Consequences of the Live Stream: No new kit, equipment and so much more nothing.

Well to be honest, the singleplayer portion of the game was the thing most affected by the "decision". Apparently I'm not the only one enjoying that, and even I am pretty pissed about it...
When it comes to multiplayer, I think much of us didn't have high expectations to begin with, and it was more of a confirmation of things most of us knew already.

I ended up pretty "meh" on both, so I suppose my indifference on both counts somewhat disqualifies me.

SP was better than I expected. I still felt it was mediocre overall, but my expectations there were pretty low. MP was actually weaker than I expected it to be. I had some fun with it, and I figure I got my money's worth, but I'm not sure much short of a year's worth of dedicated support with content updates would have turned it into something approaching ME 3 MP.

I think mostly my expectations have reflected what I've seen from BioWare over the last 6 or 7 years. Everyone's opinions of individual games differ, but for me, Everything including and after DA 2 has seen a decline in fundamental writing quality and worldbuilding. Some of it seems to be a loss of focus, but a lot of it seems to bear the earmarks of diluted writing.

The technology and gameplay in ME 3 saw a big improvement (except for planetary exploration, which blew FUCK YOU ALL THE MAKO WAS THE BEST!) so that may have set expectations for people at large somewhat out of whack.

Before DA 2, BioWare's writing was highly worthy of praise, but their game design and mechanics could fairly be criticized. DA:O may be awesome, but that gameplay left something to be desired even for 2009 standards, and the graphics were out of date by then, too.

With each iteration, the technology improves, but the writing seems to be diluted heavily to appeal to a broader... *ahem* apologies... "AAA" audience. They've been kind of morphing into a bit of an inverted image of what their original reputation was, and it's not surprising to me that the audience is responding in a broadly confused way.

To be honest, when I learned that writing at BioWare was actually broken down by character, as in each writer gets assigned one or more characters that they write for, it explained a lot about the problems with ever-expanding casts and ever-larger games in scope. I don't believe writing a game that way works well when your teams are spread out the way they are these days.

Anyway, I totally lost track of where I was going with that. I blame a lack of alcohol. Mostly I think I just meant that BioWare doesn't really surprise me with what they do in the last couple of years, because it seems to reflect the direction they've been going for about seven years.

You could not be further off from why this pile of trash failed.  I'll sum it up for you with one simple point:

The studio and development team lacked a very critical logical skill that allowed dumb shit like some poor writing and no mp balance:  The ability to think about how others would react to what they had created - a level of empathy, but in a cognitive sense.  This skill wasn't even on their radar as shown by the canceled beta - because they felt they didn't need input.  More accurately they probably didn't know the meaning of the word.

You only have to be of slightly higher than normal intelligence to be able to exercise this skill.  And you could see from day one the factors that suffered because what the development team flat out missed due to a mix of their lower than needed competency level and the administrative debacle before and after said dev work.  Examples:

No balance

Locked skill points

UR drop rates (more specifically for those dropping cash) and the horrendously inflated pool, including character kits.

CRASHES

New content release schedule

The joke of "Apex" missions and strike teams

And much more

The fact is they pushed an unfinished, half-assed product that was unable to support the hype behind it, both from fans and what the development studio had put out there.  The market responded appropriately.  And ultimately 1.09 came out proving for the world that their level of competency and intelligence remained about the same.

P.S.  Crashing to desktop is the most far removed the image of the lazy basement dwelling image you've tried to blame.  If anything, the people who have the least amount of time available to play would be the loudest for that defect.  Nothing is worse than back to back crashes on wave 6 or 7 when you've only got less than an hour a day to play.

That was most likely the case. It still does not excuse lack of beta for major patches which could have been easily done similar to DAI.