I know I can't get my facial features since I'm using a character imported from Mass Effect and that isn't a big deal to me but for some reason Mass Effect 3 isn't recognizing that I have a Mass Effect 2 character ready for import!

I have a save game that finished the game, my Shepard survived, I have the Mass Effect 2 importer file, and none of those have ever touched my cloud save.  I tried my new console, I tried using my USB drive that I use to use to switch between my old consoles, and I tried my older console that I believe I played it on orginally and Mass Effect 3 doesn't seem to know that I have a Mass Effect 2 character?

Anyone heard of anything like this?  If I can't get my Mass Effect 2 character that will probably be a deal breaker for me...

I had to load my old save in mass effect 2, and save it in mass effect 2 (I reformatted my computer since 2 years ago). So my mass effect 3 would recognize it as an active career.

This is the PC version though. It's importer is a lot more crappy than ME2 it seeme

That's because they took the option out of the mass effect config executable and inserted it into the game itself, which made it all kinds of crappy. Not only that, they also switched the code values around, so a lot of people got different shepard faces than they used in ME2 because of that. Luckily I suffered none of those issues, though I know i'm on a minority.

This may help you out, though it requires some tinkering with your save file from ME2: http://masseffecttools.99k.org/v2/index.php

Is that for the pc or 360 version? I have the 360 version.

this is the most frustrating thing in the world. i got a new ps3 like 6 months ago copied my mass effect 2 completed perfect save over and now just got mass effect 3 and nothing shows in the character import. cannot find any ideas on the net about ps3. any can anyone help

Do you still have mass effect 2?

This isn't for the PS3, but I had to reformat my computer. As I said above it initially wouldn't recognize my save file as an active career. I loaded the save file in ME2, and saved it again. 

Then ME3 recognized it as an active career.

This is just troubleshooting as this was with the PS3 version, however, if you have this available it could work.

no I dont have me2 anymore man this sucks. I dont think there is anything i can do. I think i read that if you began a new game + then it wont show. I just hit continue they was back at freedoms progress and it autosaved. 

I have two 360's. I keep my game saves on a flash drive and just use that on the system I'm playing at the time. I tried to import my Shepherd on my old 360 and it didn't work. I went to my 360s and it worked just fine (had to recreate the appearance, though). It even remembered the stuff I did from Shadow Broker and The Arrival.

The difference? My 360s had a file called "Mass Effect 2 Character Importer". Look for that file on one of your 360 HDD's and you should be fine.

I have that file and tried it on the USB drive on both consoles and tried using that file on the hard drive of both consoles, nothing worked.  :-/

The only thing I can think of is I got a new hard drive from the time I finished ME2 and started ME3 and maybe it doesn't like that?  I know when I was playing ME2 I didn't have two 360's so I wasn't saving on my USB drive.

The only thing left I have to try is to load a save from ME2 and just beat the game again, hopefully that will work.