minutes of advance warning. It stood no better chance.

was in the dozens and the number hitting the alliance parliment was over a dozen.

Typical Reaper-tactics, this and their Earth invasion: using no more/no less than necessary to get the job done.

[DarthRic]

Modifié par DarthRic, 26 mars 2013 - 09:57 .

[teh DRUMPf!!]

DarthRic wrote...

Also saying "they were just not using all their forces" is not an argument, I gave written facts you can either refute them or accept that im right,

Or neither.

It's written that the dozens that engaged the Alliance fleet were "a mere screening for the main force."

In other words, it was just a scouting-party. Again, they held back.

also to point out flaws in your estimates, the Leviathan DLC has the batarians say the dead Reaper is at least a few million years old effectivly retconning the original billion year estimate.

I doubt a couple of batarian paper-pushers know much about this kind of thing.

They're probably wrong, like when EDI guessed that the Reapers failed to preserve the Protheans.

If we were anywhere close to being able to beat the Reapers, we would not be depending on a superdevice to win.

To top it all off if the reapers had 20k capitals they would have more than the organic fleets have cruisers, which would mean the war would last all of 5 mins before the fleets are annihalated.

The galactic fleets haven't been striking the Reapers head-on.

They're predominantly employing hit-and-run tactics. Minimal engagement.

I'm 99% sure the Codex says this.

[teh DRUMPf!!]

 krukow has messaged me that she can't bring herself to continue our previous argument in this thread.

Kicked the fight out of her, I guess. We'll consider that an admission of defeat.

Let's all just take this as a lesson: read more, post less. You'll be better off for it.

[Ieldra]

"Billions of organic minds, uploaded and conjoined within an immortal machine body. 'Each a nation'" (Legion in ME2 on the nature of the Reapers).

Killing a Reaper is genocide. Maybe it's justified, maybe not, I'm not taking a stance on that here, but assuming it's an act of mercy is not just the cheapest kind of hypocrisy, it's the worst kind of racism, because it assumes that a kind of life you know nothing about is not worth living. You cannot imagine that an entity created through the harvesting process can want to live? That individual minds may still be alive and want to continue? Fine, but that says more about your lack of imagination than about the entity in question.

If you want to know, free the Reapers from the Catalyst's control - and ask. Or take control of them and take the answer from their minds.

[knightnblu]

I don't buy the "mercy" reason either, but I also don't care about the remnants of past civilizations. I care about justice, and justice demands that they be executed for their crimes against sentient life across untold cycles and for the victims of the current cycle. How would preserving the tortured shadows of a dead people serve any purpose? Better to kill them all and be done with it. The galaxy gets justice for the war crimes it has suffered repeatedly and the Reaper threat is permanently neutralized.

[Dean_the_Young]

LineHolder wrote...

Can we lend credence to the notion that some preserved civilizations would wish for continued existence? Yes, we can.

OK, I'll go liquify two spiders, mix them, preserve them in a glass jar of amber and then ask them if they want to continue to be preserved. 

If they aren't suffering after the joining, why would they?

Depression, injury, torture... there are a lot of horrific experiences and times we can go through which can make us wish for any release from the pain, even death, without that desire lasting forever forward. We overcome depression. The injury heals, or we accept it and move on. The torture ends, and we are liberated.

Pain is transitory. Not only isn't it forever, but pain can often be a gateway sensation preceeding something better. Having a dislocated shoulder forced back in hurts like the dickens, but ends the previous discomfort. The enjoyment of sex for women comes after losing their virginity.

Well, that last one might be a bit off as far as comparisons go, but the point remains: it would be the current state, after the horrific joining, that would be measured against. If the Reapers don't believe themselves to be in infinite pain or suffering, why should you?

[Dean_the_Young]

Sajuro wrote...

Ok it isn't a mercy killing because the Reapers are in pain, it's revenge for the civilizations they melted and terrorized and it is a mercy killing if you believe in souls so the countless creatures that make up Reapers can finally be laid to rest.

Are the minds in the Reaper gestalt even the same minds that were processed? If so, wouldn't their souls remain to their current state and beliefs? If not, aren't those souls already passed and the current minds worth their own souls, if Geth can also be considered to have souls?

This screams of being an arbitrary interpretation of an abstract, potentially fictional, construct.

[Dean_the_Young]

Astartes Marine wrote...

HYR 2.0 wrote...
One can make the case for "diminished responsibility" there, IMO.

One could also make a case for the Nuremburg Defense...and then have it promptly shot down.

The Nuremburg defendents had free will, even if they were in a dystopian state. The Reapers don't: they are effectively shackled AI with enforced views/activities (depending on the exact nature of the Reaper-Catalyst relationship).

[Rhayak]

krukow wrote...
No, idiot, you didn't 

Does that tone make you feel empowered, little kid?


Anyway, yeah: the Reaperification process is not a pretty sight. But there is no way to tell how the victim feels afterwards. If they feel at all, that is.

In Synthesis, however, it's explained that the Reapers did preserve the knowledge of those Reaperized. So they do continue to exist somehow, and there is a reason for NOT wanting to destroy them.

[Dean_the_Young]

Megaton_Hope wrote...

Either way, the person they used to be is finished, over. That person wasn't linked to millions of other minds inside a giant robot cuttlefish. Wasn't even capable of being. This thing that is, it's got different goals and different beliefs, arrived at from who knows what process of intra-cuttlefish logic and cuttlefish-based perceptions.

True, but it still leaves the question of souls and individual worth, for those who care about such things. Is the soul of a brainwashed/remade person still the same soul? Do those beings, soul or not, have their own value?

I mean, individuality itself as we know it is a constantly changing identity. Who you are now is different from who you were an hour ago, a week, a year, a decade. The person you used to be is finished, over... but I doubt either of us would argue that it makes who you are irrelevant, or that it means there isn't any form of continuity.

[GeneralMoskvin_2.0]

I consider the Reapers enslaved victims of the catalyst. And as I could not sacrifice the Geth (EDI is another story...), Destroy is a no-go. I'm still torn between Control and Synthesis. No idea what I should pick.

[Argolas]

@Your estimation on the Reaper forces: Invalidated through the battle for the Apien Crest. The Turians bound the bulk of the heavy Reaper fleets that stood against them at Palaven, and the Reapers did not have the power to take the Turian fuel supply, that means the Reaper forces were stretched thin. If they had 20k capital ships, they could easily send 100 to every relevant colonized planet in the galaxy, a force that could each take 400 dreadnoughts so no one would stand a chance (I doubt it gets better if you count smaller ships of both sides in). Also, during Priority: Earth, several Souvereign-class Reapers break out of the battle and that leaves an opening large enough for the crucible. Even if there were only a few hundred Souvereign-class Reapers near Earth this would make NO sense. Flaw in your logic: Reaper casualties. They create 0-1 Souvereign-class Reapers per cycle, a single casualty per cycle results in their numbers stagnating or falling. Considering that the Turians alone destroyed multiple capital ships, I am surprised that they can even sustain their numbers. Despite the fact that they fought isolated star clusters, those are very much able to take a few Reapers with them, the Asari did it as well.

About the actual topic: The Reapers are monsters, I don't care about a merciful "death" for them (I don't consider them alive). I do care about those who were harvested to become part of such an abomination. Destroying their Reaper is mercy to them IMO. They died long ago and should be allowed to rest, as should every husk, cannibal, banshee, marauder, collector and whatever other abomination the Reapers may have created.

Modifié par Argolas, 26 mars 2013 - 11:03 .

[Jadebaby]

a HYR 2.0 thread - Nonsense, tbh.

[Jadebaby]

Rhayak wrote...

krukow wrote...
No, idiot, you didn't 

Does that tone make you feel empowered, little kid?

I don't like krukow either...
 
but does calling him/her a little kid make you feel empowered? lulz

[Jadebaby]

HYR 2.0 wrote...

 krukow has messaged me that she can't bring herself to continue our previous argument in this thread.

Kicked the fight out of her, I guess. We'll consider that an admission of defeat.

Let's all just take this as a lesson: read more, post less. You'll be better off for it.

You are the most arrogant son of a ****. Proven even more by the fact you can't see past your own nose to realize that in this instance, you are wrong!

People can choose destroy for a plethora of different reasons, one of them is mercy-killing. Deal with it.

[Rhayak]

Jadebaby wrote...
 
but does calling him/her a little kid make you feel empowered? lulz

Empowered as **** XD

[Dean_the_Young]

HYR 2.0 wrote...

DarthRic wrote...

Also saying "they were just not using all their forces" is not an argument, I gave written facts you can either refute them or accept that im right,

Or neither.

It's written that the dozens that engaged the Alliance fleet were "a mere screening for the main force."

In other words, it was just a scouting-party. Again, they held back.

The better counter-argument to make would probably be to note that his numbers are a minimum with an undefined number in addition to them, while his argument rests on it being a maximum.

Arguing that they were holding back is unverifiable, and goes off-point.

also to point out flaws in your estimates, the Leviathan DLC has the batarians say the dead Reaper is at least a few million years old effectivly retconning the original billion year estimate.

I doubt a couple of batarian paper-pushers know much about this kind of thing.

More to the point, 'at least a few million' doesn't contradict a billion: a few million would be a low cap, not a high cap. There is no contradiction here, especially when the source in question is clearly an imperfect adjucator.

To top it all off if the reapers had 20k capitals they would have more than t[he organic fleets have cruisers, which would mean the war would last all of 5 mins before the fleets are annihalated.

The galactic fleets haven't been striking the Reapers head-on.

They're predominantly employing hit-and-run tactics. Minimal engagement.

I'm 99% sure the Codex says this.

It does, but it doesn't change his point: by all in-universe logic, the war should have been over long ago.

But then, that's just a consistent weakness of the franchise in general, because Bioware (or Mass Effect in particular) sucks at treating numbers of scale consistently. This was evident all the way back in ME1, when we first heard the Alliance backstory and yet Humanity was treated as a near-great power despite only a few decades of Mass Effect knowledge.

It's a consistent fact of the planet lore that Bioware had no idea of what a 'big colony' meant: the largest Human colonies (Terra Nova during ME1 BDTS DLC) is around four million. At the same time, the planet Aite (the Overlord world) is going to have a moon crash into it in two centuries, has a population of one and a half billion: Korlus, the junk-planet Grunt is gotten from, is a Terminus planet of almost four billion. Heck, the single Asari colony of Illium, one of the 'newest' Asari colonies, has 85 million people... which outweighs the combined total of all known Human colonies in existence. And yet, Human colonies are treated as a Big Thing, though even in ME2 Bioware could never decided if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of colonists had been abducted. (Fun fact: Shepard's Collector Base speach doesn't even cover all the colonists taken from Horizon alone.)

Mass Effect's number lore is a mess, and always has been, same with all other military fields. Dreadnaughts, the Biggest Baddest measure of power the galaxy has, number in the low dozens. Krogan, despite having no space navy and being primarily infantry, are considered a considerable military force. The War Assets are replete with such examples, in which an individual or small group of people is equivalent to a warship or entire fleet.

But then, what can you expect from a sci-fi setting which measures military strength in terms of ground forces in an age of orbital bombardment?

[DarthRic]

Modifié par DarthRic, 26 mars 2013 - 09:58 .

[Dean_the_Young]

DarthRic wrote...

HYR 2.0 wrote...


Or neither.

It's written that the dozens that engaged the Alliance fleet were "a mere screening for the main force."

In other words, it was just a scouting-party. Again, they held back.

You are not reading it correctly, it says the dozen reapers attacking the alliance parliment were screening for the main force of DOZENS that went to earth, so they didnt hold back.

That's not what the codex says: specifically, it does not say that the main force only consisted of dozens, or that that the dozens that went through were the extent of the force. You are projecting a limitation that the codex does not.

As for using hit and run tactics, yes they were doing this, but as you saw on Palavan the Turians were fighting toe to toe with the reapers.

If you call an engagement of about a minute 'toe to toe', sure. We don't have much to suggest they stuck around to fight for long.

Additionally many systems had info such as allied forces fighting off the reaper fleets, as well the reapers apparently couldnt spare a destroyer for some places because they were lower priority which indicates the reapers didn't have the massive numbers you claim.

Since we don't know how the Reapers are deploying their forces, we can't honestly say that. If the Reapers place a higher priority on containing this cycle in its known area and preventing people from fleeing to unmarked planets to prolong the harvest, then the vast majority of their forces could easily be dedicated to sentry duty rather than direct invasion. The scanning mechanic of Reaper pursuit could be gameplay-lore segregation, or it could show how the Reapers prioritize: that they're willing to send destroyers and Dreadnaughts to shore up their blockades rather than accelerate their harvest of hard targets and risk squirters.

Finally the Baterians were the ones examining the dead reaper I believe, they would be more likely to give an accurate measure of its age than the ones which had a brief time to analyse it before the Baterians stole it.

The Batarians themselves don't exactly claim to be accurate, and there's not a contradiction.

What are you even trying to argue here, anyway? That if the Reapers aren't a billion years old, they won't have enough ships? The Catalyst's history already proves that the Reapers aren't dependent on Reapers for Harvesting in the first place, so Reaper force numbers can't be restricted like that in the first place.

Also why does the reapers having only 300 capitals mean we would not be desperate to stop them?  Thats more than the number of cruisers in the alliance fleet.

We don't know that, either.

The numberical vagueness of the franchise is working against you here. We don't know how many Reapers there are, but we also don't know how many cruisers, frigates, carriers, destroyers, and so on there are for the organics either. There are only a few numbers in the ME lore about military strength, and most of those relate to dreadnaughts: the lore would be equally compatible if there were thousands of cruisers flying around as if there were hundreds.


Heck, even this entire exchange you've been pursuing rests on implicit assumptions that are worth questioning. The argument that the Reapers in all their numbers would overrun us immediately assumes that, well, the Reapers got here at about the same time. Why do you assume that, when the Reaper trek from Dark Space could have come in waves, or been a continuous stream of reinforcements throughout the war?

Maybe you should take your own advice and read more post less (and maybe try looking more as well, the reapers in the final battle above Earth were clearly not in the thousands).

He didn't claim they were either, so that's a strawman. Nor does the lore claim that the majority of the Reapers are at Earth, or even a sizable fraction: we're told that the Reapers have bolstered the defenses, but not by how much or to what extent. If we are safe in assuming that the galaxy map implies a general galaxy-wide Reaper offensive at the end of the game, there's even less to suggest the Reapers are trying to put most of their forces at Earth.

Edit: On topic, I don't know whether the minds in the reapers want to live or not.  Quite frankly it makes little difference, Harbinger and sovereign both seemed quite sentient and quite malevelently committed to our destruction (that they are not like this after synthesis just supports the idea it brainwashes people).  The only options available to me were:
A.  Change the entire galaxy, effectivly killing the people in existence now and remaking them into something new.
B.  Play god as the catalyst, seriously would you trust anyone else with this? Then why trust Shepard, he is a hero but that does not give him the right to "protect" the galaxy according to his ideals, no matter how noble they are
C.  Wipe out a sentient race and a friend but give the survivors the chance to determine their future for themselfs.
D.  Do nothing...

I found C to be the best for the galaxy in the long run, others disagree and thats fine, but I can't stomach the other three options.  I headcannoned it that EDI and the Geth's part in the war would mean any future synthetics would have more rights and a better future.

That's fine, but you're also ignorring the OP's point. Or rather, you're not addressing the topic, which is about one specific motivation for Destroy in particular. If it doesn't apply to you, it doesn't, but that's what his topic was trying to be about.