I know most of you already know what I'm talking about, but I'll admit, I hadn't read it and had assumed it was just another pissed off, barely literate teen spewing their angsty, bigoted trash all over the internet.

Okay, now I've read it, and I was wrong, it's actually worth reading if for nothing else the way Gaider handles it is the way I would hope to handle such a situation:

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/304/index/6661775&lf=8

Also, after reading it, I could probably be friends with Baltas, he's ignorant, but he's making a legitimate attempt to communicate (apparently he needs to learn to not repost crap over and over again) and you know what? He's polite, even if I think he's shortsighted. This is the kind of person I don't want to make an enemy of, because even if we don't see eye to eye he's probably not a bad person and you probably can come to some sort of working agreement with someone like that.

Whew, I guess that was a long way of saying, civil conversation happened on the internet and I was surprised (and had wrong preconceived notions).

Link doesn't work. Site won't accept my choice of language.

Weird, I don't even have Javascript enabled for that site, I just picked English and was in...

Guess I'll have to fire up IE if I want to try to read it.

Was I the only one, who got the CANADIAN flag with the english language choice ;)...

That's normal, Bioware is Canadian after all.

I found that post more interesting than I thought I would given the cesspit the Bioware forums usually are. Still, it's a fairly immature viewpoint, and David Gaider's reply was great, as usual.

For the record I do agree with the guy that the love interests in DA 2 sucked, but it was far from the only bad thing in the game unfortunately, and the gay romances didn't bother me at all.
Your PC can just tell them he's not interested right off the bat after all, so I don't see the problem.

I think the guy was put off by a male NPC that initiates the romance, regardless of the NPC's gender. I don't think this bothered very many people, but it isn't often done so it's no surprise that some would have found it jarring. Of course it's an immature viewpoint (I'd call it ignorant, myself, I'd bet he's never spent any time considering it). I thought it was notable that he actually tries to have a decent conversation about it. While many of the responses were acidic and nasty (on both sides) his original post was not (I had previously assumed it was).

I also loved that Gaider, the guy responsible for how DA2 handled all this, actually replies and sincerely questions his own decisions. This is way different than some communities where a moderator would have just banned the dude or something equally stupid. Wow! I think I have a bit of a fanboyism for Gaider now.

At any rate, I thought it was interesting and actually more notable than I had originally assumed it to be.

Straight people, in my view, shouldn't be complaining about having to put up with that. The rest of us have to put up with a lot more than that. I had to give my kudos to the writers and various people who made Wet Hot American Summer just because they had the guts to have to men making out on film. It's rare that there's any depiction of that at all, even if just as a parody.

But then again, it's got a significant amount of support from The State so that's really not that surprising.

As for allowing the option of turning that off, all it's going to do is legitimize the bigotry inherent in the system.

TBH from what I saw it wasn't the NPC coming on to the player that was annoying it was the conversation options leading to that. In fairness Fenris was handled well and there was no confusion however Anders was handled a little clumsily. You start off with a nice responce because you want him as a friend then the very next option has two hearts to initiate the romance and one broken heart to basically say "get the hell away from me".

The issue wasn't that Anders was Gay/Bi but that it was a situation where you had to romance him or you piss him off which is not what we wanted. Fenris, Merrill and Isabela are all handled well, just Anders has this problem in his conversation options.

I don't see a particular problem with that. The guys writing the various Fallout games put players in those sorts of binds all the time on purpose. I'm not sure why this case would be any different.

But then again, I haven't played the game, so I'd assume that there is some actual reason why that's unreasonable.

I think people were more surprised at how Anders character had changed between Awakening and DA2. In Awakening he was making jokes all the time, he was very much like Alistair from Origins. In DA2 he is all SRS BSNS. Also some people like to have friends in the party who aren't LI's. As I said becuse his conversation options were poorly scripted it seems to imply he's only interested in being friend if you are dating him. Which is a rather shallow attitude. The other characters in the game can get along fine without any romance and in fact if you romance neither Isabela or Fenris, it's implied the two start having a relationship by their conversations.

What fueled this whole thing was that writing is just as bad and as lazy as everything else in DA2

Anders basically jumps Hawke on their first conversation and Hawke either agrees to stroke his magic staff or walks away with a huge rivalry hit. Some folks saw this as forcing a gay romance on male players, which is ludicrous because the very same thing happens with a female char, so those people should've went "Boy, who ever wrote this character and the player dialogue choices either sucks bigtime at writing or wasn't paying much atention to it" but naturally some chose to be offended with the perceived 'forced gayness', which wasn't there.

Had the writer bother to include a neutral "not interested" option or if the hit was 5 instead of 15 or whatever it is and this whole sillyness never would have taken off the ground.

I'm not sure about it, but I think I remember being able to pick a neutral "not interested" option that didn't give me a rivalry hit. I'll agree it was badly written though, and rather jarring given that Anders was a well-written character in Awakenings, if a bit goofy.

He is right to some extend. Not so much about the gay/straight issue perhaps, but the fact that companies attempt to please more and more people to make more money, but end up diluting the game and messing it for everyone.

If you really want to appeal to a larger demographic then go the extra mile. A thing which Bioware clearly did not do. I'll quote Gaider here "The truth is that making a romance available for both genders is far less costly than creating an entirely new one. ". In truth this attitude defines DA2 pretty well. Make it fast, make it cheap, cut corners, bring in the $$$.

And you just can't do that. Can't, at the same time, go after a wider demographic while investing less. The result we all know by now.

It's not inappropriate at all it's just the sloppy way it was handled. It only affected Anders, none of the other LI's. All the romance was handled badly in truth because when you have decided who you want to go for and do initiate a romance you will cringe at some of the lines they make Hawke say. People complain Anders came on strong? Hawke would be arrested acting like that in our world. Trust me there was nothing subtle or realistic about the romances in DA2.