According to Billy, people find it hard to find the DLC and download it, fragmenting the playerbase

That's been the explanation since day 1 of MEAMP. I think there is a certain amount of truth to it. Patches are auto-downloaded (on most systems) whereas DLCs must be manually downloaded.

The two aren't necessarily related.

I doubt the decision to release content by patch was directly responsible for the lesser amount of said content. I believe the two decisions were likely independent of each other.

In and of itself, not splitting the player base is a good idea. Without knowing what, if any, relationship it has with MEA's other problems, I'm not going to take issue with it.

The part about finding the DLC is true. I remember before MEA dropped, there would be near-daily threads on reddit from people wondering if people still played, because they couldn't find anyone, and it nearly always turned out they were missing DLC. Making all the necessary DLC/patches/content/whatever mandatory for playing was a step in the right direction, in my opinion.

I am pretty certain DLC had the opposite effect of 'splitting the player base' with 3. Why would they opt to go with patches when it was such a success before? They seem to treat DLC as if it is a broken system. What possible reason would they have to do that?

Assuming that everyone has access to the same content would also simplify the matchmaking code.  Trying to match people with different sets of available content would be a PITA.

Also - it may have something to do with console certification and the associated fees.  Patches may be cheaper to release than DLCs.

It's an issue now, far after support, but it was also an issue at the realease of the first and all subsequent ME3MP DLC, so to me that's not really a relevant counter-argument.



Yeah, that's exactly how it works with ME3MP.

If they were so worried about fragmentation, why the "region lock"?

Except it is not legit at all if you see my previous post.  If their business reasons suck they deserved to be called out for it.  And believe me i am not one of the serial bioware bashers.  (Me3mp was a huge surprising success!  Lets change some of the logical things the things that made it work!)

I'm still not sure what the point of this thread is. This is old news, the ship has sailed. Find something new to complain about.

How do you feel about the neo-weapon grind? I haven't heard anyone's opinions on that, it's like people are ambivalent and nobody on the Internet wants to share their thoughts with me.

they went down the patch route because that's how EA roles.... higher up front cost for the game with free content updates during the first year, where it sucks ass is because it leads to lower overall income from the franchise because your not getting that dlc income, this isn't such a problem for MEAMP because mass effect mp updates were provided for free anyway however doing it as patches instead of hoping people notice theres a new product offering in the addon listings especially if there not following on social media or forums to be notified of such an update is a good move (especially when you consider they closed their forums and the twatter following is way smaller than the number of games sold) this leads to another problem, vis a vis dlc's for the sp game, there haven't been any which has lead folks to assume there's nothing new and bioware doesn't care about its game.... their ability to communicate is missing several things and the lack of content packs makes lots of sad puppies ....

Avoiding patch 1.09 would also have avoided Platinum, and quite a few other changes they made.  I'd be surprised if players on different patches could participate in the same games/lobbies, due to compatibility issues.