I'm going to need some info on how duplicates work

Question

So my question over here: Is D.Va's ultimate affected by Mercy's damage boost? was marked as a duplicate if this one: What ultimates can be damage boosted by Mercy?

The second question does have answers that essentially can count towards the first one. However, I'm going to need some clearing up on how it's a duplicate for one specific reason:

Specific vs. General question and answers - The first question is about a specific character in the game and opens up to more in-depth answers concerning that character (like the accepted answer). The two questions are different in what would be an acceptable answer. The first one covers the mechanics behind damage boosting that character:

...does it get buffed by Mercy's damage boost if she's using it on you before you activate your self-destruct or does the buff stay on D.Va herself after you launch the mech?

The second one is more of a general "Which characters can be boosted?" and not how it works exactly, hence the answers will cover different elements of the game. The answers to the second question only answer the title of the first one.

I'm not claiming that my question isn't a duplicate of the second one. I just want to know how exactly is that determined in this case, where the two are asking about different things that overlap only partially and require a different type of answer. Of course, having tons of questions that ask "Can [insert character here] be damage boosted?" would be insanely dumb but if they're asking how and when to use a boost on a character and how that boost works when used on someone, it's a different deal. Unless the answers to the second question are constantly edited to include all the info concerning the mechanics behind it, I don't think that they can be qualified as answers to a more specific question.

Answer 1

We had some discussion about this in chat: https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/37601802#37601802

The problem is that we were getting a large amount of questions that effectively boiled down to the same thing: "does Mercy's damage boost affect X?". While having these individual questions may allow us to go more in-depth, there really is no need for that considering the answer to all of these is essentially a boolean yes/no.

There could be a case made for explaining the individual mechanics of how the boost should be used to buff a certain mechanic, but A) that's what secondary answers are for and B) This site is meant as a general reference site, not an in-depth analysis tool for every single game out there. There are specialized community sites that use the Wiki format to describe these effects in more detail than we ever could.

Answer 2

TL:DR; We tried to consolidate a bunch of similar questions, but consolidating questions is difficult and confusing.

As Nzall mentioned, there are a huge amount of questions about this topic. In fact, here's 7 of them I found just now.

• Is D.Va's ultimate affected by Mercy's damage boost?
• Does Mercy's Damage Boost apply to Ana's healing?
• How does Mercy's damage buff interact with Genji's Deflect ability?
• Does Mercy's damage buff affect structures?
• What ultimates can be damage boosted by Mercy?
• How does boosting Ana work?
• What do damage buffs affect?

Every one of these questions basically boils down to, "If Mercy damage boosts X, what happens." I included the critical information from fcm's answer about D.Va's ult into my answer on how Mercy's damage boost affects ultimates. After some discussion, I then put together a single megapost hoping to try and consolidate any question about damage boosting into a single answer.

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be working out well so far. The +23 scoring "Is D.Va's ultimate affected by Mercy's damage boost?" was closed as a duplicate of the +10 scoring "What ultimates can be damage boosted by Mercy?", which was also closed as a duplicate of the -4 scoring "What do damage buffs affect?"

Funnily enough, I was planning on making a meta post asking to handle this very issue, but it looks like the gun has been jumped a bit here. I'm not sure what the best way to proceed would be in this scenario.