-4

I think we've all seen these sorts of questions before. You know the ones, you have new users coming in to the site asking away...

...and they're asking us to help get their account back on Clash of Clans or whatever.

Now these sorts of questions are a nuisance for many reasons:

  • They are often consistently asked by new users and they are often asked a lot on the site, meaning the all end up being duplicates of duplicates of duplicates in a sense.
  • We can't help them anyways due to the fact that we are not the support team for any game.
  • A lot of these questions are asked before the user decided to contact support, and it keeps happening over and over.
  • In the cases in which they have contacted support, they come to us instead when it's fairly clear we are in a lower position than, you know, the company behind the game.

And so on and so forth. It's tiresome to say the least.

Thus, my suggestion would be for these to be filed under off-topic. We can't help them whatsoever and they often aren't exactly even to do with the game, just their accounts.

So should this be the way forward?

2
  • 6
    If we're already closing these questions as duplicates, why would it help to also be able to close them as off topic? – murgatroid99 Sep 23 '15 at 16:42
  • 1
    And here's another one. gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/324043/… I really wonder why the hell does people land on our website when they want to recover their account, but seemingly not falling on a question telling them what they can do? – Fredy31 Dec 31 '17 at 20:10
9

We really don't need to make these off topic. What we should/could do is create a canonical "this is how you get your account back" sort of question to point these to (whether we'd need one per game or one for all is another issue).

These are very much about gaming. Without the account, the game is effectively useless. Sometimes there are ways to get things back, sometimes we just get to tell them to go to the game's support people, because we can't deal with it. And that is super okay. Giving people the internet signposts that get them to where they need to be is a good thing, I think.

People tend to panic when they can't play their favourite game. So they just think someone anywhere on the internet might know what they need to do to make it go again. They might not know they have to go to the support people for the game (a lot of people think they have to go to things like Google support and Facebook support etc, which might not be the case, and so on).

Yes, we get a lot of these. But that's why we have the duplicate question option. If we know we have the answer (even if it is "sorry, you have to go through support for the game, there is no other way"), then we can mark it as a dupe, the person gets the info they need, and we can all move on with our day. :)

4
  • Understandable. It seems the way I've put it is fairly negative among people as well. Should a self-answer question be made then to act as the signpost? – nine Sep 23 '15 at 16:51
  • 3
    We already have what looks like a canonical question for this topic, at least for Clash of Clans: gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/181997/…. – murgatroid99 Sep 23 '15 at 16:54
  • @murgatroid99 awesome, then there is definitely no need for the OT to happen, we can just funnel people there, and create other ones for other games as they crop up. :) – Ash Sep 23 '15 at 16:55
  • 1
    I find that the solution to these questions can usually be grouped together. Often, the user might be entering a username when it asks for an email, or entering old credentials, or trying to access a locked account. Perhaps the best way forward could be to create a general "incorrect username/password - what do I do" question, with a community wiki answer that provides information at the top level, before listing links to the core question relative to individual games. Games could be added as specific titles pop up, with the answer addressing all games, in general. – user106385 Sep 25 '15 at 4:19

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .