Don't worry. Kaz Hirai is on the case. He'll raise prices so painfully high that consumers will "need to get 10 jobs just to earn the right to use our products".

ACtually, if you follow Indoctrination Theory, 2/3 of the choices probably lead to indoctirnation. The only question is.. do you become their Saren champion or do you become a Husk. I feel like Synergy = Husk. :)

Actually, most people aren't mad because the ending is sad/tragic. Way to buy into propaganda. If you bother to read what everyone has said or listened to the countless youtube comments, there's one united message:

The endings are discontinuous in flow from the rest of the games.

It's not that people die. Most people are okay with people dying. It's that the game shifted from one which choice mattered and character endings were explained concisely to one in which there are more questions than answers. For instance, why were my crew, whom were completely loyal to me through the games and fought to their bitter ends on every other mission... suddenly running from battle? Especially the squad mates that were with me on the ground battle, charged with me to the citadel matter stream, saw me get cut down.. so what? Joker flies the partyvan by and tells everyone that it's time to peace out? That kinda personality change is very inconsistent. Every single person would continue fighting until the job was done. You don't ride in with every races' best ships to war just to chicken out when it counts.

It's not that people are yellign about inability to change a major storyline. To teh contrary, people are upset because the major storyline WAS changed, in the span of 14 lines of dialogue delivered by a 11th hour new villain who has the power to end it all and leaves it up to you, Neo, to rejoin the source. Really? A last minute super villain that supplants the existing villain armada? That's introduced in 14 lines?

Cool story, bro.

My advice? Stop reading Bioware's interpretation of people's anger and actually read what people have to say. What's funny is that despite BioWare saying that they are listening, all the angry people are saying THE SAME EXACT THING, and yet BioWare pretends that they don't hear it. :)

Well, the comparison to the Matrix is pretty apt.

In Mass Effect, you have the main conflict, which is "We need to stop the reapers from killing all advanced races". This carries over three games. In the end, in the last 15 minutes and 14 lines of dialogue, the conflict objective completely changes to "You need to choose whether to condemn all sentient machines, control them (but lose yourself in the process... essentially merging yourself with the reapers -- else, how will you control them post-mortem?), or "return to the source" and add your own energy into the collective stream and force conformity to all life in the universe.

In the Matrix, Neo's entire conflict was "We need to stop the matrix/Agents/machine/Colonel sanders from enslaving humanity/destroying zion". That is, up until the last portion of the second movie, where an abruptly new character, Colonel Sanders, changes the decision to "Join the source and continue the cycle or watch us destroy humans." Sure, you can argue that they sorta did introduce the Architect earlier in the movie, but it was only hinted to here and there. You don't really meet him until the end. And even then, he replaces the main villain? Sorta kinda? Or offers a different kind of salvation? It's a really weak ending.. a deus ex machina.

In both cases, a last-minute introduced character offers an universal reboot with limited scope options. And for Mass Effect, a game built on the premise of your choice impacting the universe, to have that completely retconned in an ending where 2/3 choices involved rejoining the source, it's.. very weak. And Deus Ex machina?

Personally, when the kid tells me I can ONLY kill ALL of the reapers. Or ONLY do this. or that. with no varying level of options and controls, it just felt wrong. And for the starchild to watch the galaxy evolve around itself, including have evidence that AI and Biological units can coexist walking in its superstructure (hello EDI/Joker, Legion/Tali) and for it to continue on it's assumption that humans and robots can't coexist.. makes little sense. On top of that, the circular logic of "Machines kill advanced species so they can't create machines that kill advanced species" just hurts my brain. No, it's not that it is a thing I cannot comprehend. It's just poor logic. It's sloppy logic.

Instead, I took Option 4. I sat there emptying my clip at the starchild. Sure, the war raged on, but at least my shepard did something that is true to his nature: he used violence to solve stupidity. Oh yeah!

Assimilation is the wrong genre. This isn't star trek.

The word you're looking for is Indoctrinated.

At the end of ME2, EDI downloads specs of Harbringer from the Collector Base (this is what Joker hands Shepard at the end, assuming Shep survives. If not, Joker still has this technical info).

When the Normandy was handed over to the Alliance, these specs were handed over as well. That means the Alliance/Citadel council races had specifications on how to kick reapers in the teeth. Sure, not all their weapons could have been upgraded, but some may have had time to do some massive improvements.

Not to mention all of the council races upgraded their fleets and added dreadnought-class warships en masse.

Plus recall that 1 Maw Thresher took out a reaper... the Quarian fleet took out a reaper and in the battle for Earth, the entire galactic victory armada had combined navies of many, many races.

There are actually 5 options

Paragon
Neutral
Renegade
Paragon-Only (If you have enough paragon points)
Renegade-Only (If you have enough renegade points)

Sometimes, there's a sixth option to get more information. But no one really chooses that.

Who's to say it wasn't Casey Hudson's design genius that envisioned the end of the reapers through detonating eezo-driven mass relays, thus causing catastrophic system-wide explosions, just to perpetuate an adam-and-eve scenario with Tali, Liara, any-member-of-my-team-that-Joker-could-normally-not-get-a-date-with-but-in-my-absense-he-can?

I wonder if Mass Effect 4 will just be like Age of Empires or something.

Though, if Bioware really IS listening but wanted a quick out, they should just release an official DLC.... ported to Minecraft. Call it... "Build a home with Tali on Rannoch.

Perhaps there's a chair which powers a millenia old weapons platform. Better call MacGuyver to control it.

Or, at least, postpone your game release until NaNoWriMo, so that your fans can outlet their frustration of an unsatisfactory ending through fan fiction. That would be pretty neat. Foolish, but neat. Instead of "We are listening", change your catch phrase to "Write your own ending".