That was my concern. Thanks!

So I have a question. I see the same people who came all over Skyrim praising Witcher 2 to the high heavens and saying Mass Effect 3 was garbage.

I think that's mostly just a fact of life for everyone. If you want to be happy it helps to be active and go out seeking it rather than waiting for it to fall into your lap. Men are socialized into expecting to ask a girl out. Women don't get the same "Don't be a wuss! Sack up and talk to her!" thing.

I've been on a fair amount of first dates too, but since nothing ever really comes of it I don't really see much point in being actively engaged with it unless I happen to have some free time one week (rare) AND I see someone worth talking to (uncommon) AND (ultra-rare) she deigns to respond to me.

It's funny, I feel like pretty much every girl I've met has liked OKCupid once they stop paying attention to the creepy unsolicited messages while just about every guy I've met who has been on it for more than a week or two finds it to be a waste of time.

I think I'd like to add a #11 item to this list. A complete refusal to allow established characters to change or grow. You notice it whenever something bad happens to a character someone likes or something upends the way things work the fandom instantly cries about how everything is ruined forever.

I'm not sure if you've ever read an unedited manuscript before but they're almost universally atrocious. It's not even just a matter of grammatical errors and spelling. That's the easy part. The hard part is tightening up the narrative, improving the pacing, and being absolutely merciless about cutting things out that…

"Books good! TV bad! We are individuals! We must think for ourselves!"

I haven't played DA2 yet, but how were the characters in DA:O not deep? I found them to be better written and more believable than Mass Effect where the first one tended to fall a bit too much into the "Planet of the Hats" trope with each of the alien races. (Mass Effect 3 did a much better job though.)

What 'taste of alcohol" are you covering up? Alcohol doesn't have a taste, it's completely neutral. The unpleasant tastes are impurities within the alcohol that come about when you do a poor job distilling or don't filter adequately. And you only really get it from shitty liquors. Really high proof liquors mix easily…

Ashley was also pretty boring. She was an okay character. I liked her all right, but Vega was just better written and more fun to listen to.

What do you mean there is no logic to it? Why would it want to stay awake for over 50,000 years? All of them go dormant in between harvests. It's established that they need to be dormant if they're going to lie around for a long period of time already. There's nothing new about that.

That's not what Chekov's gun is. Chekov's Gun is a literary technique in which you introduce the solution to a problem (generally unexpectedly) early in the work. That doesn't mean everything you introduce has to be relevant later on. Especially in episodic fiction. in ME3, the Crucible was a Chekov's Gun. You could…

"As for Vega, I just can't like him. I've tried, but every time I see him, I think of all the well developed, complex, interesting characters from ME2 that he's 'replaced'. So, instead of having any of those highly specialized, interesting, surgical tools, I have a hammer who likes to smash things. Perhaps if I didn't…

Oh, so you're asking for a reward? Where is it written that stories have to reward your investment? Read anything by Hemmingway or Salinger. They all end with a kick to your gut and a general theme of "caring = misery." That's the point. That's the moral of the story whether you like it or not. You're not entitled to…

Did you just mash the X button through all the dialogue or something?

Like I said before, these 'plot holes' are merely ambiguities and unanswered questions. That's not what a plothole is.

So now you're complaining that ME3 doesn't unfold exactly like Star Wars? Where is it written that you MUST get to kill the baddies you don't like for a conclusion? Sure it might be more satisfying, but if it turns out the dragon you've been hunting is just a windmill it's not important to your mission to slay it.

So basically you're mad that the ending didn't line up with the fanfiction you wrote in your head?

I'd love to see what your examples of "a game worth playing" are. I'm getting a lot of platitudes about how bad things are and not a lot of actual evidence to justify any of it from you.