EA/Bioware in Full PR Damage Control Mode v3 *UPDATED 5/7/12, 12:34 PM UTC/GMT -4 hours*

Maybe.

Gun...Foot.....Bang!!

BW asks for input for DA3
Dragon Age: Question of the Month (Discovery & Learning)
A move to get some trust back. But I don't trust Bioware.

The case with ME3: Changing Mass Effect 3 with Fans: A Case Study of Innovation and Change Communication
If we see again some polls then we should be really careful. And as soon the "gaming press" gets involved it will get messy. I see the order of importance for EAware to appease investors, gaming press, ..., customers.

And if they don't get the double time than EA normal dev cycle, it will be another rush job, with a day one DLC price inflation attached to it. Danger may come too, if they decide to make it for the next gen consoles (an excuse to get more time): that it has to be a self contained story block buster and fall into the same trap as ME3.

Something complete different, Electronics Art and Activision eternal war: Activision and EA settle but Call of Duty trial to go forward

EA tries to assimilate the crowd founded game market.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...owdfunded_projects_with_free_distribution.php

(Found this (in German, trying to find the English original): http://www.gamestar.de/news/branche/2567947/origin.html)
Projects that are crowd founded and are distributed over Origin, EA will distribute them free for 90 days. After that distribution fees will apply.

EA had to issue a cease and desist declaration in Germany, that they will inform in future the customers better about the requirement to install Origin. Battlefield 3 was the first game with Origin requirement. The notice that the game requires a connection to license server was too unremarkable and the EULA is granting EA too many rights.

Verbraucherschützer erwirken Unterlassungserklärung gegen EA

EA shuts down Dragon Age Legends EA to shut down its Dragon Age social game
This happens out of the normal product life cycle. EAware probably sees only that it cost too much to continue it. But not that they alienated with DA2 the fan base, and more and more are loosing interest in the DA franchise.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/117379-BioWare-Austin-Cuts-Workforce

"Restructuring"

Interesting but sadly unavoidable. They did a real mess with SW:TOR and now they reap what they sowed. I hope all these people laid off will find a new job quickly.

"...to continue to build Star Wars: The Old Republic as one of the most compelling and successful online experiences in the world today."

See, this is what annoys me about BioWare/EA press releases: no matter much things are crashing down around them, they will steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that there's anything wrong. I realise that this is the typical corporate PR-speak, but it comes across as not only unbearably smug, but completely delusional.



Somehow I don't think this is "the most sucessful online experience in the world."

Might be beating the dead horse posting on this thread but anybody know how to get Atghunter on the phone to comment on priestly's presence and recent thread creation on the HTL website? I think its PR and either him not so subtly taking opinion polls for the content of the EC, the future focus of either SP or MP DLC or now if they're gonna run with IT or not.

Maybe I'ma just paranoid/cynical but that's what it looks like to me.

I don't Maybe @BaChuck has any idea?

I know nothing happened recently, but I'd love to see a sitrep from atghunter

When I first read that I figured they were alluding to some multiplayer DLC, Retake Omega, or worst yet an MMO. I never really figured it was going to be post ending content and while I hope thats what they meant I doubt thats what they meant, at least at the time.

When I first beat the game - I picked destroyed; did enough MP to get Shep breathing. Very first thing I thought was; WTH was that. They've given us not an ending but a cliffhanger. Second I saw what they tried to do - lot of people are actually seeing it; so I'm not the only one that's mad they tried to not just indoctrinate Shep but us as their customers.

BW done twists kinda like this before - its not just one thing that points to this - its all the pieces of evidence that we have that paints this picture. That's the other thing; BW has the though picture we're piecing things together.

Then we got people using Occam's Razer to dismiss my theory or IT - problem is using this scienctific method on Literature is the fact all story/poetry/rpg stories etc have hidden meaning thus making occam's razer useless. They need to go back to literary theory and look at the story as a whole.

People will dismiss what I say - but we'll see...... @LukeE had a great break down on good doctor's blog - which is very much on the same wavelength as my theory.

Also something that is very interesting to watch is the polls that Chris Priestly has put up specially the last one. Why would BW poll about IT this late in the game unless they are using some form of it and are actually gauging the reaction.

I think the last question that was asked (about DLC) by chris, was intresting seeing as it has now been announced the latest MP DLC Rebellion pack will also be free. Is this a direct result of our responses as well as the remnants of older initiatives from the retakeME3 facebook group?

There's another theory I've seen floated on BSN that the reason for the poll was to gauge the level of fan upset to come since they've already decided not to use IT.
Whichever way it goes the poll almost has to be a "stick your finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing" move. They wouldn't bring the voice talent in unless the script direction has already been set.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with applying Occam's Razor to this situation, or any conjecture about literature for that matter. For starters, your claim that they have hidden meaning, while valid, is meaningless to this situation. Even in science, the people forming the conjecture don't know everything; their experiments have "hidden meaning". There is nothing unique about literature that can't also be applied to any other deductive reasoning.

On top of that, you have to look beyond the narrative in this situation. The story of Mass Effect was created by a business, owned by another business. It is not beyond possibility that all of the evidence that appears in the fiction to support IT was put there deliberately for IT, but then do to time/money constraints the planned ending was scrapped and a new simpler/cheaper one was put in its place, but none of the evidence was removed.

Applying Occam's Razor to the narrative, the simplest answer that supports all of the evidence is certainly more than what we've got, and the IT seems like a pretty safe bet. Applying the principle to the business end, however, I see something very different. At this point, with the evidence available to us, the simplest answer is NOT the IT. After this sort of fan reaction one would expect an admission not a denial. It would be suicide to allow your stock price to drop as EA's has just to keep up the pretense of "indoctrinating" your fans. Is it possible that they are? Sure, there is information hidden from us, but we can't make suppositions based upon information we don't have, just that which we do.

My biggest reason for believing the IT is not true at this point, whether because it was never true or because Bioware has since changed their minds, is that they haven't told us yet. I would liken it to a practical joke gone awry. If I did the old "bucket of oatmeal" trick on a friend and it ruined his iPhone 5 (wool over the eyes followed by extreme anger just like ME3), I wouldn't deny that it was me for 5 months and then go "Suprise, I was lying; here's a new phone," mostly because if that happened to me I would be absolutely pissed about the 5 months of lying, even though my friend eventually did the right thing. What I would have done is apologize as soon as I saw that I had pissed him off and agreed to replace his phone. If, like Bioware, I was doing this to multiple people, I would probably wait until I had pissed everyone off before the apology, but that is as long as I would wait, which is exactly what I thought Bioware was doing when they kept saying, "We're waiting for more people to finish the game."

As a doctor once told me “When you hear hoof beats, think of horses, not zebras.” Until I actually see the zebra I'm going to assume we're dealing with a horse

Well it's true. In the end they're not going to please everyone. However what they're dealing with now in regards to the ending controversy is a ~90% disapproval rating according to their own poll. Even if I'm generous and assume that a decent amount of people that were satisfied with the ending didn't log on and vote the lowest I could see the disapproval rating going would be around 70%. 60,000+ is a very viable sample size.

I guess what they're hoping to do right now is get that approval rating somewhere between 80% and 90%, but saying some people can't be pleased is a fair statement so long as they try to fix the ending. Had they done nothing about it with that disapproval rating and said the exact same thing would have been a much different story, in fact it kind of was before the EC was announced.