Let's address the Donphan in the room- should Pokemon Go tech support be off topic?

Question

For context and precendent:

Minecraft crash questions should be made off-topic: yes/no?

In fact, I might as well copy paste it and make a few changes.

I'm tired of seeing terrible "Pokemon GO won't work". I'm tired of closing them. I'm tired of posting comments asking for a shred of useful material. Tired of seeing the same issues repeatedly.

But nevermind being tired, there's diet energy drink for that!

What's really damning, in my eyes, is that we're terrible at answering these questions, as a community. The Q&A format doesn't really suit them: we close them and then either

1. go back and forth in the comments, trying to troubleshoot whether it's the servers, an actual bug, or a ban
2. we ignore the terrible question
3. We dupe it to a generic one which may not actually answer the question

Number 1 indicates that, maybe, these are actually off topic. (Number 2 and 3 just growing apathy and frustration.) We're quality for lots of things, but this doesn't appear to be one of them. Generally, if a question requires lots of back-and-forth to diagnose the problem, it's a forum question, not a Stack question.

Worse, is that growing apathy. Our mandate is to curate good questions that make experts want to be here to write good answers. Entertaining questions that are evidently increasing the apathy of Pokemon GO experts, might undermining that mandate.

Should Pokemon GO tech support be thrown out with the trash: yes or no?

And if "no"... we need a plan, stat, to make them less rubbish, or we really should be saying "yes."

Answer 1

No, for multiple reasons. First of all, it is no secret that I am not a fan of the modded minecraft decision, because I do not believe we should feel comfortable taking categories of questions about a particular game and deciding those questions are off topic. That has been and is my position.

That aside, these sorts of questions lack some of the key problems that modded minecraft crashes have. The main problem with modded crashes is users would throw a crash log at us from a hundred mod pack, and we would have to try to figure out which of the hundred was responsible and why. Pokémon Go lacks both the complex log, and the amount of variability.

Most of the questions we are getting courtesy of the latest patch can and should be duplicated, which they have been, although sloppily in some cases. Hopefully the next patch resolves these issues.