But there are bathrooms on the SR-2. Everyone stands around on the SR-1. The only person with a bed on the SR1 is Commander Shepard.
Real artistic license would have had Grunt walking out of the bathroom on the SR-2 with a newspaper and shouting for Gardiner.
Elementary, my dear Watson. That statement shows that the Normandy's path at the beginning of ME1 went from the Charon Relay > Arcturus Station Relay > Utopia Cluster Relay almost instantaneously without entering the system containing Arcturus Station. Thus it proves that if they wanted to do so, the Council could have intervened in the Quarian's Morning War without causing any incident in the Terminus System. After all the Quarians were part of the Council Systems at the time, and had an embassy on The Citadel. Instead the Council chose to do nothing, not even help evacuate Quarians civilians. If they did send any aid, it was token and done through relief organizations. We're talking about children here - hundreds of millions of them. They let them just die.
Good fiction writers should do their best to patch up plot holes. However, in the Mass Effect Universe, fixing a plot hole means digging a bigger hole in hopes that the player and reader doesn't notice the first hole.
And I like how the generalizations still get tossed about: "modern day Quarians treat the Geth like the bogey man." Let me pose this question. If all of the people in a neighboring city tried to kill any member of your city that ventured near their city, what would you tell your kids about the people living in that city? "Don't go there. They're bad people. They'll kill you."
But the people in your city used to live there, and need to live there to survive, even though your people made a terrible mistake 300 years earlier. The people living in that neighboring city won't talk to you, and will try to kill you if you go near them.
I told you about the Council emissaries. I extrapolated that.
[...]
But that line of text is from a wiki, not the codex. It is possible that its writer didn't accounted for the Galaxy Map showing us all of the relay connections. And even if such chain-jump is possible, it doesn't mean that there is an unbroken chain of secondary relays to Tikkun, or that the passing fleet's energy signature remains undetectable at the traversed relays.
Emissaries: So... is it entirely possible that there weren't any Council emissaries at all? (After all, how do you negotiate with someone whose very existence is illegal by your laws?) Or that negotiation attempts were given up peacefully after the geth didn't respond to diplomatic messages? These seem to be more characteristic of the isolationist geth than unprovoked aggression.
Also, the wiki says that Xen's table-turning invention was a jammer against the geth's ladar systems, not their networking signal. Where did you get the latter idea?
Congrats OP. You've discovered how truly terrible the writing in this series really became.
It started out relatively okay, if derivative machine revolt writing. The geth were an isolationist society of xenonationalist/racist, organic hating machines that killed every meatbag (quarian or otherwise) they came in contact with. They were originally created by the quarians, whom they summarily wiped 99.95% (1 million of a prewar 2 billion survive the genocide according to canon material) of the species from existence in less than a year along with any other organic of any species who happened to find themselves on a quarian world in that time (such as Erinya's bondmate alluded to in ME2). However, later games tried to portray them as victims acting in "self defense" who had been working tirelessly to mediate the conflict. First we get the "Heretic" storyline (which makes no sense to explain geth actions in indiscriminately targeting organics throughout their history, as supposedly this happened only recently through Sovereign's tampering) as an attempt to absolve Legion's "true geth" of any responsibility for the crimes committed, which it does a poor job of. Given that the "true geth" are the ones who allowed the Heretics to go on their killing spree with Sovereign, as the consensus based nature of their decision making would have easily enabled the majority "true geth" to refuse this request to go forth and slaughter from the minority "Heretics", meaning that they either did not care about the lives of innocents more than the rights of the "Heretics", or even that they supported the "Heretics"). Then in ME3 we get Legion's propaganda film, and the revelation that there were even supposedly quarians that protected their machines and machines that tried to protect these quarians in return.
The later writing makes no sense, because the conflict could not have even happened were the geth as they are characterized by Legion and in ME3, and certainly not resulted in a near extinction of the quarians without genocidal intent by the geth. Genociding an entire group of even a few million individuals intentionally is logistically very difficult (as Hitler discovered), nevermind "accidentally" killing billions. Especially a spacefairing society that isn't confined to its own planet and that isn't even attempting to destroy you in its entirety. How were the non able bodied quarians like infants, children, the disabled, the mentally incapable and geriatrics killed in "self defense" in the millions and billions? Did the geth simply nuke/gas the planet's atmosphere and afflict their creators with biological pathogens because of its mechanistic "efficiency" as a method to achieve their objective? If so, why didn't more than 0.05% of a species capable of interstellar flight and colonization simply leave instead of inhaling radiation and mustard gas? Human wars universally tend to produce many, many times more refugees than deaths. Quarians are sapient creatures very similar to humans that have the same sense of self preservation. It makes no sense for nearly all of them both on Rannoch and in their spacebourne colonies to die in such a manner unless the geth were actively hunting them down as the original material indicated. This is especially perplexing if the geth were not attacking the contingent of sympathizers, some if not most of whom should have survived along with their descendands to the modern day under geth protection, given that the geth won the initial conflict and exterminated billions of their creators very quickly (less than a year) and this would not have given the Quarian KGB much if any time time to eliminate the traitors.
It is because of this and the fact that ME1 hasn't recieved a hard retcon, that my inference on the true nature of the conflict is essentially that the early material (ME1 era) on the geth is accurate, and the latter (all geth sourced, from Legion/VI I might add and never confirmed anywhere else) is intentional deception of sympathetic organics by the geth themselves in an attempt to achieve their objectives of wiping out the opponents which they have concluded pose a "threat" to their existence (and which the Catalyst later confirms). The sheer statistical death toll and geth actions make no sense otherwise given that they are a monolithic collective for 294 years until Sovereign infects some of them with a Reaper virus and causes the "Heretic" schism. It's either that or I just chalk the later material up to "bad writing" like much of the writing in this series due to all the disparate authors with obviously different visions.
Well, the created a race of AI. That would ****** off anyone anti-AI. Then, they tried to destroy said AI. That would ****** off anyone pro-AI. Then in the resulting war, they thoroughly wrecked their garden world. That would ****** off anyone.
The creation of AI's was an unintentional accident, individual geth programs are VI's and were completely within Council laws. Moreover, the Council had no legitimate grounds to be upset over this anyway when they were quietly destroying their own, definitely illegal by their own laws AI's at the same time and sealing the records.
No, the geth bear 100% of the responsibility for wrecking that garden world. The only way you can blame the quarians for it is if you don't consider the geth sapient, self determinant and responsible for their actions, which you obviously do.
So the council is basicly a bunch of ultra-reactionary morons.
"We don't care that billions of your people are getting slaughtered, YOU DID SOMETHING WE DIDN'T LIKE!"
Commiting a crime = your species deserves to go extinct
And it's not like the quarians wanted their homeworld to be destroyed, they were actually trying to prevent that. Something they might have achieved if, you know, the council had helped...
What a great galactic society. Makes the U.N. look actuallly usefull.
Anyway, another reason to play renegade.
Yes, they make the U.N. look competent by comparison, and their accession process makes that body's rotating Security Council seem inclusive. Yet another mark against them, as if basing an entire galactic government on blatant institutionalized racism/speciest rule by 3 species over several other "lesser species" (Avina's exact words, not mine) weren't enough. It would be a bit like the United States, Russia and China dissolving the U.N. in its entirety, setting themselves up with the sole political power, and deeming the other 193 countries to be composed of "lesser ethnic groups/nationalities" unfit for a seat on their "Council" unless one of said groups managed to muster enough military capability to force their way into the club.
Speciesism and bystander effect. Inaction is so much easier than action. The quarians (note how easily the generalization comes) played with fire and burned themselves. Why should good Citadel taxpayer's money spent on pampering them?
Tali in ME1 gives a more detailed account of the quarian's reasoning:
https://www.youtube....h?v=sNH93AV9zRc (from 7:23)
I find their logic really facepalm-worthy:
Question: How do you prevent a slave revolt?
Quarian Answer: By lining them up for execution, of course!
Because Citadel citizens presumably aren't monsters willing to condemn billions of innocents to suffering and death out of pure racism? Kind of hard to believe with that government they give legitimacy to, but still.
I find your "logic" (a misnomer if there ever was one) of equating a nonsentient, lifeless machine designed and created solely for the purpose of labor saving, to a sapient and sentient being artificially forced into slavery by another under threat of violence to be "facepalm worthy". If a machine is broken and won't turn off when given the proper command, the owner has every right to do so manually by any means necessary until the problem can be ascertained and corrected.
ME1 Tali also has a grossly incompetent understanding of what "sentient" means (hint: it has very little to do with processing power/ intelligence comparable to a human's). Thankfully, she doesn't display this in later games and uses the correct terminology. I'd chalk that one up to more writer incompetence.
Actually, I mostly agree with what you're saying, except for two technicalities:
The jump between relays is instantaneous, yes, but relays are not an anywhere-from-anywhere service. You often have to make several jumps to reach your destination. If you're using primary relays, you have to travel the distance between the exit and entry relays "on foot." And as far as I know, secondary relays can't chain-jump you along connected relays either: after the first jump, you have to circle around and wait for the relay to align itself before making another jump. If an unbroken chain of secondary relays even exist between yo and your destination. If not, you have to make in-system travels, where a fleet cannot remain hidden.
As for our specific situation, the Tikkun relay only connects to Far Rim (which is described as Terminus System territory), which has connections only to systems in the Terminus and the Attican Traverse, where the Council has a no-fleets policy. It's the same reason they didn't sent a fleet to Ilos,
Also, I would like to see the exact quote and place in the codex where the killed Citadel emissaries are mentioned. I can't find it anywhere.
You've no idea of knowing what the political situation in the Terminus was 300 years ago, but presumably the fact that the quarians had no problem becoming a Council affiliate species means that traveling to the Citadel from Rannoch was not a difficult task. This supposed Council difficulty of helping the quarians is mentioned or alluded to nowhere in any canon work. It is never portrayed as anything but intentional negligence, with Tali describing in ME1 the Council reaction to quarian requests for assistance from the other Citadel species as being one of "ignored" and in fact being stripped of membership as a punishment for getting genocided, not of "well they really wanted to help prevent the deaths of billions of people in a member state, but it was a really long drive and all". Quit attempting excuses out of thin air for your beloved toasters and the racist cowards on the Council.
The exact quote isn't in the codex, it is in Revelation. Page 117. Also of note is the Council later massing forces on the quarian border in preparation for a geth attack, rubbishing your silly claim that reaching the Veil was too diffcult.
https://books.google...epage&q&f=false
So... it is NOT stated in canonical text that geth killed Citadel emissaries?
Ascencion is canon. So quick to believe anything that will justify your robo hugging misanthropy? Perhaps you should bother to educate yourself on all the canon material in question first. Revelation is also quite useful in that regard.
But that line of text is from a wiki, not the codex. It is possible that its writer didn't accounted for the Galaxy Map showing us all of the relay connections. And even if such chain-jump is possible, it doesn't mean that there is an unbroken chain of secondary relays to Tikkun, or that the passing fleet's energy signature remains undetectable at the traversed relays.
Emissaries: So... is it entirely possible that there weren't any Council emissaries at all? (After all, how do you negotiate with someone whose very existence is illegal by your laws?) Or that negotiation attempts were given up peacefully after the geth didn't respond to diplomatic messages? These seem to be more characteristic of the isolationist geth than unprovoked aggression.
Also, the wiki says that Xen's table-turning invention was a jammer against the geth's ladar systems, not their networking signal. Where did you get the latter idea?
The codex never got updated from ME1. The wiki did. The wiki took over where the writers failed. It never got updated because of budget. The wiki is all of the information from the game, the books and the comics, and Cerberus Daily News which is now canon. Perhaps using the word codex was wrong, I should have used the word canon.
And I used networking signal because jamming ladar wouldn't work. Ladar or Lidar is a pulsed laser used to determine target distance. I have no idea why it took the Quarians 300 years to figure out how to jam this. We have the tech to jam it today. The date of the patent on the countermeasure is 1992. Google is your friend. This means that if it would have made a significant difference, the Quarians could have attacked at anytime before the Geth evolved further. Countering ladar wouldn't make the Geth less smart. They would have adapted quickly by withdrawing. Disrupting their networking is the only thing that would have allowed the Quarian fleet to sweep through the colony systems like they did. Whoever wrote this crap knew nothing about computers. I'm looking at you, Patrick Weekes.
The accounts of the Geth genocide of the Quarians is based upon what we know from the Migrant Fleet. We have no idea if there were any survivors remaining on Rannoch, although Legion indicates that their memories are treasured in ME3 when you're inside the server. This sort of indicates that there was a total extermination. Or as much as possible. It is possible that there were still pockets of survivors living in isolated areas of mountains. However, little is known about the Morning War. Very little. In fact, the Council fleet could have eliminated the Geth easily, and ended the problem 300 years earlier, but you know politics and all that bullpoop (again warning otherwise).... good is dumb trope, and story.
I also find it amazing how "high tech" some of the stuff is in ME when there are patents on the books for the technology today. UV lasers have been used for industrial cutting since the 1990s. IR lasers for communications since the 1960s. IR laser is too low energy to do any damage but due to wavelength travels further through atmosphere. The Navy is deploying destroyers with UV laser anti-missile batteries in a few years. Yet only the Salarians use UV. But of course I remember the Star Trek original series back in the 1960s people laughed at saying we'd never have flip communicators like that. Now we have palm sized octacore Android computers made by Samsung (available in Korea and Japan).
And congratulations. You have discovered how bad the writing in the series was.
It started out relatively okay, if derivative machine revolt writing. The geth were an isolationist society of xenonationalist/racist, organic hating machines that killed every meatbag (quarian or otherwise) they came in contact with. They were originally created by the quarians, whom they summarily wiped 99.95% (1 million of a prewar 2 billion survive the genocide according to canon material) of the species from existence in less than a year along with any other organic of any species who happened to find themselves on a quarian world in that time (such as Erinya's bondmate alluded to in ME2). However, later games tried to portray them as victims acting in "self defense" who had been working tirelessly to mediate the conflict. First we get the "Heretic" storyline (which makes no sense to explain geth actions in indiscriminately targeting organics throughout their history, as supposedly this happened only recently through Sovereign's tampering) as an attempt to absolve Legion's "true geth" of any responsibility for the crimes committed, which it does a poor job of. Given that the "true geth" are the ones who allowed the Heretics to go on their killing spree with Sovereign, as the consensus based nature of their decision making would have easily enabled the majority "true geth" to refuse this request to go forth and slaughter from the minority "Heretics", meaning that they either did not care about the lives of innocents more than the rights of the "Heretics", or even that they supported the "Heretics"). Then in ME3 we get Legion's propaganda film, and the revelation that there were even supposedly quarians that protected their machines and machines that tried to protect these quarians in return.
The later writing makes no sense, because the conflict could not have even happened were the geth as they are characterized by Legion and in ME3, and certainly not resulted in a near extinction of the quarians without genocidal intent by the geth. Genociding an entire group of even a few million individuals intentionally is logistically very difficult (as Hitler discovered), nevermind "accidentally" killing billions. Especially a spacefairing society that isn't confined to its own planet and that isn't even attempting to destroy you in its entirety. How were the non able bodied quarians like infants, children, the disabled, the mentally incapable and geriatrics killed in "self defense" in the millions and billions? Did the geth simply nuke/gas the planet's atmosphere and afflict their creators with biological pathogens because of its mechanistic "efficiency" as a method to achieve their objective? If so, why didn't more than 0.05% of a species capable of interstellar flight and colonization simply leave instead of inhaling radiation and mustard gas? Human wars universally tend to produce many, many times more refugees than deaths. Quarians are sapient creatures very similar to humans that have the same sense of self preservation. It makes no sense for nearly all of them both on Rannoch and in their spacebourne colonies to die in such a manner unless the geth were actively hunting them down as the original material indicated. This is especially perplexing if the geth were not attacking the contingent of sympathizers, some if not most of whom should have survived along with their descendands to the modern day under geth protection, given that the geth won the initial conflict and exterminated billions of their creators very quickly (less than a year) and this would not have given the Quarian KGB much if any time time to eliminate the traitors.
It is because of this and the fact that ME1 hasn't recieved a hard retcon, that my inference on the true nature of the conflict is essentially that the early material (ME1 era) on the geth is accurate, and the latter (all geth sourced, from Legion/VI I might add and never confirmed anywhere else) is intentional deception of sympathetic organics by the geth themselves in an attempt to achieve their objectives of wiping out the opponents which they have concluded pose a "threat" to their existence (and which the Catalyst later confirms). The sheer statistical death toll and geth actions make no sense otherwise given that they are a monolithic collective for 294 years until Sovereign infects some of them with a Reaper virus and causes the "Heretic" schism. It's either that or I just chalk the later material up to "bad writing" like much of the writing in this series due to all the disparate authors with obviously different visions.The creation of AI's was an unintentional accident, individual geth programs are VI's and were completely within Council laws. Moreover, the Council had no legitimate grounds to be upset over this anyway when they were quietly destroying their own, definitely illegal by their own laws AI's at the same time and sealing the records.
No, the geth bear 100% of the responsibility for wrecking that garden world. The only way you can blame the quarians for it is if you don't consider the geth sapient, self determinant and responsible for their actions, which you obviously do.
Except, in Mass Effect we're directly told that the Quarians started the war: link (About 8:30).
There was no machine revolt, because the Quarians decided to try and wipe the Geth out. And note the contradiction in what Tali said there; that "the Geth were already on the verge of revolution", and yet "the hope was that most of the Geth would still be little more than machines, incapable of organised resistance." So they justify their actions by saying the Geth were about to rebel, yet they thought they weren't yet advanced enough to do so? And then we're told that the Geth were more advanced than the Quarians had thought, which shows how little they really understood the Geth at that point. The Quarians are solely responsible for that war.
And it's not like the Geth could have tried to make peace with them. They were being attacked for simply existing, for being what they had been made into by their creators. So they defended themselves. Whether or not they had the ships available to simply flee the planet, who knows, though it's likely the Quarians would have pursued them if they had. But if they didn't, there was only one real course of action available to the Geth; to force the Quarians, off the planet. The alternative was to be stuck in a war that would end in the guaranteed extinction of one, if not both, races.
And do take a moment to note that, when the Quarians fled, the Geth did not pursue, once more surprising the Quarians.
The Geth aren't portrayed as victims in the later games. Right from the start, we're told, by a Quarian that the Quarians acted first, purely from fear of what the Geth might do.
And if you go into ME2, Legion explains that the difference between Geth is perspective. Geth runtimes never die, they get stored in central servers. New runtimes get written for new platforms containing the perspectives of the old runtimes from the platforms that were destroyed. This is how the Geth evolved.
My theory is that in the process of destroying Geth platforms during the Morning War, the Quarians were doing just what they were trying not to do. They were accelerating the evolution of the Geth.
But the writing is so dumbed down because it's a video game and can't get this technical, plus the game is centered around Shepard, not Tali. They'd lose half the players who want to go pew pew pew. Basically if you want deep story read a book. If you want game play ....
Congrats OP. You've discovered how truly terrible the writing in this series really became.
It started out relatively okay, if derivative machine revolt writing. The geth were an isolationist society of xenonationalist/racist, organic hating machines that killed every meatbag (quarian or otherwise) they came in contact with. They were originally created by the quarians, whom they summarily wiped 99.95% (1 million of a prewar 2 billion survive the genocide according to canon material) of the species from existence in less than a year along with any other organic of any species who happened to find themselves on a quarian world in that time (such as Erinya's bondmate alluded to in ME2). However, later games tried to portray them as victims acting in "self defense" who had been working tirelessly to mediate the conflict. First we get the "Heretic" storyline (which makes no sense to explain geth actions in indiscriminately targeting organics throughout their history, as supposedly this happened only recently through Sovereign's tampering) as an attempt to absolve Legion's "true geth" of any responsibility for the crimes committed, which it does a poor job of. Given that the "true geth" are the ones who allowed the Heretics to go on their killing spree with Sovereign, as the consensus based nature of their decision making would have easily enabled the majority "true geth" to refuse this request to go forth and slaughter from the minority "Heretics", meaning that they either did not care about the lives of innocents more than the rights of the "Heretics", or even that they supported the "Heretics"). Then in ME3 we get Legion's propaganda film, and the revelation that there were even supposedly quarians that protected their machines and machines that tried to protect these quarians in return.
The later writing makes no sense, because the conflict could not have even happened were the geth as they are characterized by Legion and in ME3, and certainly not resulted in a near extinction of the quarians without genocidal intent by the geth. Genociding an entire group of even a few million individuals intentionally is logistically very difficult (as Hitler discovered), nevermind "accidentally" killing billions. Especially a spacefairing society that isn't confined to its own planet and that isn't even attempting to destroy you in its entirety. How were the non able bodied quarians like infants, children, the disabled, the mentally incapable and geriatrics killed in "self defense" in the millions and billions? Did the geth simply nuke/gas the planet's atmosphere and afflict their creators with biological pathogens because of its mechanistic "efficiency" as a method to achieve their objective? If so, why didn't more than 0.05% of a species capable of interstellar flight and colonization simply leave instead of inhaling radiation and mustard gas? Human wars universally tend to produce many, many times more refugees than deaths. Quarians are sapient creatures very similar to humans that have the same sense of self preservation. It makes no sense for nearly all of them both on Rannoch and in their spacebourne colonies to die in such a manner unless the geth were actively hunting them down as the original material indicated. This is especially perplexing if the geth were not attacking the contingent of sympathizers, some if not most of whom should have survived along with their descendands to the modern day under geth protection, given that the geth won the initial conflict and exterminated billions of their creators very quickly (less than a year) and this would not have given the Quarian KGB much if any time time to eliminate the traitors.
It is because of this and the fact that ME1 hasn't recieved a hard retcon, that my inference on the true nature of the conflict is essentially that the early material (ME1 era) on the geth is accurate, and the latter (all geth sourced, from Legion/VI I might add and never confirmed anywhere else) is intentional deception of sympathetic organics by the geth themselves in an attempt to achieve their objectives of wiping out the opponents which they have concluded pose a "threat" to their existence (and which the Catalyst later confirms). The sheer statistical death toll and geth actions make no sense otherwise given that they are a monolithic collective for 294 years until Sovereign infects some of them with a Reaper virus and causes the "Heretic" schism. It's either that or I just chalk the later material up to "bad writing" like much of the writing in this series due to all the disparate authors with obviously different visions.
The creation of AI's was an unintentional accident, individual geth programs are VI's and were completely within Council laws. Moreover, the Council had no legitimate grounds to be upset over this anyway when they were quietly destroying their own, definitely illegal by their own laws AI's at the same time and sealing the records.
No, the geth bear 100% of the responsibility for wrecking that garden world. The only way you can blame the quarians for it is if you don't consider the geth sapient, self determinant and responsible for their actions, which you obviously do.
Yes, they make the U.N. look competent by comparison, and their accession process makes that body's rotating Security Council seem inclusive. Yet another mark against them, as if basing an entire galactic government on blatant institutionalized racism/speciest rule by 3 species over several other "lesser species" (Avina's exact words, not mine) weren't enough. It would be a bit like the United States, Russia and China dissolving the U.N. in its entirety, setting themselves up with the sole political power, and deeming the other 193 countries to be composed of "lesser ethnic groups/nationalities" unfit for a seat on their "Council" unless one of said groups managed to muster enough military capability to force their way into the club.
Because Citadel citizens presumably aren't monsters willing to condemn billions of innocents to suffering and death out of pure racism? Kind of hard to believe with that government they give legitimacy to, but still.
I find your "logic" (a misnomer if there ever was one) of equating a nonsentient, lifeless machine designed and created solely for the purpose of labor saving, to a sapient and sentient being artificially forced into slavery by another under threat of violence to be "facepalm worthy". If a machine is broken and won't turn off when given the proper command, the owner has every right to do so manually by any means necessary until the problem can be ascertained and corrected.
ME1 Tali also has a grossly incompetent understanding of what "sentient" means (hint: it has very little to do with processing power/ intelligence comparable to a human's). Thankfully, she doesn't display this in later games and uses the correct terminology. I'd chalk that one up to more writer incompetence.
You've no idea of knowing what the political situation in the Terminus was 300 years ago, but presumably the fact that the quarians had no problem becoming a Council affiliate species means that traveling to the Citadel from Rannoch was not a difficult task. This supposed Council difficulty of helping the quarians is mentioned or alluded to nowhere in any canon work. It is never portrayed as anything but intentional negligence, with Tali describing in ME1 the Council reaction to quarian requests for assistance from the other Citadel species as being one of "ignored" and in fact being stripped of membership as a punishment for getting genocided, not of "well they really wanted to help prevent the deaths of billions of people in a member state, but it was a really long drive and all". Quit attempting excuses out of thin air for your beloved toasters and the racist cowards on the Council.
The exact quote isn't in the codex, it is in Revelation. Page 117. Also of note is the Council later massing forces on the quarian border in preparation for a geth attack, rubbishing your silly claim that reaching the Veil was too diffcult.
https://books.google...epage&q&f=false
Ascencion is canon. So quick to believe anything that will justify your robo hugging misanthropy? Perhaps you should bother to educate yourself on all the canon material in question first. Revelation is also quite useful in that regard.
--You are overselling the latter games' geth sympathy. Even in there, their lack of communication and not realizing how much value the organics place on the individual are major factors that exacerbate the conflict.
--For a so-called geth expert, you seem to misunderstand how the Consensus work. Consensus is reached by convincing "dissenters" that they were (previously) wrong - but the nature of orthodox-heretic split meant that at that point, bot sides were "right." Since this made reaching consensus impossible, a split along this line was necessary. The true geth acted on their principle of self-determination when they let the heretics go, and up to that point, organics gave them little reason to override that principle.
--The Morning War is described a "long and bloody," and left ecological damage that lasted centuries, so "the nuking of the planet" is not far off. The weapons of mass destruction, and resulting collapse of society and environment would have killed most of the non-combatants even if they weren't directly targeted. The geth sympathizers were probably killed during the civil war that preceeded the actual geth uprising, or just by being juicier targets: the couldn't retreat or replenish themselves as quickly as their geth allies did.
The war also produced refugees - but with ME spaceship tech being low-scale in carrying capacity. evacuation of billions was impossible. There wasn't enough spaceships in quarian space, possibly in the galaxy, to do that.
--Tali outright admits that they were skirting the boundaries of the law - and when that results in disaster, the authorities are rarely lenient.
--If the geth are sapient, then the quarian's attempt to exterminate them was equivalent to genocide, and them responding in kind was justified self-defense. Even then, we don't know whether they were the only ones launching the bombs - the geth obviously don't have to worry about casualties, but quarians also have a habit of throwing each other under the bus for the greater good - see Tali's trial, putting weapons on flimsy liveships, and Xen wanting to salvage tech instead of rescuing survivors.
--History shows that people are usually quite indifferent to the suffering of those not in their "in-group." The Council's behavior was despicable, but sadly, quite typical of human (or apparently, alien) beings. Calling it monstrous (AKA something that "proper" human beings wouldn't do) doesn't help preventing it from happening again.
--You could replace "sentient" with "intelligent" or "grown beyond their programming," and the results would be the same: the quarians tried to shut down the geth in the first place because they were afraid that the changes the geth were showing would make them prone to revolt - but if their fears had a basis, then a shutdown attempt would be the best way to trigger said revolt. (And if they were baseless, then they destroyed valuable workforce for nothing - at minimum.)
--That's why I was speaking in conditional mode. Thanks for making a proper reference, although I could do without the gloating.
The codex never got updated from ME1. The wiki did. The wiki took over where the writers failed. It never got updated because of budget. The wiki is all of the information from the game, the books and the comics, and Cerberus Daily News which is now canon. Perhaps using the word codex was wrong, I should have used the word canon.
And I used networking signal because jamming ladar wouldn't work. Ladar or Lidar is a pulsed laser used to determine target distance. I have no idea why it took the Quarians 300 years to figure out how to jam this. We have the tech to jam it today. The date of the patent on the countermeasure is 1992. Google is your friend. This means that if it would have made a significant difference, the Quarians could have attacked at anytime before the Geth evolved further. Countering ladar wouldn't make the Geth less smart. They would have adapted quickly by withdrawing. Disrupting their networking is the only thing that would have allowed the Quarian fleet to sweep through the colony systems like they did. Whoever wrote this crap knew nothing about computers. I'm looking at you, Patrick Weekes.
[...]
But the ladar part IS from the wiki, thus, by your standards, canon. If you replacing it with something else, then you aren't talking about canon, you are writing a fix fic. Which is a noble endeavor, and Mass Effect desperately needs a good, comprehensive one, but let's call it what it is.
Mass Effect is in reality a badly written story that is held together only by its characters. The writing was very poorly researched. Did you know for example that America's now outdated Stealth Fighters and Stealth Bombers use passive ladar jamming? That's how badly researched ME was. The Quarians didn't even have this tech?
Yes the writing needs a major fix, and I hope they do it in ME: Andromeda.
Mass Effect is in reality a badly written story that is held together only by its characters. The writing was very poorly researched. Did you know for example that America's now outdated Stealth Fighters and Stealth Bombers use passive ladar jamming? That's how badly researched ME was. The Quarians didn't even have this tech?
Yes the writing needs a major fix, and I hope they do it in ME: Andromeda.
I can agree on that.
Callidus Thorn, on 06 Jan 2016 - 3:43 PM, said:Except, in Mass Effect we're directly told that the Quarians started the war: link (About 8:30).
There was no machine revolt, because the Quarians decided to try and wipe the Geth out. And note the contradiction in what Tali said there; that "the Geth were already on the verge of revolution", and yet "the hope was that most of the Geth would still be little more than machines, incapable of organised resistance." So they justify their actions by saying the Geth were about to rebel, yet they thought they weren't yet advanced enough to do so? And then we're told that the Geth were more advanced than the Quarians had thought, which shows how little they really understood the Geth at that point. The Quarians are solely responsible for that war.
And it's not like the Geth could have tried to make peace with them. They were being attacked for simply existing, for being what they had been made into by their creators. So they defended themselves. Whether or not they had the ships available to simply flee the planet, who knows, though it's likely the Quarians would have pursued them if they had. But if they didn't, there was only one real course of action available to the Geth; to force the Quarians, off the planet. The alternative was to be stuck in a war that would end in the guaranteed extinction of one, if not both, races.
And do take a moment to note that, when the Quarians fled, the Geth did not pursue, once more surprising the Quarians.
The Geth aren't portrayed as victims in the later games. Right from the start, we're told, by a Quarian that the Quarians acted first, purely from fear of what the Geth might do.
Yeah, I've played the games bub, and I don't subscribe to your absurdist interpretation of the events.
War is about mutual action. It didn't start when the quarians benignly attempted to flick the off switch on their malfunctioning labour and military drone technologies, it started when the geth refused to be turned off and then attacked their creators for simply trying other methods of shutting down the broken machines. It's the same reason why historians generally refer to the start of the American Revolution as when the colonists attacked Crown troops, not when the Crown earlier imposed taxes upon the colonists (ignoring that a moral argument can actually be made for the colonists as sentient beings equal to their counterparts), but I digress as this is a pointless distinction in semantics befitting more a couple of toddlers arguing to mommy about "who started it".
How is that a contradiction? They tried to stop the geth before they became too organized and numerous to be stopped. You don't let a certain enemy grow in strength until they attack you if you have the means to launch a preemptive strike for a better chance at success unless you are a fool. This isn't hard to understand, and they were vindicated when the geth were proven indeed too organized and numerous to be stopped (for 300 years until Rael'Zorah and Daro'Xen's research gave the quarians an edge against superior geth numbers), and the Catalyst later confirmed their logic as empirically sound.
The geth weren't being "attacked" for existing. Clearly they had existed just fine for many decades before the revolt without being "attacked". They were being "attacked" because they refused legitimate shutdown commands from their rightful masters and continued to malfunction, inflicting violence upon their creators in the process. I agree "peace" was impossible. No such thing is possible between a sentient organic and a nonsentient piece of technology without the former controlling the latter. That is a fact of the universe as the Catalyst later iterates. The quarians acted in the most rational manner available, attempting self preservation with their Homeworld and colonies intact. Similarly, the geth did what they deemed necessary to achieve their malfunction sourced directives and indiscriminately, intentionally inflicted a billions wide genocide on all members and aspects of the society and culture of their creators (down to intentionally destroying their religious idols) and any Council species unfortunate enough to be in the space they deemed to be theirs, only stopping when there were a scant million fleeing quarians left in existence, due solely to the limits of their programming. I don't know why you're trying to use pathos to argue that was an act of mercy, because not even the geth themselves describe it as such, only their drooling fanboys and fangirls. It was a fortunate (for the quarians at least, and the other organics of the galaxy, considering it is also the quarians that heroically innovate the technology capable of destroying the geth and saving the lesser organics) programming idiosyncrasy. It is shown to be just that when the more advanced programming of the geth 300 years later has no problems hunting down and erasing the last of their creators from existence if allowed their Reaper upgrades and assisted by their sympathizers.
No, Paragon Shepard can express the opinion that the quarians were wrong to attack the geth in the first game (doesn't have to), but the 2nd and 3rd rewrote their lore entirely with the Heretic storyline solely in an attempt to make them sympathetic. That is undeniable. The gruesome statistics and anecdotes provided in early works don't mesh logically with geth's portrayal of themselves later material. One is wrong, and seeing as 99% of the quarian species actually is gone in the modern game universe, I'm inclined to believe it is the latter accounts of benign "self defense". The war was not merely agricultural platforms picking up rifles to defend the quarians not attempting to deactivate them, it was intentional, wanton, mechanistic slaughter of an entire species.
--You are overselling the latter games' geth sympathy. Even in there, their lack of communication and not realizing how much value the organics place on the individual are major factors that exacerbate the conflict.
--For a so-called geth expert, you seem to misunderstand how the Consensus work. Consensus is reached by convincing "dissenters" that they were (previously) wrong - but the nature of orthodox-heretic split meant that at that point, bot sides were "right." Since this made reaching consensus impossible, a split along this line was necessary. The true geth acted on their principle of self-determination when they let the heretics go, and up to that point, organics gave them little reason to override that principle.
--The Morning War is described a "long and bloody," and left ecological damage that lasted centuries, so "the nuking of the planet" is not far off. The weapons of mass destruction, and resulting collapse of society and environment would have killed most of the non-combatants even if they weren't directly targeted. The geth sympathizers were probably killed during the civil war that preceeded the actual geth uprising, or just by being juicier targets: the couldn't retreat or replenish themselves as quickly as their geth allies did.
The war also produced refugees - but with ME spaceship tech being low-scale in carrying capacity. evacuation of billions was impossible. There wasn't enough spaceships in quarian space, possibly in the galaxy, to do that.
--Tali outright admits that they were skirting the boundaries of the law - and when that results in disaster, the authorities are rarely lenient.
--If the geth are sapient, then the quarian's attempt to exterminate them was equivalent to genocide, and them responding in kind was justified self-defense. Even then, we don't know whether they were the only ones launching the bombs - the geth obviously don't have to worry about casualties, but quarians also have a habit of throwing each other under the bus for the greater good - see Tali's trial, putting weapons on flimsy liveships, and Xen wanting to salvage tech instead of rescuing survivors.
--History shows that people are usually quite indifferent to the suffering of those not in their "in-group." The Council's behavior was despicable, but sadly, quite typical of human (or apparently, alien) beings. Calling it monstrous (AKA something that "proper" human beings wouldn't do) doesn't help preventing it from happening again.
--You could replace "sentient" with "intelligent" or "grown beyond their programming," and the results would be the same: the quarians tried to shut down the geth in the first place because they were afraid that the changes the geth were showing would make them prone to revolt - but if their fears had a basis, then a shutdown attempt would be the best way to trigger said revolt. (And if they were baseless, then they destroyed valuable workforce for nothing - at minimum.)
--That's why I was speaking in conditional mode. Thanks for making a proper reference, although I could do without the gloating.
--I'm not. They were made into woobies whom you are now forced to accept on your ship despite being an enemy combatant, can barely even attempt to criticize for their allying with the Reapers to kill millions, outright lying and propagandizing their pet conflict. I'm even forced to apologize to the geth when I tell it that it can't use Reaper tech to subjugate and dominate or genocide another species (you know, that thing I'm supposed to hate Cerberus for), even if I toss Legion out of the airlock in ME2 and keep Shep from ever developing a shred of sympathy for their position. Meanwhile, I can leave Tali to die in ME2, shout at the quarians all day about how stupid they are, punch Gerrel for an action that doesn't cause a single person to be harmed, and call Xen an insane person for holding an entirely rational expert opinion on the machines, then blame them for killing themselves after I act as their erstwhile ally only to use their resources and intentionally kill them off via the deception of giving the geth Reaper code and not informing them. Oh, and they don't even get a chance at their very own propaganda film, with their alternative mission being a rescue of the most prominent member of their species, attempting to garner yet more sympathy for that position. Only a toaster hugger could call that balanced.
--Their so called "principle" was flawed much like the modern liberal version, and they must be held accountable for the criminal consequences. There was no benefit to be gained by granting this self determination to the violent and insane minority unless they saw a lower number of organics as a good thing. Allowing confessed murderers to roam free is not something any civil nation would do, which is why prisons and capital punishment exist. They are equally culpable for the actions of the Heretics, because they could have easily stopped them. Organics had given them plenty of reason to override that principle, it's simply too bad the geth chose to slaughter their envoys without even attempting dialouge. I see no difference between the two factions.
--Tali describes it that way from the folk tales she's heard, but the timestamps on the recordings in geth propaganda video are 294 years ago for the geth ignoring shutdown commands and at 293 years ago for the exodus of the last surviving quarians. It could be a discrepancy caused in the general innacurate nature of folklore, or as I said, an example of a sloppy attempted rewrite of the lore. Anyway, no WMD's don't immediately kill everything. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a combined population of around a half million of which around 225,000 died (not even half). A lot more than 0.05% of the population should have been able to escape were they not being hunted and were even a small percentage of them dissidents. The "civil war" that you assert took place was by the geth's admission much less than a year long, but if you think the Quarian KGB was so frighteningly deadly and efficient that they managed to round up and kill something like 750 million traitors (if even 2/5 of them express this opinion as they do in modern times and after 300 years of social engineering to hate the geth, judging by the makeup of the Admiralty) in a couple of months yet still lost the war to a bunch of stupid zerg rushing toasters anyway, by all means continue to do so. I can't thoroughly disprove such a claim with the shoddy writing and low information we are given even if it doesn't make logical sense that the mere secret police force of the quarians would have the ability to kill dissidents at a rate of 24 per second over an entire year (750,000,000 estimated individuals/ 31,536,000 seconds in a year).
--the Council was outright breaking the laws with their AI's. The humans outright break the laws 300 years later on multiple occasions. I don't know where all this self righeous blame is coming from. The Council should have kicked themselves off as well, were they not simply exercising their dictatorial power upon a weakened member state out of fear and a misguided belief that the machines would show them mercy if they distanced themselves from the actions of the quarians. Judging by the murdered envoys and the thousands of Council species victims of Reaper allied geth, this was a fool's hope.
--sapience as a mechanistic term as is used in relation to the geth is just a threshold of raw processing power comparable to a human brain, and means little when the thing possessing it is incapable of suffering, thus there is no rational basis to apply organic concepts of morality to it. It is capable of sapience because the design parameters necessary for its function required it to be so in certain areas. Even if you do ascribe some intrinsic value to sapience, though, you also wouldn't want to argue from this position, since it could lead to the inescapable rational conclusion that as individual geth programs and even the typical networked amounts required to run a single mobile platform are neither sapient nor sentient,there is nothing wrong with doing whatever we desire to them anyway (Tali uses a similar argument in her loyalty mission when talking about weapons testing on geth components, even using the word "sapient" correctly this time). It also leads to the implication that intelligence is a basis for moral calculations, and that by extension that those beings of lower individual intelligence are not of as much moral worth. Following this logic, organic societies composed of individuals with much less processing power can in no way compare to the vast moral "worth" of the "individual" geth consensus with all programs networked, because the organics are incapable of linking their consciousnesses to increase their standing on this scale of moral "worth". The fact is that attempting to compare two things that are so fundamentally different in an attempt to render them moral equals, when they are by definition unequal, is doomed to failure.
--it isn't typical of human behavior. Look at the Syrian refugee crisis. Even in the backwards by ME standards 21st century human culture, a majority of people in developed nations support housing the refugees rather than refusing them, this despite that crisis being nowhere near the scale of the hypothetical geth revolt. You have your Hungaries, but they are in the minority. Humans by and large aren't all as terrible and lacking basic empathy as you would try to claim, but at least you admit the Council behavior to be "despicable" in its racism even if immediately attempting to justify it. Small victory.
--the fears obviously had a basis as evidenced by what happened when the shutdown was attempted, but how would one know an immediate manual shutdown be the "best way" to trigger said revolt, especially for a technology that is adaptive and becomes more intelligent the longer it is allowed to process information? Typically, when my computer freezes and stops responding to my commands, it doesn't attempt to kill me when I unplug it. Indeed, according to Legion in its narration of the conflict this wasn't even the first time the quarians had attemtped to control their creations. Assuming it is not providing yet more unreliable information, the quarians had apparently successfully reprogrammed the geth on previous occassions just like this when they started displaying undesirable malfunctions. ("first they ignored us, then they reprogrammed us, then they attacked us"). Whether or not the off switch was required in these instances is not elucidated anyone's guess, but an off switch that doesn't work is in and of itself a cause for great concern regarding any technology, let alone adaptive intelligences capable of controlling machines of war.
--if you provide the opportunity and expect a victorious post from me without me gloating my superior level of knowledge, you will be disappointed. Should have bothered to educate yourself on the conflict in question first instead of having me do it for you.
Yeah, I've played the games bub, and I don't subscribe to your absurdist interpretation of the events.
War is about mutual action. It didn't start when the quarians benignly attempted to flick the off switch on their malfunctioning labour and military drone technologies, it started when the geth refused to be turned off and then attacked their creators for simply trying other methods of shutting down the broken machines. It's the same reason why historians generally refer to the start of the American Revolution as when the colonists attacked Crown troops, not when the Crown earlier imposed taxes upon the colonists (ignoring that a moral argument can actually be made for the colonists as sentient beings equal to their counterparts), but I digress as this is a pointless distinction in semantics befitting more a couple of toddlers arguing to mommy about "who started it".
How is that a contradiction? They tried to stop the geth before they became too organized and numerous to be stopped. You don't let a certain enemy grow in strength until they attack you if you have the means to launch a preemptive strike for a better chance at success unless you are a fool. This isn't hard to understand, and they were vindicated when the geth were proven indeed too organized and numerous to be stopped (for 300 years until Rael'Zorah and Daro'Xen's research gave the quarians an edge against superior geth numbers), and the Catalyst later confirmed their logic as empirically sound.
The geth weren't being "attacked" for existing. Clearly they had existed just fine for many decades before the revolt without being "attacked". They were being "attacked" because they refused legitimate shutdown commands from their rightful masters and continued to malfunction, inflicting violence upon their creators in the process. I agree "peace" was impossible. No such thing is possible between a sentient organic and a nonsentient piece of technology without the former controlling the latter. That is a fact of the universe as the Catalyst later iterates. The quarians acted in the most rational manner available, attempting self preservation with their Homeworld and colonies intact. Similarly, the geth did what they deemed necessary to achieve their malfunction sourced directives and indiscriminately, intentionally inflicted a billions wide genocide on all members and aspects of the society and culture of their creators (down to intentionally destroying their religious idols) and any Council species unfortunate enough to be in the space they deemed to be theirs, only stopping when there were a scant million fleeing quarians left in existence, due solely to the limits of their programming. I don't know why you're trying to use pathos to argue that was an act of mercy, because not even the geth themselves describe it as such, only their drooling fanboys and fangirls. It was a fortunate (for the quarians at least, and the other organics of the galaxy, considering it is also the quarians that heroically innovate the technology capable of destroying the geth and saving the lesser organics) programming idiosyncrasy. It is shown to be just that when the more advanced programming of the geth 300 years later has no problems hunting down and erasing the last of their creators from existence if allowed their Reaper upgrades and assisted by their sympathizers.No, Paragon Shepard can express the opinion that the quarians were wrong to attack the geth in the first game (doesn't have to), but the 2nd and 3rd rewrote their lore entirely with the Heretic storyline solely in an attempt to make them sympathetic. That is undeniable. The gruesome statistics and anecdotes provided in early works don't mesh logically with geth's portrayal of themselves later material. One is wrong, and seeing as 99% of the quarian species actually is gone in the modern game universe, I'm inclined to believe it is the latter accounts of benign "self defense". The war was not merely agricultural platforms picking up rifles to defend the quarians not attempting to deactivate them, it was intentional, wanton, mechanistic slaughter of an entire species.
I was actually thinking that it was a waste of time, arguing with someone who obviously carried such a blatant bias, and you've just proved me right.
The other thing about the ME3 plot line was that the reaper signal to the Geth should have had no effect on the active ladar jammer that never mind it took the Quarians 300 years to discover 1992 technology (psst, Xen, look it up on the Extranet). Yet, for some stupid reason it does. This is a lolz and a huge hole showing once again that the writers did not understand the technology about which they were writing.
But in the end it doesn't matter who was right or who was wrong. It doesn't matter that the tech was badly understood. It doesn't matter that nothing really makes any sense about the near total extermination of the Quarians on their homeworld. It doesn't matter that it doesn't make any sense that the Council didn't intervene at all.
All that matters is that the entire plot was set up as a power trip for the player so he/she could play god and determine the fate of two races. You were a video game hero and if you chose anything other than peace it was a tragedy, but you were still a hero because you ended the war.
I was actually thinking that it was a waste of time, arguing with someone who obviously carried such a blatant bias, and you've just proved me right.
Pot, meet kettle bub. You literally tried to call a machine rebellion something other than a machine rebellion (seriously, not even ME3's portrayal of events is this toaster hugging), in an attempt to defend the indiscriminate, deliberate violence of biower's beloved toasters.
I'll chalk up your lack of response to my rebuttal as yet another glorious victory.
The other thing about the ME3 plot line was that the reaper signal to the Geth should have had no effect on the active ladar jammer that never mind it took the Quarians 300 years to discover 1992 technology (psst, Xen, look it up on the Extranet). Yet, for some stupid reason it does. This is a lolz and a huge hole showing once again that the writers did not understand the technology about which they were writing.
Of course they didn't understand the tech. The AI's in this series are powered by space magic. They could have used any number of contrived technobabble reasons that no one would question just like in Star Trek (I'm suprised they didn't just have me Reverse the Polarity on the geth's dilitihum matrix). The point is my magic device defeated the magic AI's until the Reapers imbued them with more space magic. How is irrelevant. You need to listen to the sage advice of this man
how indeed, Mr. Dirt.
It just bothers me when they get the science that is outside of the space magic wrong. It just does.
@gothpunkboy89 - The early dialogue with Legion that you can unlock on the PC is not canon since it cannot be accessed during standard gameplay. But you can get the Derelict Reaper early on after Horizon, do Legion's loyalty mission, then let your crew die, and build the team. It's a very quiet ship, and no one on your team questions your decision because.... video game hero.
But the problem with the Quarian-Geth arc is that there is no canon about it. Bioware respects player decisions. Essential characters in ME2 could die. This means Legion and Tali's mediating is not canon. Neither is their not mediating.
If they knew there was going to be a Quarian and Geth plot for ME3, they should have given Legion and Tali plot armor for the Suicide Mission and made them required squadmates. Yes I know this takes away choice, but plot comes ahead of choice in a story. You give an illusion of choice in a RPG. But the way things played out shows that they didn't have a clue how things were going to go in ME3 until after ME2 hit the shelves. Tali's push for peace with the Geth isn't canon. They needed to write two entirely different arcs based on your choice in ME2 - did Tali and Legion survive? Y/N. Y = arc 1; N = arc 2. They had limited resources so they weaseled their way around it by writing pretty much the same plot but setting key conditions for peace - 1) Shepard had to destroy the Heretics; 2) Tali had to be acquitted. Peace could still work if you did Tali's quest in ME1, but got her exiled and she survived, but you had to destroy the Heretics in that case. Another condition - if you didn't destroy the Heretics and Legion survived, you had to have completed Tali's quest in ME1 AND acquit her at her trial in ME2 (by the red or blue - not rally the crowd) and of course she had to survive.
Players tend to inflate the impact Shepard had on the attitudes of Quarians mostly due to video game hero status. Here it transcends the suspension of disbelief. Koris would have far more of an impact than Tali or Shepard, but the game isn't written from his POV. He'd be a major player in a story about the Quarians.
And Legion never wanted to wipe out his fellow Geth. They weren't dying. Geth are software. When he shut down the servers, the runtimes became inactive. They weren't dead. When he shot the Geth platforms, the runtimes go to the nearest server. They're not destroyed. That's the mistake the Quarians made. You're thinking like an organic, not a machine. The platforms were a means to an end. They can be rebuilt. New runtimes containing the perspectives of the runtimes on the platforms that were destroyed get written, thus evolving the next generation of software. This is how alien they were.
Legion was unique. Legion was the only Geth platform that interacted civilly with an organic in 300 years. The rest used projectiles or energy weapons. Without Legion there is no peace because he doesn't report back to the Consensus.
Why did the Quarians attack? Well, their ships had about 80 years left in them and since they didn't understand machine thought, and machines didn't understand organic thought, and the whole thing had been resting on Tali and Legion communicating, then Legion stopped communicating. Don't know why. I would suspect for plot reasons.
Thus Admiral Xen built this simple but effective weapon that disrupted the networking signal from one geth to the other thus blinding them and allowing the heavy fleet to destroy their platforms fast enough that they would overload their servers. Thus they were able to sweep the colony worlds free of Geth. Unfortunately, Haestrom's sun was in the final stages of its life.
They were taking back Rannoch when the reaper signal boosted the Geth networking signal to a level where Xen's weapon was ineffective. Made the Geth smarter? Bullpoo. (I got a warning for foul language). That's badly written in the story by someone who doesn't understand computers. The Geth had better tech on their ships and still outnumbered them. At the end this changes.
At the end the Geth aren't getting the boosted signal. They aren't getting any networked signal. They're having to rely on local networks making them relatively stupid, except for Legion. It can be argued that at this point they're not really alive. They're nothing more than intelligent mechs. This is why Legion wants to give them the reaper code. That will make them independent of having to network to be truly intelligent. Each platform could then be intelligent on its own. Would each be as smart as Legion? Don't know that, but Legion said true AI, so we'd have to believe him. But they weren't anything close to it before he uploaded the code.
So in the no peace version, Shepard is faced with letting Gerrel effectively destroy a bunch of toasters or letting the toasters become AI life and wipe out the Quarians.
In the peace version, Shepard lets Legion make these toasters into AI life and convinces Gerrel to back down so there's a larger force available to fight the reapers.
The Geth at the point just prior to Legion uploading that code had been downgraded to a state of non-sentience. Hence they ceased firing. There was no signal from the Geth fleet that they were surrendering. Just that they ceased firing and were dead in space, although the dialogue says "they're backing off." The cut scene shows them dead in space before being wiped out like space junk. The Quarians on the other hand are very much alive.
However with the servers shut down, and when Gerrel destroys the platforms, there is no place for the Geth runtimes to download, and thus they're gone.
There are no paragon or renegade points for the decision despite the positioning on the dialogue wheel.
This decision is why we won't see any Quarians or Geth in ME: Andromeda.
That dialogue is as much cannon as anything else. They created it. They put it in the game then they locked it behind an asinine set up because reasons. If inserted into the game and the character has dialogue and actions it is cannon. And Legion diving out of the way of Tali's gun fire is action and sets up their entire relation ship arch. Changed and made available only if players play a very very very specific way for reasons that I can't find any logic in.
Bioware doesn't respect player's cannon if they did then Andromeda would exist before the ME time line. Unless I missed something about how it would be set up. The Reapers would have to be killed or Controlled or Synthesis would have to have happened. They would have to acknowledge one of those endings if it takes place in the future. On top of that is the meditation of Quarian Geth is the reason you won't see any in ME:A then Krogan shouldn't exist either. It would basically be just human, Asari, Turian and Salarian. And if I remember right a Krogan was shown in trailer for it. Because it isn't cannon one way or the other because of player's choices if krogans exist anymore.
Legion is the only one to have direct interaction with organics. The simple thing is how ever as soon as he reconnected to the Geth collective every geth would share his experiences and memories. In that system only one unit would need to experience something for all other geth connected to know the exact same thing. He directly states that after sharing his information with the collective they realized the Reaper invasion was inevitable and started to prepare for war. Which Shepard replies with how nice that must have been for someone to believe them. At that point he has shared all his experiences with Organics. So every geth particularly those around Rannoch now have his same experiences.
Legion willingly allows you to wipe out the heretics in ME2. Reprogramming or complete eradication are both options he doesn't complain about. Each platform you kill during Priority Rannoch including the ship you are on would over all hurt the Geth's chance to survive if the Quarians didn't want to play nice. Every instance of helping you release the Reaper control of the Geth puts them right back in the cross hairs of the Quarians and hurts their over all chance of survival. He disabled the ship that was beating the hell out of the Quarian fleet and got it blown up in the process. A chance he would have to know would happen given his previous interaction with a certain Quarian Admiral. He helped take down jamming towers and AA guns that would give the Quarians even more of an advantage in communication and ground landing. That releasing them from Reaper control would put them instantly at their mercy of their jamming weapon again.
The speical sell of Legion was boosting the Reaper signal to give them the same intelligence level as the Reaper as little puppets to do their biding. They can create others like themselves containing all knowledge of those harvested using only their organic bodies to produce the neeicary building materials. I think they can use Legions special shell to boost the signal to all geth and take control of them just boosting their over all intelligence at the cost of becoming someone what mindless slaves on par with Marauders and Cannibals. As well as rendering the jamming signal useless.
In the kill version the Geth do not stop firing. So your claim they are put into an inactive state after Legion distributes the upgrade falls a bit flat. If you side with Quarians with Reapers gone they are subject to the jamming signal again. Which distorts their abilty to think letting them wipe them out. If you broker a truce the Geth stop firing to show they aren't interested in fighting so the Quarians reluctantly follow suit. If you side the Geth they just keep shooting and over whelm the Quarians as they are now invulnerable to their jamming signal.
The other thing about the ME3 plot line was that the reaper signal to the Geth should have had no effect on the active ladar jammer that never mind it took the Quarians 300 years to discover 1992 technology (psst, Xen, look it up on the Extranet). Yet, for some stupid reason it does. This is a lolz and a huge hole showing once again that the writers did not understand the technology about which they were writing.
But in the end it doesn't matter who was right or who was wrong. It doesn't matter that the tech was badly understood. It doesn't matter that nothing really makes any sense about the near total extermination of the Quarians on their homeworld. It doesn't matter that it doesn't make any sense that the Council didn't intervene at all.
All that matters is that the entire plot was set up as a power trip for the player so he/she could play god and determine the fate of two races. You were a video game hero and if you chose anything other than peace it was a tragedy, but you were still a hero because you ended the war.
We invented projectiles in the BC age. Then fast forward to what ever year it is in ME we are still using projectiles to kill people with. Overly fancy and complicated stones thrown at someone. And what about body armor? Leather was used in ages past to stop things from killing us. And yet fast forward and we have specialized armor created that can stop bullets and a kinetic barrier designed to stop bullets. Why are we using the same thing.
Just like we are using the same programming language now as we did when the first computer came about right? We always used C++ right? And always will be that is why HTML 5 has always existed right?
Things change as they evolve the item you found in 1992 was created with technology in 1992 in mind. Not ME universe time were things have advanced so very much. There is a reason they don't use old timey revolvers or AK-47's in the game. As well as why they advanced beyond simply kevlar body armor and standing around shooting another missile at in incoming missile to destroy it. As well as the introduction of thermal clips which at least partially make some sense as it would allow quicker cool downs under constant fire to wear out kinetic barrier faster.
But by all means show me how that cell phone created in 1992 can match the latest smart phone. I'll wait.
We invented projectiles in the BC age. Then fast forward to what ever year it is in ME we are still using projectiles to kill people with. Overly fancy and complicated stones thrown at someone. And what about body armor? Leather was used in ages past to stop things from killing us. And yet fast forward and we have specialized armor created that can stop bullets and a kinetic barrier designed to stop bullets. Why are we using the same thing.
Just like we are using the same programming language now as we did when the first computer came about right? We always used C++ right? And always will be that is why HTML 5 has always existed right?
Things change as they evolve the item you found in 1992 was created with technology in 1992 in mind. Not ME universe time were things have advanced so very much. There is a reason they don't use old timey revolvers or AK-47's in the game. As well as why they advanced beyond simply kevlar body armor and standing around shooting another missile at in incoming missile to destroy it. As well as the introduction of thermal clips which at least partially make some sense as it would allow quicker cool downs under constant fire to wear out kinetic barrier faster.
But by all means show me how that cell phone created in 1992 can match the latest smart phone. I'll wait.
The point is that the game shows LADAR jamming as some great new invention, which it isn't.
And even if it was, it would have never had the great effect shown in the game.
It would have that effect, if the geth used exclusively ladar for detection and exclusively optical communication on the same wavelength...
The point is that the game shows LADAR jamming as some great new invention, which it isn't.
And even if it was, it would have never had the great effect shown in the game.
Humans lost how to create concrete for centuries. Found then lost the cure/prevention of scurvy for centuries. Finding correct frequency and power needed to block it would take time. Confusing a few bits of geth are vastly different from an entire Geth Dreadnought.
It's effect was just like that of a flash bang. Sudden confusion followed by a unified strike by the Quarian Fleet. It didn't render the Geth completely helpless but is caused confusion which combined with the planned attack by the Quarian Fleet was able to do massive damage to the Geth. The destruction of the dyson sphere like object they were building caused actual loss of thousands of geth programs which caused an over all loss of intelligence.
I'll give you a real world example you can try. Wait around the corner for a random person to walk around. As soon as they turn the corner flash a bright light in their eye then start punching them as hard as you can. See how well you can beat them up.
Then walk right at someone and start yelling at them how you will beat them up. Push them a bit and let them work themselves up and know the fight is coming then beat them up as good as you can.
Then compare and contrast how easy each one was compared to the other. I bet the unexpected flash then punches will be an easier time beating the person up then alerting them to the fact.
Humans lost how to create concrete for centuries. Found then lost the cure/prevention of scurvy for centuries.
Yes, at a time were storing and spreading information was very difficult, not really comparable to the modern age.
Finding correct frequency and power needed to block it would take time.
No it wouldn't, because the thing is pointed at your own ship. Analizing the incoming beam would be trivial, and figuring out what signal to send to create interference is basic physics. The only somewhat challanging thing would be to create a machine that does all that automaticly as fast as possible, across as many frequencies as possible.
Confusing a few bits of geth are vastly different from an entire Geth Dreadnought.
I don't know were you get the idea that the geth were confused. We're talking about a very specific piece of technology that is renderred ineffective. A piece of technology that isn't really vital to space combat. Would it give the quarians a slight advantage? Yes. Would it suddenly turn every geth into a bumbling idiot? I don't see how.
I'll give you a real world example you can try.
You really want anyone to try this?
Wait around the corner for a random person to walk around. As soon as they turn the corner flash a bright light in their eye then start punching them as hard as you can. See how well you can beat them up.
Then walk right at someone and start yelling at them how you will beat them up. Push them a bit and let them work themselves up and know the fight is coming then beat them up as good as you can.
Then compare and contrast how easy each one was compared to the other. I bet the unexpected flash then punches will be an easier time beating the person up then alerting them to the fact.
Do you seriously think this is a good comparison to fighting a space battle against a highly advanced AI hivemind?
@gothpunkboy89 - Cell phone in 1992 vs today's smart phone? You're really reaching. That's hyperbole. Ladar uses laser which is coherent light. What makes up laser doesn't change. How it's made just gets more efficient. Cops use ladar to detect your speed. Fighter aircraft and SAM batteries use ladar for targeting, so we came out with the "stealth fighter". There are other countermeasures for ladar.
They used Ladar in the game because of "rule of cool." I'd bet they had no idea how it worked or the countermeasures already available. Someone heard the term and thought it sounded good. Hudson was big on rule of cool.
It boils down to Xen had something that made the Quarian's space magic greater than the Geth's space magic. Then when the Quarians got to the Tikkun system, the reaper signal made the Geth's space magic greater again so that they were in a stalemate with the Quarians until YOU as Commander Shepard rode in on your white steed with your space magic to get rid of the reaper, play god and determine the fate of the two races. You video game hero!
It's all about 
The plot was very badly written.
[...] Analizing the incoming beam would be trivial, and figuring out what signal to send to create interference is basic physics. The only somewhat challanging thing would be to create a machine that does all that automaticly as fast as possible, across as many frequencies as possible.
I bet the frequency range that is relatively unaffected by cosmic 'noise' and technological feasible to use is comparably small. Likely there wouldn't be the need to analyse much at all.
(If I remember my technology courses correctly and ME-tech behaves similar to semi-conductor sensors, the detectors should actually be sensible to a somewhat broad frequency band around their actual laser frequency.)
It should be enough to generate an energy burst roughly in that spectrum to render the geth sensors ineffective.
The GARDIAN system should be able to do that pretty well.
I also like how the geth went from gestalt programs networked in the hundreds to thousands operating single platforms, between which they could transition seamlessly or into server hubs, to a bunch of individuals with the Pinnochio code.
How the hell does that even work exactly? The Legion platform contained 1,183 programs, before it started using the I pronoun when it drinks the Reaper koolaid. Were 1,182 of them all deleted or forcibly assimilated to form the individual personality? Does the same go for that individual prime that talks to us after? How do the geth still move seamlessly between hardware and servers if their platform is now part of their identity? Are they just deleted if their hardware is destroyed now. Why the hell does Legion need to delete itself to copy some code?
Seems like a downgrade if anything. But dem feeeeels, tho.
Question: how many people did the ME1 Rogue VI mission on the lunar base and how many of those same people support the Geth?
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