tensorproduct said:
I would simply assume different numbers. Another marketing anecdote (I'm loathe to use marketing and statistic in the same sentence) is that happy customers rarely say anything, whereas unhappy customers will do their best to be heard. From this, a small proportion of dissatisfied gamers can drown out any number of people who are content with the status quo.
I can't say I disagree with this, but where's the tipping point? The company only knows about people that speak up, why should they assume that more people disagree with the complainers than agree. If a company assumes that the majority are always happy with the product produced, then there's no reason to change anything, which is not how things are. To use another ME example, Bioware apparently listened to complaints about the Mako in ME1, so it was removed (for better or worse) for ME2.
It's interesting to think how we might generate better statistics. Some form of anonymous on-line survey? Very susceptible to ballot stuffing, but it's marginally better than "I've seen more people complaining than I have happy".
I was thinking about ballots that were run on BSN coming back with figures showing the vast majority disliked the ending and wanted a change, the biggest score I saw was around 90% in favour of revised endings.
Actually, I think you kind of missed my point. What I was trying to say was that we, as consumers of entertainment, have absolutely no inherent right to expect to be satisfied by what we consume.
To argue that Bioware should change the ME3 ending to satisfy disgruntled customers exposes the flaw in assuming that we do have such a right, as it would lead to other disgruntled customers who can then expect the same consideration.
Obviously I can't speak for everyone who hated the endings here, but I have never seen it claimed we have a right to an altered ending, except by people thinking the ending shouldn't be changed using it in "entited crybaby" arguments. It has always been the case that we were extremely unhappy with the ending and would be unwilling to pay more for DLC/future games. Bioware had the choice, stick to thier guns or try to fix the ending to regain the faith of the fans they alienated.
Quote from the facebook group "Bioware is a business if we can make them understand that by using the current endings they alienate (no pun) their customers, and destroy the replay ability of the trilogy they are hurting their profits we CAN bring about a change for the better."
This has never been about the "right" to get an altered ending, simply trying to get Bioware to choose to implement a change that will result in people like myself continuing to give Bioware business. Again, this is my viewpoint, shared by the people I have talked about this issue with.
Where does it end? When nobody cares enough to complain anymore, or when they can prove beyond a doubt that a majority of their customers are satisfied enough, or simply when Megalodon gets an ending that is palatable?
What will you do if you're on the wrong side of one of these controversies? Is the customer always right if you're not the customer who feels hard done by?
Firstly even before the ending controversy I was half expecting to be disappointed by the ending. I wanted a Shepard lives happy ending. I would not have found a decent ending where Shepard dies to be worth the shitstorm that errupted over what we got, but I would not have found it particularly palatable. But the ending we got was such a sucker punch it was worth complaining over in my opinion, and I was far from alone in this.
It ends when the company in question decides it ends, when they think the complaints are too minor,the amount of complainers too small to be worth the resources to fix. If Bioware had decided that trying to salvage potential income from pissed off ME fans wasn't worth the effort, that would have been the end (I would not have been happy about it, but it would have been the end), but it wasn't. Bioware thought the outcry was sufficient to be worth addressing, just as Bethesda did before them with Broken Steel, so they have attempted to address it, how well they have done, I don't know.
