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Better Business Bureau Claims EA Lied About Mass Effect 3
Not long ago, amongst the angst and anger felt among the Mass Effect community, one particularly upset lad filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau. It claimed that Electronic Arts lied about Mass Effect 3 when it stated player choices would affect the overall outcome.
Interestingly, the Better Business Bureau agrees with him.
BBB’s own Marjorie Stephens agreed in a blog post that EA and Bioware are guilty of lies in the game’s advertising. She specifically points out quotes on the Mass Effect site, which state that players can “completely” shape their destiny, which she agrees is a false statement.
“The lesson to be learned here is companies should give careful consideration to how they word their advertisements,” she explained. “Otherwise, there could be detrimental effects, especially in the era of social media and online forums.”
Electronic Arts is not under fire for this alone, as it appears that their wildly popular MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, might have suffered extreme data loss from the most recent patch. Fans on 4Chan are livid (as expected), and have been on an EA-hating rampage all morning.
Good luck to you EA, you’re going to need it.
[via BBB]
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Reporter: “This could be the dEAth of Bioware!”
and your writers thought we were all whiny babies…….its nice to see the BBB actually take the side of the consumer. EA’s been destroying franchises for a while trying to fight activision and make a COD killer unfortunately its destroyed their own games and developers now we need this much hate against activision and capcom or the industry is never going to go back to being decent again.
I wouldn’t go so quick as to loop us all into your notion that we all think you’re “whiny babies.”
But statements like “EA’s been destroying franchises” and “we need this much hate against the industry” certainly don’t help against that notion.
It’s true, they have been whiney babies, but that doesn’t mean that EA doesn’t destroy franchises. I didn’t feel that way about ME though, the Dragon Age one hurt me the most.
EA destroys franchisees or their love child bioware does look at maxis their sim games are still great quality even if you do not buy the dlc that comes out ever 2 days fun fact to have all the content in sims 3 u need 56.8 gb of space EA’s main fault is they have a pretty bad marketing team change that their games are still great. (marketing team is shit because they think any publicity is good publicity and it is not sure we all know EA name but it is linked with the word outrage which is not a good word to be linked with when your considering buying a game)
lets not forget about securom, my point was that these large companies have become too big and are aquiring and forcing good developers to the ground. I firmly beleive that bioware’s baby mass effect would have been the next star wars or star trek, something for nerds like myself to lose themselves in but it seems like the moment they were aquired by EA they lost that passion that made mass effect 1′s story so great. An interview with mac walters makes it clear where EA/biowares mind is at at this time..
A lot of journalists around the internet and a few here initially have been looping us all as whiny babies, Maybe I came off as too harsh but i’m tired of being treated as such as a gamer especially by bioware who refuses to even really talk to their fans, instead of being treated like paying customers we’re being trying treated as expendable assets who have no choice but to pay biowares and EA’s Salary wether its forcing the online pass thing on us or Day one dlc or now true endings(heres looking at you capcom), I think as a community we look to you as reporters to help stop this and instead as an industry many support this new direction and those who do not are snuffed out. I think all of us adult gamers are getting tired of being abused and ME3′s ending is just 1 of many reasons why we have this anger towards companies like EA, Activision and capcom. I for one am tired of this BS, and the fact that now in order to play anything now adays i’m required to sign a contract that by all purposes should be as illegal here in the states as it is in the EU but somehow has been completely overlooked.
allright allright i get it you didn’t like ME3… can’t we just hate on Bioware and leave it at that? i think this is waaay beyond the line, i mean just because it said “completely”? c’mon stop whining that is just marketing and i don’t think it’s wrong… you get your fair share of choises during the game! it’s just the ending that sucks so can we get past that? please? it’s not the worst game ever and i don’t think Bioware deserves such a treat.
Umm, we hate EA, not Bioware. A lot of people want to make sure there is a strict distinction between the two and the hate that flows around. EA’s getting review by the BBB and EA’s the one that’s blamed for the ending.
Who on Earth hates Bioware? They’re a great developer who make great games; it’s just unfortunate that they’ve fallen in with a bad crowd (EA). Big publishers like EA are more concerned with getting more money they tend to cut corners and forget the little things that make games great. This has worked for them in the past, but usually with smaller games; with something like Mass Effect, which has such a huge fan base, everyone is in uproar at finally realising what they have done.
So to sum up: it’s not Bioware’s fault, it’s EA’s.
I do lol fuck you EA
Why the hate on bioware for everything? I believe up until the last 10 minutes of the game was Bioware’s work. They put so much details with all those scenes, dialogs, cut scenes, etc and suddenly in the end, it’s like a one way conversation without being able to interrupt the talk. I’d say the last 10 minutes was EA’s work, something is definitely fishy.
So. Basically they are in trouble for using absolute language.
You do realize how many other games use language like this in their adverts?
Maybe it’s time that games are sold based on their own merits.
I hope EA gets the kick in the balls not bioware
-_-
Oh man, when I saw this in my newsletter…
Half-laugh, half-loud cheer.
This has GOT to be some kind of joke. Congratulations, you big bunch of children, you’ve successfully set the video games industry back about 30 years.
Why? This happens in every industry and to a lot of businesses. If anything, this will make publishers be more watchful of what they put in advertising. I don’t think this can legitimately hurt gaming.
Why would that be a bad thing? lol maybe that’s just what we need, is for them to take a good hard look at what gaming used to be and should still be today but it isn’t
Quite the opposite. 30 years ago the BBB probably wouldn’t even recognize “video games” as an industry lol, let alone something they need to watch and get involved in.
EA will probably take the world’s 20 best lawyers and pay them half a million dollars to save their ass.
why is their so much Hate for EA and not Activision for pushing out crap year after year just to make a buck Activision is the worst company here not EA just a bunch of COD fan boys who trying to ruin stuff
Seriously you can’t even defend yourself after I say this but… YOU ARE THE BIGGEST FUCKING BATTLEFIELD FANBOY I HAVE EVER SEEN! What the fuck does this have to do with anything? And you should still hate on EA because if you didn’t realize there’s more battlefields than CoD! So just shove that “pushing out crap year after year just to make a buck” shit up your ass you fucking moron. And yes EA is the worst fucking company. the fucking money whores at least activation will use some of their money to entertain people… and i’m not just talking about the game.
Exactly this! And even the creators of south park have known this for a long time now, there have been 2 episodes making fun of how greedy EA is.
But Activision is not ruining established franchises and killing off once great developers, unlike EA.
way i see it you did shape your outcome just not the universes outcome put me on the law team
i knwe it, its EA fault that ME3 ending sucks, they just want to leve a open story so they can make more DLC or another game
Look, let’s be real here. Activision, Bioware, EA, Valve, and every other well known company that deals with publishing or making games are not evil. They all simply want to maximize profits just like every other business in the world. They have no obligation to make a game fit for your specific tastes. They have a goal and that goal is to make money. It would be all hunky-dory if they could make the artistically perfect game they would like to make, but they cannot compete in the gaming industry if they made decisions to maximize consumer happiness instead of maximizing the number of consumers who are willing to buy their product. Those are two entirely different things. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.
Also, you did “shape your own destiny.” Every decision you made felt real and you saw the repercussions of your decisions. Just because there was no shout out to the decisions you made over the course of the journey at the end doesn’t mean that your decisions did not matter. They felt real and I was almost brought to tears by some of them. Not everything is about the ends. The means matter too.
While I applaud that the BBB is taking this seriously I shake my head that the fandom is so bent out of shape over the ending. Hopefully the next installment (you know there will be one) will be better about epilogues.
so bent out of shape eh? so investing 5 years into a really good story only for a greedy company to go screw up the ending and us getting annoyed makes us bent out of shape? i think you need to reassess yourself sir.
So WHAT if you invested time into the story? That doesn’t give you any sort of right to how it ends. Listen to yourself! “I really liked this story so I have a say in what happens.” Does that honestly not strike you as irrational? All that was promised to you was a working game, and that’s what they delivered. You do not have any sort of “right” to what happens in the plot.
Did you even read the article? Says quite clearly that they promised you a say in the ending (through your ingame decisions), which was not delivered on at all. Hence why the BBB got involved.
You did get a say in the ending, no matter how much you didn’t like it.
Might as well sue everything ever for using absolute language in advertising. Heck, if they say a game is “epic” or “amazing” and I don’t agree, I might as well sue because that’s false advertising, right?
This shouldn’t be taken seriously. The comment is not a blatant lie in any way and isn’t even technically untrue. This is just ridiculous.
This should be taken seriously. They marketed the game saying that you could control the entire story. They said it in interviews and even labeled the game like that; “quotes on the Mass Effect site, which state that players can ‘completely’ shape their destiny.”
Also, saying a game is “epic” is completely different. “Epic” is simply an adjective to describe an opinion on the game.
Saying you can do something in the game and then not being able to do it is false advertising.
You can control the story just as much as in ME1 or ME2. Are you telling me that ME3 contained a lack of choice? Events throughout the game do change based on choices you have made. That is fact and as such the statement is not false. You have an impact on the story and even the outcome, no matter how small that impact may be or how much that impact may displease you.
damn nerds dont get your panties in a bunch its a damn game
if your here your automaticly a nerd, welcome to the club