Timeline for Minecraft crash questions should be made off-topic: yes/no?
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| Jun 15, 2020 at 8:58 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Apr 11, 2015 at 3:09 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @Frank Yes, we're bad at troubleshooting. (Or more to the point, SE's structure makes everyone bad at it here.) Without doing a survey of questions I can't be sure, but my sense is that the slower-changing games have fewer showstoppers that show up here as early-life questions, and when they do show up here early in their life, they probably sit unanswered for a while before being answered (which is OK at SE). Being few, they don't really cause problems. But, I'm not paying attention to crash stuff in many other games, so I may be wrong that there isn't a problem elsewhere than Minecraft. | |
| Apr 11, 2015 at 1:51 | comment | added | Frank | @SevenSidedDie That's a good point. I wonder, though, how timely the answers are to those questions. I would suspect that novel issues, even if they become common later, would be issues that we don't handle well at the time of asking. We're good at locating resources to help, but actual troubleshooting seems to be a weak point of our. Would you agree? | |
| Apr 11, 2015 at 0:36 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @Frank Oh, just that we have a lot of tech support questions that don't evince any problems, and I suspect it's related to how little the game changes. Knowledge can accumulate in the community about all kinds of things, including tech support, and we handle them fine. Minecraft tech support sucks, I think, because its problems develop faster than the necessary knowledge accumulates among casual tech-support people (i.e., our scope: people just trying to play games). This answer says all tech support is a problem, but I don't see that as being true, for these reasons. | |
| Apr 11, 2015 at 0:19 | comment | added | Frank | @SevenSidedDie I would agree to stable games having common issues, yes, but I seem to be missing the main thrust of your argument. Care to elucidate? | |
| Apr 11, 2015 at 0:09 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @Frank Yes, it being a problem with needing novel diagnosis is something I would agree to. Stable games tend to correspond to technical issues being as well known as in-game play issues, but yeah, it's an accidental correspondence. I think we can rely on that correspondence being almost always the case, though, right? | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 23:53 | comment | added | Frank | @SevenSidedDie I can see where he's coming from. We're good at locating resources to common issues, and supplying the answers. Actually diagnosing an issue curently in play, that doesn't have something from the developer or a fix elsewhere online, is something we don't really handle well. We actually kinda suck at it; Minecraft just brings it to the fore due to the massive variety of errors they have. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 17:12 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @murgatroid99 With games that are updated less frequently than Minecraft, there are still lots of questions about "I can't play" that are reasonably common and not moving targets, such that it's a known issue with known fixes. Compare the mess that is (even vanilla) Minecraft crashes with this question about a broken Oblivion launch menu. The ongoing evolution of Minecraft makes its issues ongoing, while a game that hasn't been patched for 8 years is stable. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 15:05 | history | edited | murgatroid99 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 10, 2015 at 14:20 | comment | added | Comic Sans Seraphim | +1, with the same caveat @SevenSidedDie mentioned- we need to be clear on what counts as unsuitable tech support. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 5:55 | comment | added | murgatroid99 | I guess I think of "My game isn't working; help" as tech support, but I would consider "how do I change the resolution?" to be more like providing auxiliary information for game play. The difference is that on one side, we're helping them play the game, and on the other, we're trying to fix the fact that they can't play the game. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 5:51 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | We do have some good tech support, especially around issues not relate to crashes. An example off the top of my head are Qs like "how do I change the resolution?" for an old game that uses a tiny square of the screen—that, when answered well, can help a lot of people because it's a widespread need. So, we should perhaps distinguish the kind of tech support that is a problem, rather than a blanket ban covering good types as well as bad. Crashes only, perhaps? | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 1:58 | comment | added | Sterno | For once I agree with @Frank. We're pretty terrible at tech support. About the only time we're any good at it is when it's an incredibly common issue that a google search already turns the answer up to anyway. We're not making the internet any better with these. | |
| Apr 9, 2015 at 23:22 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | "They've been a pain for a long time and they're only tangential to our actual area of expertise." This is really the most important issue in any SE topicality debate. I suspect this stance will be unpopular, but it's got solid sense going for it. | |
| Apr 9, 2015 at 22:27 | comment | added | Frank | You will never hear an argument from me when it comes to banning tech support wholesale. 100% support, all the way. | |
| Apr 9, 2015 at 21:36 | history | answered | murgatroid99 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |