642 réponses à ce sujet

[MassivelyEffective0730]

Is it really worth it? Sacrificing all of humanity.....

 

If it accomplishes my goals? Absolutely.

[DeinonSlayer]

Is it really worth it? Sacrificing all of humanity.....

Why is humanity of greater worth than any other race?

The cost of destroying the Reapers is destroying the Geth along with them. There is no one species, including humanity, that I wouldn't sacrifice to save the rest and put a permanent end to the cycle. Do I like it? No. Having that kind of blood on his hands might well leave Shepard a suicidal husk of a man (depending on the Shepard), but his mission will have been accomplished, the future secured. I didn't like losing the hostages on X57 either, but that was the price of eliminating the threat.

[MassivelyEffective0730]

Why?

 

Because my goals come first. I have the power to make a galactic society in the image of what I want it to be, based on my own ideals and values - if my goals are met.

 

I have the chance to play God. Unlike most people, I actually would take the reigns in a heartbeat.

[MassivelyEffective0730]

You can play god already if you chose too. Also Denion, I'd let the hostages die as well to stop balak.Hostages to me are as good as dead anyway. 

So Massive, your ok with throwing away your humanity for your own ambitions and selfishness?

 

I'm not throwing away my humanity for my ambition or selfishness. My humanity isn't compromised at all. 

 

What is 'humanity' anyway? Can you define that for me? Or is it what I suspect it is? A subjective ideal based on subjective values, principles, ideology, and morality?

[MassivelyEffective0730]

How can you claim to have humanity if you don't know what it is. As for what humanity is.....prey. Food for those who sold their souls, their beings, their ideals and philosophies to evolve and transcend above all. To become greater than god itself. Without humans there be no prey. No prey=No food. An as a monster I must feed!

 

I know what humanity is. I'm asking if you know what it is. Hence, it's also a rhetorical question, but you tend to be very... literal minded so I guess I have to explain it for you. 

 

Cool for you. Humanity is what it is, and it is for me what I need it to be when I need it to be. 

[MassivelyEffective0730]

WTF?

[KaiserShep]

Why is humanity of greater worth than any other race?

 

That's an interesting question. I like to consider it the same as I would if it came down to choosing to save a stranger, or saving a family member. Automatically the family member will be saved, and it would mean absolutely nothing who or what that other person is. Is it logical? Can't say that I care, but, like my brain says at 5AM before I've had my coffee: F*ck Logic. 

[Iakus]

Why is humanity of greater worth than any other race?
 

because when someone else's house burns down, it's a sad story.

 

When your house burns down it's a tragedy.

 

Same reason Liara freaks out when Thessia is invaded,  why Garrus gets so somber when talking about Palaven, and Wrex's battle cry of "I am Urdnot Wrex, AND THIS IS MY PLANET!!!"

[DeinonSlayer]

That's an interesting question. I like to consider it the same as I would if it came down to choosing to save a stranger, or saving a family member. Automatically the family member will be saved, and it would mean absolutely nothing who or what that other person is. Is it logical? Can't say that I care, but, like my brain says at 5AM before I've had my coffee: F*ck Logic.

I guess the way I look at is choosing a personal connection over choosing the greater number of lives. Saving a family member versus saving twenty people I don't know.

To put it back in the context of the MEU, my canon Shepard cares more about the Quarians than, say, the Asari (whom he has generally seen as arrogant hedonistic layabouts). He has a very personal connection with one in particular (though he tries not to let that affect his judgment), and the former species displayed greater responsibility - took more steps in the name of preparing for the fight with the Reapers - than the latter by far, but if he had to make a choice to save one race at the expense of the other, if somehow the choice was directly between saving 17 million Quarians and a couple billion Asari, wouldn't it be the right choice to save the greater number of lives? Even if it leaves Shepard a suicidal husk of a man after making that choice.

...you know, the more I think about it, maybe that isn't necessarily the case. Maybe there is something to Massively's approach, and it's more than a numbers game.

[Livi14]

because when someone else's house burns down, it's a sad story.

 

When your house burns down it's a tragedy.

 

Same reason Liara freaks out when Thessia is invaded,  why Garrus gets so somber when talking about Palaven, and Wrex's battle cry of "I am Urdnot Wrex, AND THIS IS MY PLANET!!!"

 

That's how I see it, too.

And the quarians taking any steps in the name of preparing for the fight with the Reapers? What? They did absolutely nothing. The only thing the Quarians cared about is Rannoch.

[KaiserShep]

Ironically, it's on account of the quarians' insistence on taking Rannoch that the geth had any chance of becoming an asset. Without them being pinned in that system, we never would've assaulted the dreadnought, freed Legion or bothered to destroy the reaper base. Had they simply prepared for the war against the reapers and rallied with the rest of the Alliance fleet, the geth would likely have been used as cannon fodder and ultimately destroyed without ever knowing why they were allied with the reapers again.

[DeinonSlayer]

That's how I see it, too.

And the quarians taking any steps in the name of preparing for the fight with the Reapers? What? They did absolutely nothing. The only thing the Quarians cared about is Rannoch.

They armed their entire fleet, and after offloading their civilians (freeing up their ships for independent action in so doing), committed their entire fleet to the fight. Or did you think they armed themselves solely to fight the Geth?

They did exactly what I would have wanted them to do, what I would have expected the other species to do: Arm themselves to the best of their ability, take minimal measures to safeguard the survival of their species, and commit every available resource to the Reaper conflict. Other species had larger, more widely dispersed populations and larger, more adaptable economies. They could have, and should have, been churning out dreadnoughts as fast as they could mine the metal, but the major species of the galaxy chose to stick their heads in the sand.

Before ME3, the only organizations who even acknowledged the Reapers and made preparations for their arrival were Cerberus, the Migrant Fleet, the Geth Collective (not that we see any of it), Wrex's Krogan, and (ostensibly) the Rachni. It'd have been a better use of Shepard's time between ME2 and 3 to iron out the situation between the Quarians and the Geth, securing the assistance of the two largest fleets in the galaxy in preparation for the invasion, instead of sitting in a cell with his thumb up his ass.

[Jorji Costava]

because when someone else's house burns down, it's a sad story.

 

When your house burns down it's a tragedy.

 

Same reason Liara freaks out when Thessia is invaded,  why Garrus gets so somber when talking about Palaven, and Wrex's battle cry of "I am Urdnot Wrex, AND THIS IS MY PLANET!!!"

 

The analogy is imprecise, because you don't have any personal connection or history with the majority of members of your own species. When a member of my family dies, it makes sense that this affects me far more than when someone I don't know dies. But should I be more affected by the death of someone who is of my own race or ethnicity than someone who isn't, assuming I don't know either of these people? I'm not so sure about that one.

 

I guess the way I look at is choosing a personal connection over choosing the greater number of lives. Saving a family member versus saving twenty people I don't know.

To put it back in the context of the MEU, my canon Shepard cares more about the Quarians than, say, the Asari (whom he generally sees as arrogant hedonistic layabouts). He has a very personal connection with one in particular (though he tries not to let that affect his judgment), and the former species displayed greater responsibility - took more steps in the name of preparing for the fight with the Reapers - than the latter by far, but if he had to make a choice to save one race at the expense of the other, if somehow the choice was between saving 17 million Quarians and a couple billion Asari, wouldn't it be the right choice to save the greater number of lives? Even if it leaves Shepard a suicidal husk of a man after making that choice.

...you know, the more I think about it, maybe that isn't necessarily the case. Maybe there is something to Massively's approach, and it's more than a numbers game.

 

It sounds harsh, but the utilitarian argument is obvious enough: The lives of however many billions of Asari are worth more than 17 million Quarians plus one soldier's desire to go on living. Notions of collective guilt or innocence are questionable at best (how much of a role did the average Quarian or Asari play in the decisions we're holding them accountable for? Are we prepared to make the judgement that the average Quarian is just such a better person than the average Asari that one Quarian = hundreds of thousands of Asari?), so I'm not sure judgments about which race contributed what should play much of a role.

 

There's a well-known episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in which Captain Sisko and a Cardassian ex-spy named Garak conspire to fabricate evidence that the Dominion (who the Federation is at war with) is planning to attack the Romulans; they're hoping that the forgery will lead the Romulans into joining the war against the Dominion. Some spoilers here, I guess, but Garak's closing line is this: "You may have just saved the whole Alpha Quadrant, and all it cost was one Romulan senator, one criminal, and the self respect of one Starfleet officer." You can question Garak's ethics, but it's hard to disagree with his cost-benefit analysis, and I think the same is true for the case of ME.

 

EDIT: Changed some phrasing.

[MassivelyEffective0730]

They armed their entire fleet, and after offloading their civilians, committed their entire fleet to the fight. Or did you think they armed themselves solely to fight the Geth?

They did exactly what I would have wanted them to do, what I would have expected the other species to do: Arm themselves to the best of their ability, take minimal measures to safeguard the survival of their species, and commit every available resource to the Reaper conflict. Other species had larger, more widely dispersed populations and larger, more adaptable economies. They could have, and should have, been churning out dreadnoughts as fast as they could mine the metal, but the major species of the galaxy chose to stick their heads in the sand.

Before ME3, the only organizations who even acknowledge the Reapers and made preparations for their arrival were Cerberus, the Migrant Fleet, the Geth Collective, Wrex's Krogan, and (ostensibly) the Rachni.

 

To fight the Geth. Not the Reapers. The Geth. The Quarians decided then and there that they'd settle a score since the galaxy was ending.

 

They didn't do anything in the name of fighting the Reapers until after you solve their problem for them. They just threw themselves into fighting a senseless war with the Geth when they knew damn well what was coming. They should have been preparing their stock of resources and equipment and keeping their fleet in a ready pattern close to the Citadel, prepared to assist with efforts against the Reapers, and when the time came, Shepard could go to Rannoch and secure the Geth's support (who were planning for the Reapers arrival on their own). 

 

The Quarians did the exact same as the other species. They stuck their heads in the sand. Worse, they nearly cost me all of their assets, and the assets of the Geth. That's why I hold them just as low as the Asari on the totem pole for worthless species in the war. Their self-insulation basically made them apathetic to any concern beyond their own needs, even to an existential threat to the entire galaxy.

 

You can scratch the Migrant Fleet from that risk. Getting blown up by the Geth does not constitute preparation for the Reapers.

[Livi14]

Ironically, it's on account of the quarians' insistence on taking Rannoch that the geth had any chance of becoming an asset. Without them being pinned in that system, we never would've assaulted the dreadnought, freed Legion or bothered to destroy the reaper base. Had they simply prepared for the war against the reapers and rallied with the rest of the Alliance fleet, the geth would likely have been used as cannon fodder and ultimately destroyed without ever knowing why they were allied with the reapers again.

 

The geth only allied with the reapers because the quarians attacked them. As Admiral Koris put it: We drove the Geth straight into the Reapers arms.

[DeinonSlayer]

To fight the Geth. Not the Reapers. The Geth. The Quarians decided then and there that they'd settle a score since the galaxy was ending.
 
They didn't do anything in the name of fighting the Reapers until later. They just threw themselves into fighting a senseless war with the Geth. 
 
The Quarians did the exact same as the other species. They stuck their heads in the sand. Worse, they nearly cost me all of their assets, and the assets of the Geth. 
 
You can scratch the Migrant Fleet from that risk. Getting blown up by the Geth does not constitute preparation for the Reapers.

That assessment willfully ignores both what Gerrel says in ME2 and what Tali says in ME3. They acknowledge that they'll need their ships to fight the Reapers, the stipulation is that they need somewhere to drop off their noncombatants while they do it. As long as their cargo holds are full of civilians, the fleet cannot split up and do the work they need to be doing in this war because they have to stay close enough to a liveship to receive daily shipments of food, per ME2's codex. Never mind that the cargo holds are physically full - partitioned into living space per ME1's codex. Offloading the civilians, clearing out their cargo holds and eliminating the need to stay massed together in a single fleet to keep everyone fed, gave them the operational flexibility they needed to be of any use.

[KaiserShep]

The geth only allied with the reapers because the quarians attacked them. As Admiral Koris put it: We drove the Geth straight into the Reapers arms.

 

But where it gets kind of weird is that the reapers then decided to establish a base on Rannoch, and take total control over them. It's fair to assume that the reapers are fully aware of the geth's hold over Rannoch, and the geth in their pre-war form are totally susceptible to being hijacked, so that right there makes them an asset ripe for the picking. In the reapers' position, they wouldn't need their consent to take control of the system and turn them into their slaves. I'm of the opinion that by their will or not, the geth would have become their tools.

[MassivelyEffective0730]

That assessment willfully ignores both what Gerrel says in ME2 and what Tali says in ME3. They acknowledge that they'll need their ships to fight the Reapers, the stipulation is that they need somewhere to drop off their noncombatants while they do it. As long as their cargo holds are full of civilians, the fleet cannot split up and do the work they need to be doing in this war because they have to stay close enough to a liveship to receive daily shipments of food, per ME2's codex. Never mind that the cargo holds are physically full - partitioned into living space. Offloading the civilians gave them the operational flexibility they needed to be of any use.

 

It's not willful ignorance, it's questioning and criticism of idiocy that could have cost us their fleet. Here's the flaw in that statement. Separating civilians from the fleet does not increase force projection capability. A Quarian warship doesn't have increased projection of ability just because the liveship it gets its supplies from is empty of civilians. They'd still be heavily bound to the Quarian fleet as a whole, and they would not be able to split up anyway. That's a two way street. The warships may protect the liveships, but the civilians leaving the liveships does not suddenly make the warships any less dependent on the liveship. Offloading the civilians could have waited long enough for Shepard to secure peace with the Geth to allow their citizens to return to Rannoch unhindered. 

[MassivelyEffective0730]

The geth only allied with the reapers because the quarians attacked them. As Admiral Koris put it: We drove the Geth straight into the Reapers arms.

 

Exactly.

[MassivelyEffective0730]

But where it gets kind of weird is that the reapers then decided to establish a base on Rannoch, and take total control over them. It's fair to assume that the reapers are fully aware of the geth's hold over Rannoch, and the geth in their pre-war form are totally susceptible to being hijacked, so that right there makes them an asset ripe for the picking. In the reapers' position, they wouldn't need their consent to take control of the system and turn them into their slaves. I'm of the opinion that by their will or not, the geth would have become their tools.

 

I think the Reapers were too focused on other species to really put a huge amount on the Geth. That's why they only put one Reaper on Rannoch to control them. I think the Reapers were counting the Quarians on being panicked idiots, which would in-turn drive the Geth into their arms for survival, since they were being forced into a *damned if you do, damned if you don't* situation.