Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo :P

Honestly i just haven't played the game and won't be picking it up till much later. Just peeved about talks of its ending on every website. :S

I don't understand how subtlety fits in with the Indoctrination Theory. There have been subtle elements to Mass Effect's story as a whole and even the developers themselves say the 'ending' was made for the purpose of discussion. This essentially gives them a license to be 'subtle' with whatever symbolism/themes they want.

The broad topic is about the end in general, yes. My discussion with Vertigo-X was about a far more narrow aspect of the ending. You're now interjecting your only-somewhat-related ideas about the broad topic into the narrower discussion. That is the root of the confusion here. I am not now, nor have I ever, disputed the reason why fans are disappointed with the ending. Primarily because I am also in the camp.

In order for the theory to work, the player must peice together a disparate series of (often small) events, and tie them together with (often smaller) bits of the series' lore. Little of the evidence that points to the indocrtination theory is ever front and center in this game's plot, and some of the information required in the theory requires the player to have read the Codex. I think we can agree here, correct? As persuasive as it may be, there is never a single scene or speech the player can point to in support, right?

By contrast, the rest of the series' plot has been absolutely straightforward. Information important to the plot has been explicitly stated to the player in a manner which can not be skipped. And when the series wants to you to think about subjects like racial tolerance, or the importance of teamwork, or your low odds of survival, or whatever the series has not been shy about beating you over the head with the message. Can we agree to this statement? If we do, then I think it follows that the series is probably not going to turn into Mulholland Drive or Vanilla Sky in the final five minutes. When the head writer said he wanted "Lots of speculation from everyone," I'm extremely confident he meant this to come from the fact that he didn't bother to answer many of the series' big questions* or even the questions created by introducing a major plot character with only sixty seconds left in the series (or from leaving in snippets of an ending video that probably relied on content that was ultimately cut).

*Think of the part where he said he ditched the Q&A with Casper, because he didn't want to hand out information the player didn't "need to know."

It's all good! I don't buy the indoctrination theory myself, mostly because of the reasons I wrote earlier in this thread, but I can't deny it is pretty consistent with a lot of the weirder stuff that happens in the game, especially in the beginning and end. The idea that he's just knocked out like you're saying is plausible too, although all of these endings are as unsatisfying as the one we got. I don't hold any hope of getting a different ending myself, but I've got my fingers crossed for those who do want it. I certainly wouldn't mind...

Well I just beat the game and personalty I am not mad about the ending.
I picked the Synthesis as it was the only logical choice for me ( I don't get why so many players call one of the other ending the good ending, if you helped the Geth earlier, there is only one logical choice for Shephard to make...).

Finally finished the game, only one ending though and I feel content. The series still is the best in gaming I personally have experienced.

I have to disagree with a lot of things here.

1) Blowing up the Mass Relays does not mean blowing the Solar system. When Shepard blew one relay, his goal was to do exactly that. Here we have the makers of the Mass Relays that are using them to transmit a specific kind of information and at the same time it destroys those Mass Relays. As the people that built those thing you would think they know how to do this without blowing up a stellar system ( like redirecting most of the energy from the destruction to the next relay, which seems to be what is happening)............

Blowing up the relays actually makes kind of sense. Look at it from the reaper creator point of view, we give you Citadel, the relays, the reapers. You think you have a better solution, ok, but you're on your own from now, the future is yours to build. We will not intervene anymore...

2) I don't buy the indoctrination theory. The reapers creators are the one that built the Crucible blue prints ( you get hinted as much), meaning they are the one that actually provided a way for another race to get in touch with them and provide their own solution to the Synthetics-Organics conflict. If they didn't want that race to act of their free will, they didn't need to go in such a convoluted way..... The reapers could perfectly have won the war. They are the ones that let a door opened for a race or an alliance strong enough  to actually change the future, but you have to earn it... Seeing the difference in technology that was always going to be the case, the only way the Alliance can beat the Reapers is if the Reapers let them or somehow the Alliance convinces the Reapers creators, which is what happened...

3) Sure the ending is not perfect, but we're talking of a conflict on such a scale that no ending is going to satisfy fully everyone.  All along Shephard had to make choices and not all of those were easy and white or black...

My only beef with the ending is that I would have liked to see different cut scenes at the end for the different endings...

^^Dude for the love of all that is holy can you PLEASE stop going on about what the ME3 devs said about the game. Everyone knows that devs just spew a bunch of PR and taking their word for anything that relates to their game is like trusting a complete stranger to hold on to all of your money.

Also I would like to say it's just as much speculation that the Sol Mass Relay could have a big enough explosion to destroy Earth. Mass Relays don't automatically destroy solar systems, they destroy whatever is in their blast radius (which to be fair is pretty freaking big). Basically if there's a Mass Relay waaaay at the end of the solar system (like it is in the Sol system) it probably won't be hitting Earth...especially if Earth is on the opposite side of the sun from the Mass Relay. Like it or not there is a better chance that Earth survived than got destroyed from the explosion.

You've got to pay a little more attention to both the Codex and the dialogues on Arrival. They say that a relay exploding releases the energy equivalent of a Supernova and Supernovas don't exactly destroy a whole system, especially since most of them collapse after a set energy has been released. See the formation of black holes, neutron stars (commonly known as Pulsars) and other Supernova related phenomenae in RL. And since the existance of planets surrounding neutron stars have been confirmed ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17732735,  http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007MNRAS.381L...1L), there's the possibility that not all planets would have been destroyed with a Relay explosion.

Then what stops other developers from thinking "Oh damn, check it out! If we give people incomplete endings we can get extra money later on with the "REAL" ending being DLC."

Welcome to the era of paying $60 for a game and then another $10 for the ending and gamers would have nobody to blame but themselves.

Don't like their product? Then just say "fuck it" and move on.

Best way to voice your opinion on this is to vote with your wallet, and I mean by NOT spending what's in it.