Child's Play Halts Retake Mass Effect Donation Drive

[Burnhardt]

So PA is prematurely ending a charity drive... and they're doing so under the pretense that it's causing confusion (for whom, 3 or 4 people?), and because they don't like the cause. Disgusting.

Your post has made me confused.

Are you disgusted that Penny Arcade has put a stop to this because by doing this they're making it clear they aren't supporting the Retake movement, or because it was becoming more and more about drawing attention to getting a new ME3 ending rather than helping sick kids, the actual fucking point of the charity. As Tycho said in his post on the PA webiste "Child?s Play cannot be a tool to draw attention to a cause. Child?s Play must be the Cause."

While I support the Retake movement's intentions they should have never used this method, but to all those who contributed towards the $80k, knowing exactly what you were doing, all that could be said is well done.

 

[kouriichi]

HA HA! Called it. I knew right there at the beginning, the first time i read about it. I called it. I said "This is one of the worst ideas ever, and its going to be shot down."

People need to get over this. I didnt even think the ending was THAT BAD. I thought it was decent. But everyone these days feels so entitled they need to boycott and do fund raisers to have something change.

This really started to bother me after TB started to become more entitled. Ive been a fan of his for.... flying spaghetti monster knows how long?!? But recently hes been really whiny. "The FoV is slightly to small for me on PC, so no one should buy it" was his stance. Sure, i understand that some people get headaches from small FoV on PC, but that just means, GET IT FOR CONSOLE. Dont like the PC port? Get it for console. -_- Instead of costing them thousands of dollars paying workers to change 1 thing, so some entitled buttholes can be happy, just get it on console. If you have the ability to sink $2k into a PC, you can afford a console. PC wasnt $2000? Great, youve got $1000 more then the guy who put $2k into his PC. Go buy one.

All this whining as of late by the "gaming" community has done nothing but give me headaches.

But back on topic. Im glad it got shut down. Trying to bribe a corporation by saying "were doing it for children ", when really, your doing it because of selfish needs is one of the most amoral things ive ever heard of. Child's Play should refund the money of anyone who wants it returned.

 

[Estelindis]

I donated. I didn't think Penny Arcade or Child's Play was in any way associated with Retake Mass Effect 3. The idea was simply to turn our strong feelings about the ending of the game into something positive. I haven't seen anyone posting in the main thread on the Bioware forum saying that they want their money back or that they were confused about where the money was going. I'd really prefer if Tycho had given some actual numbers, e.g. "x% of the money has been returned, Y% of the money was not asked to be returned and has been donated." As it stands, he simply seems to be implying that the returns were quite high, but I haven't seen anything from the actual movement that would make me think that was the case.

 

[Toilet]

People are fucking idiots and need to read into what they are putting their money in.

Fuck everyone.

 

[dreadedcandiru99]

"We've also been contacted by PayPal due to a high number of people asking for their donations back."

What?

I want the ending fixed as much as anyone else, but this kind of shit is not helping our case. To whoever did this: thanks for making us all look like the entitled asshats IGN keeps claiming we are.

 

[Caffiene]

I still think that demanding a new and "better" conclusion to Mass Effect 3 [http://www.amazon.com/Mass-Effect-3-Xbox-360/dp/B004FYEZMQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332516451&sr=8-1] is silly but I'm sure not going to take issue with the results

In a news article about confusion over the donation drive, Im kind of disappointed that this line was included...

It seems misleading to continue to call it a demand when the petition at the core of the donation drive explicitly states as one of its points:

We believe:

* That it is the right of the writers and developers of the Mass Effect series to end that series however they see fit

I respectfully request that the ending of this article be altered

 

[Guardian of Nekops]

This is a very heated topic, and Child's Play believes its cause will be better served by distancing themselves from the rage that surrounds this debate. The complaints of people who... apparently didn't understand what they were doing before they gave their money must have been a huge headache for them, and there's a potential for bad publicity for them here which is not what anyone wanted.

I just hope that this was the right move, executed at the right time, and that none of this will hurt Child's Play in any way. Good people over there, who have been forced into a tough situation.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

Ha! Called it! Though, kind of surprised it took this long. Knew it would put Child's Play in a tight spot, since it almost causes an ethical problem of making them biased towards trying to push Bioware to change the ending in response to the donations.

 

[darkbshadow]

I really do hope that they don't Redo the ending for Mass Effect. What I am hoping is for them to add onto the ending. Nothing Major just just something to explain what actually happened at the end. Cause I'm a supporter of the Indoctrination theory. It would explain a lot of the issues I had with the ending.

If they really had that in mind when doing that ending I'd like to have conformation on it and then show what really happened to Shepard. Even if it's just showing that the reapers won and the cycle continues on.

 

[Kashrlyyk]

...
The people who donated that want their money back despite that it's going towards the children,...

I actually think that this is pretty reasonable and it explains why getting a refund is actually justifiable:

We'll just have to disagree on this one. I sit on two non-profit boards. If we were to ask a group to NOT raise funds for us, we would at the same time return anything they had already brought in.

Because the only time we would make such a request would be if the group raising the funds were not in line with our morals/values.

Otherwise, we'd be thankful for the money.

You can accept funds without it being interpreted as support for a cause. The only cause non-profits support is the one in their mission statement.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/9845819/229#10481951

...As Tycho said in his post on the PA webiste "Child?s Play cannot be a tool to draw attention to a cause. Child?s Play must be the Cause."
....

That is complete bullshit what Tycho says there. If that was true, why did they allow Bioware to use Child's Play to draw attention to a fucking videogame??? Bioware used Child's Play to advertise a game. That is much, much worse than whatever he thinks Retake Mass Effect did. He is lying to you.

 

[lacktheknack]

[Child's Play] has been asked what the goal is, and how much they need to raise in order to get the ending produced. We've also been contacted by PayPal due to a high number of people asking for their donations back. This is in addition to readers who simply couldn't understand how this was connected to Child's Play's mission. We were dealing with a lot of very confused people, more every day, and that told us we had a problem.

That alone is fucking disgusting. I cannot believe I'm a part of a community full of whiny, entitled, and egotistical assholes. For years, we've been struggling with the stigma that gamers, as a whole, are hopeless losers who are prone to violence and childish behavior, and here we are proving them right.

Penny Arcade's Child's Play (and by extension, Desert Bus) has been one of the greatest and most wholesome thing to come out of the gaming community, and has really helped quell the image that we're mindless slaves to "murder simulators", and just because a single AAA game had a sub-par ending, the gaming community managed to turn this into a fucking circus. Donate because you want to help Child's Play, not because your unwarranted self-importance demands that you somehow deserve a better ending simply because you may or may not have actually purchased the product.

I'm sick of this attitude. It needs to fucking stop. No other medium of entertainment stoops so low as to make petitions and campaigns over such trivial bullshit.

You don't see people sending death threats to Michael Bay's personal phones in response to Transformers.

You don't see people making massive online petitions to boycott Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing... or Brian Herbert's Sisterhood of Dune.

You don't see people withdrawing their donations from a food drive because they wanted a different ending to The Sopranos.

We're supposed to show the world that we're much more mature than this, and instead we're turning into another self-indulgent internet mob.

[HEADING=1]Go fuck yourselves[/HEADING]

Thank you for more thoroughly expressing why my back has snapped than I probably could.

I'd elaborate, but I don't like using six hundred profanities per sentence.

 

[samaugsch]

People are fucking idiots and need to read into what they are putting their money in.

Fuck everyone.

I wouldn't even have had to in this case. All I would have to do is look at the name and think, "Hmm, something tells me that this doesn't have anything to do with rated M video games." >_>

 

[RvLeshrac]

...
The people who donated that want their money back despite that it's going towards the children,...

I actually think that this is pretty reasonable and it explains why getting a refund is actually justifiable:

We'll just have to disagree on this one. I sit on two non-profit boards. If we were to ask a group to NOT raise funds for us, we would at the same time return anything they had already brought in.

Because the only time we would make such a request would be if the group raising the funds were not in line with our morals/values.

Otherwise, we'd be thankful for the money.

You can accept funds without it being interpreted as support for a cause. The only cause non-profits support is the one in their mission statement.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/9845819/229#10481951

...As Tycho said in his post on the PA webiste "Child?s Play cannot be a tool to draw attention to a cause. Child?s Play must be the Cause."
....

That is complete bullshit what Tycho says there. If that was true, why did they allow Bioware to use Child's Play to draw attention to a fucking videogame??? Bioware used Child's Play to advertise a game. That is much, much worse than whatever he thinks Retake Mass Effect did. He is lying to you.

Are you dense? They didn't "allow Bioware to use Child's Play to draw attention to a fucking videogame," they used the Bioware advertising to draw attention to Child's Play. Do you honestly fucking think that anyone who knows what Child's Play is wouldn't already know what *EVERY BIOWARE GAME FOR THE NEXT DECADE* is going to be?

 

[satsugaikaze]

^This post is my Hero for the day.

OT:

Despite the belief among some supporters that the end of the donation drive was somehow engineered by game journalists in support of EA

So since when exactly did all of gaming journalism become the bad guys? Is this a new thing or have I just been not paying attention?

You seem to be a reasonable guy who hangs around the Escapist forums a fair bit. It seems odd that you haven't at least scoped the "paid off by EA" tirade against Susan when she gave Mass Effect 3 four-and-a-half stars out of five in her review.

The internet got all cynical this decade.

 

[The Mirror Man]

The fear of a "Slippery slope" is well justified on Child Plays part. The ability to give a galvanizing shield to your cause simply by attaching it to a charity is terrifying. I can see many in the thread repeatedly mentioning how good it is that they managed to raise $80K. Even when we know the Retake Mass Effect campaign had nothing to do with the charity, it is impossible to turn down that much money for children. This allows the fans behind it to feel completely justified in their actions regardless of any other consequences.

I am glad that Child's Play thought to protect themselves by putting a stop to it.

 

[The Human Torch]

snip

Also, don't compare videogames to movies/books. Apples and oranges and such. Stop being so freaking rude.

 

[Tomo Stryker]

"We've also been contacted by PayPal due to a high number of people asking for their donations back."

What?

I want the ending fixed as much as anyone else, but this kind of shit is not helping our case. To whoever did this: thanks for making us all look like the entitled asshats IGN keeps claiming we are.

Agreed, I gave my fifty dollars in the complete understanding that I was "donating" to Child's Play. I knew what I donating to, I knew why I did it, and I knew that my intentions weren't malicious. I simply donated because it was a way to send a message and to give to an excellent cause. But to hear that it was shut down simply because some asshats didn't read the goddamn memo that was so clearly in front of them?

Yeah, I smell political bias from Penny Arcade and it wreaks. Jesus, all this over a poorly written ending. *Raises glass* This ones for you Bioware, without you who else would we have to blame?