Letter Campaign Proposal - EA

I do too. Count me in.

Yeah you will probably want to ask a mod kihten. Or you can edit your original post and add his to yours and just give credit to his post I suppose.

Well I will try one, here is my 1st draft

Dear EA, I have been an avid gamer for the past 15 years, while I have been playing on multiple systems and different genres, my most memorable games have been acquired by your company. I still remember playing Command and Conquer (CNC) and enjoying Westwood Studios producing games, then you acquired them. While the games were great up to the point of CNC 4, I still remember how frustrated I was by the portrayal of the game given the feedback by fans for a better ending, and how the fans were as upset as they were for ME3. While the overall fanbase might have been smaller for an RTS, this should have been a warning sign to your business practices, I still remember how fast that game was released and how it poorly it was made. This has put into question your other CNC products like the up and coming CNC Generals 2 which is to be released under new management.

While your company appears to have an objective for releasing games annually for certain genres, Real time strategy, Role Playing games, and massively multiplayer online games should take time to make. Your model only works if games like Battlefield, Medal of Honor, Madden NFL, or other sport games are to be relased annually, where they require constant updates. The latter being true given sports seasons.

Your failure to address the concerns of customers has lead you to face the Golden Poo award by Consumerist. While you may not have liked it, and while I may sympathize that Bank of America should have gotten it, it does not excuse your practices for these past couple of years. While we may not have a say in "politics", we have an expectation for decency when we actually spend our money for a service and it fails to provide based on the advertisements.

While you may not be the developer for the game, you have taken control as sole distributor for the Mass Effect product, as such we hold you personally responsible for the final decision as your reputation is on the line for releasing an unfinished product. I have a master's degree in engineering, and I am aware of project managment decisions. When you do a case study on this fiasco I hope you realize that crashing a project (Mass Effect 3 project) has costs in quality. You dropped the quality of the game in the end and rushed the developers from finishing that art. What do you think would have happened if Da Vinci partially finished the Mona Lisa, or Van Gogh only drew half of Starry Night?

In the end, you failed to put checks on the finished product, and as it seems, you somehow muzzled your critics, as they did not have the chance to fully critique the ending before release. As such, we the customers are demanding a change, not an extension of poorly thought out workmanship, we demand something that creates narrative coherence, as mentioned by Mr B Tongue on youtube, , to shorten up watch 36:28 if you actually value our opinion.

The future of your company is dependent upon the next few months with regards to how you handle this incident. We as your customers, are what keep you employed, not your stockbrokers, we purchase your products or we don't. As such, your response to this input will be required by us as loyal customers.

Sincerely,
Spike Spiegel06
Flying Grim Reaper

Thats a damn good first draft friend and gets straight to the point. I too was a big fan of westwood studios, Dune especially


Most importantly it was assertive and civil. As it should be

Thank you just working on a few grammatical errors, just wondering where to send and how to send it to EA to have the most effect...

Anytime Friend. Grammer is always a pain lol, especially on this laggy tablet of mine. I suppose EA has email addresses but Im sure are more for customer service (or lack there of). Maybe their PR department has a email address, kinda like how bioware has contact@bioware for feedback (*cough*). Maybe one of the HTL staff would know.

I sent a letter to BW, and an email too a month ago. Not a peep.

It crossed the ocean! I hoped somebody would've read it.

To be fair to Bioware, we sent them a lot of letters. Just because they weren't able to respond to them doesn't mean they didn't read them.

I would be happy to write a letter and send it to EA and/or BioWare. Count me in!

I don't think I explicitly voiced my support for this idea, but I'm down to write whatever letters to whomever. Just say the word.

Sounds good, something else I can do except cookies and nonsense.

kihten - I (and I'm sure the rest of the creative team) would be happy to throw something fancy together for EA. Just let us know what you need and count me in for any letter campaigns.

Angry volus banker, anyone?

A couple of printable postcard designs would rock, even if they were one sided!

Here's one to get you started. More later!


(and yes, I know that isn't actually Barla Von with the Barla Von quote...all the screens I could find of him have the top of his head chopped off)

EDIT: One more. kihten can we get these and any others from the CT moved somewhere near the top so people can find them? FYI, both are 4x6.

Trying to figure out how to present this next little bit in the letter. I remember a game I played on the PS1 called Colony Wars by Psygnosis. They had an ingenious way to portray story and gameplay, based on the success or failure of a mission, your story would change. This was before ME, so having variable endings is possible. I was thinking of posting this to EA and Bioware to express what our expectation of the story is.

Anyone have suggestions for a launch date? I'm thinking end of April or something - one or two weeks from now.
Hoping to get the info listed on a thread by the end of the week so we can start spreading the word about it.

Postcards are looking awesome!
Also, if anyone is interested, doing at least one design we can use as an informer / recruitment to send to friends and family to spread the word about HTL would be cool. Otherwise most designs can be more geared towards EA ^_^
Gonna try and catch up on threads tomorrow and try to put some info together for this.
Thanks for all the hard work while i was afk most of today!

awesome thank you!! i put these in the top post of the thread- however most likely will scrap this thread for a new one once i get all the info together and do more of a "Here's how to participate" rather than a "should we do this" post (hopefully by the end of the week) which will be more structured and will contain all the designs.

I would suggest sooner rather than later. The farther they get into making the Extended Cut DLC the harder it will be to get them to change it.

I think this is kind of related to EA stock dropping- looks like the new patch can crash ME3 and render it completely unplayable!
Not good for business....
tinyurl.com/7yfgffl