I am seriously considering never playing another non-kiddy game again because of this ending. Why invest in 100+ hours of story and decision making for it to have NO real effect on the outcome? At least in Mario Galaxy 2 I got a green star after all of the futile deaths.

I just hope Xenoblade Chronicles erases the bad taste from my mouth that this game's last 15 minutes left. I got home from work yesterday and was going to start my next playthrough, but I was so depressed that I just stared at the TV, watched the end of a bad 90's movie on one of the Premium channels, and got 15 minutes into one of the Twilight movies before I realized what I was watching. I ACTUALLY SAT THROUGH A PORTION OF A TWILIGHT MOVIE WITHOUT VOMITTING THE ENDING HAS ME SO DEPRESSED!

Bad move. This opens the doors for future titles to ship unfinished with endings being patched in via DLC.
Knowing EA, they'd probably do the same thing later on but make you pay for it.

They are not gonna change it and they should never change the ending. It's much better to have epilogues than change the entire 
ending of the game. The game is done. It ended the way you choose and the only thing left is
to find out what is the aftermath of your decision. It's the journey, not the destination.

This post makes totally sense. This was only such big deal because Mass Effect was a very story driven franchise. There are planty other examples of bad endings even worse then Mass Effect but nobody really cared. The best example I know of is God of War 3, I mean that end was terrible but I didn´t care because I haven´t played God for War for its story but for its Gameplay.

Bioware shows with this move that they really care about their fans, and really listen to them, like they allways did.

Not really.  It shows they are only going to address obvious  plot holes in the ending, really only a minor gripe from fans, but stick to the same ending in general, which was the major gripe from fans.  If they truly listened and cared, they would have adopted the indoctrination theory.  I guess they're upset they didn't come up with something that clever. 

On a personal note, when Mass Effect 3 was released I was planning on picking up 2 and 3 on the PS3 (maybe the first on PC).  When I heard about this whole debacle, I decided it wasn't worth my money and time to play these games, where choice was touted as a major feature, if my choices made no difference in the end.  Then I heard about the indoctrination theory and thought it was very clever and would be complete genious if that was what they had intended all along.  I decided I wouldn't write off a purchase just yet and wait to see what Bioware did.  Now that I know what they are doing, I have decided I won't purchase either game.

Really? Just because of the ending?

This is a big misstake, the ending is just 15 damn minutes the rest of the game is still awesome. And espacially the 2nd one i totally worth purchasing it you can buy it for lee then 15 pounds in UK and for 20 Europe in germany and I payed 2,99$ for the first one. You do wahtever you wan´t but right there no realy good new games, and Mass Effect 1 is much better then the new releases of march and april.

if they end it with shepard taking an arrow to the knee and giving up saving the galaxy, i will praise them as the king of trolls.

Honestly, I think Bioware did that fucked up ending on purpose just to stir up the whole internet. It's a viral marketing campaign packed in a complete game. And two or three months later they clear everything up, tada, Shepherd was indeed indoctrinated.

If they were indeed planning this all from the very beginning and the endings were just a viral marketing gag, I say mission accomplished.

and don't forget everyone will keep their copy so they can get to see the ending, which means less used copies floating around