Mass Effect 3 - Advertising Standards Agency Complaint Not Upheld
 

Do you rememember the complaint brought to the UK's Advertising Standards Agency claiming EA falsely advertised the player agency in Mass Effect 3's endings? The ASA has not upheld the complaint, reports Eurogamer:
More information.

Do you think some people are crying right now?
Or maybe they are accusing the ASA of having taken bribes from EA?

Who know all I know Is I'm tired or talking about his topic. It doesn't want to go away. Just wait for the extended DLC for the topic to explode again.

What a ridiculous waste of money and court resources.

I agree that it was a ridiculous waste of time and resources, but I have to agree with their findings.

Hypocritic. On one hand, computer games are officially declared a piece of culture or even art. On the other hand we (always) play the card of more important things to solve in the world.

At the same time there is the passion for and in what you do or play. We get fed up with others investing time, energy and value in something they feel strongly about? Or even get fed up with a news site reporting about it?

For the record I'm not excluding myself from being biased as I'm not only rationally involved in life (and games) per se.

Still I beg to differ! Hell, I remember a discussion in a German news mag some point between 1990 and 1995 (I think?). Simple question if computer games as products should be beta tested more thoroughly, should be more bug free and so on.

One side took the stance on arguing for a bug free product while the other saw value in end customer product testing. Of course you could go on about more complex system configurations etc. et. al. Let's be clear I was talking about logic and mechanics bugs, not necessarily graphics, drivers or sound.

Well over 15 years later now and congratulations to us all! We're well trained/programmed by now. Actually by now we're more often "entitled", eh?

Oh well, not my intention to insult anyone. Just to be clear on that. All I say is… well… congratulations! We talk again in a couple of years…

Something I forgot… personally I'm REALLY happy that the principal of free democratic basic order is still alive and uphold. That in regards to court time and money wasting. Nothing wrong with stating an opinion, quite the opposite.

Just as I obviously have a fundamentally different point of view and voiced opinion.

Well said, Nevarion. I agree with every word.

It's well and good that you're arguing for a bug-free product. I just want to ask you: who's gonna pay for it? I guess a very near bug-free product is in the realm of possibility, but it'll cost you a lot more than what you're paying for now.

Right. So the ASA bans a Marks & Spencer advert because there is a clothed girl in it bending over (wearing underwear) and six people complained nationwide. Then it dismisses the ME3 case because … red, green and blue were "nuanced" (and only sixty thousand people complained).

Somehow I think this has more to do with ME being 'just' a game, whereas Marks & Spencer was about 'serious' shocking things like a girl's naked back. I think BioWare definitely crossed the line between hype and lies, and it would have been nice to see a pro-consumer outcome here.

Imho the main reason for bugs is that developers simply just cannot think laterally.

Quoted from the DDO forums :

I don't understand your point Nevarion. It's a waste of time because the complaint was frivolous. It was only brought up because the impact of game decisions on the ending simply didn't come in a form that some group of people expected. That doesn't make it anywhere close to being false advertising.

There is no doubt that there were different endings. There is no doubt that the ending you get is based on your effective military strength (which depends on your decisions of how you play the game) and the path you choose at the end. The outcome of such a case was never in question. That's why this was a ridiculous waste of time and resources.

As a software developer, I can tell you that it is impossible to imagine all the idiocies users do…

Bullshit. That is all.

That and I can't remember how many times I've seen bug fix lists that state third party applications running in the background being the (indirect) cause of a particular problem.

The combination of a huge number of hardware combinations (I'm talking PC market here naturally) as well as a almost limitless number of third party software processes makes it impossible, and I do mean Impossible, to test/predict all the potential sources for errors/bugs/conflicts.

In other words, the bug report was incomplete, as it did not specify that the bug occurred when a the user double-clicked. I get this sort of stuff all the time, it's so tiring. It is a prime example of the differences and difficulties between user and developer, though.

This. x10.000. :D

The endings were different (Red, Green, Blue) - check.

The RGB endings were altered in a very minor cosmetic way by EMS - check.

Legally you are correct, and I'm glad that's all it takes to make you happy. However imho the whole point of regulators like the ASA is the "substance over form" principle. Otherwise I could market an electric car as "zero emissions" when in fact the emissions have simply been transferred from the exhaust pipe to the power station chimney. It is simply not a zero emission vehicle, and ME3 did not have anything near the sort of variance degree based on choices that its devs hyped us all into believing was there. Hype such as this

the courts are not going to get in the way of commerce over something so frivolous (unless they got a dog in the fight). I again remind you to note the courts almost always favour the movement of free and open trade, especially for local businesses.
—
on a related note I've been finding a lot of complaints regarding ME filed with the FTC (I was researching lockboxes as it relates to online gambling and came across these by accident)

http://www.gamepur.com/news/7426-fan…-3-ending.html

some of the complaints I found go back a few years regarding DRM and the first one

couple of students at Harvard:

http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/drmte…9814-00718.pdf

transcript for a town hall regarding this

http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/drmte…814-00472.html

Hype is a part of business (and politics). As far as a legal commission, like the ASA, I would imagine that conforming to the legal standards is all that is necessary. Don't you think you (and the numerous others complaining about this) may have just had unrealistic expectations?

Drinking Coka-Cola is not going to make you a supermodel, using Axe body spray is not going to directly lead you to an orgy with beautiful women, and driving a Ford truck is not going to let you tow a mountain. These are allowed to be portrayed because they are so unrealistic that a reasonable person would not believe it. I don't think a reasonable person would expect that every dialog option you selected through the course of a three game series would lead to a vastly unique ending. That would quite honestly require thousands of possible endings, the game would still be development, and it would probably cost more than Bioware could possibly hope to make back.

Exactly. Instead, the different endings are simply underwhelming, but different all the same. It could have been better, they didn't outright lie, I never expected a huge breakthrough in branched storytelling from this mostly scripted cinematic experience. That's an unrealistic expectation.

But yeah. Hype is hype.

It's a good thing this wasn't upheld. Otherwise we might have idiots coming out of the woodwork to file a complaint every time something doesn't end up being exactly what they expected.