This is somewhat in line with earlier questions of the type "Gaming.SE more like StarCraftII.SE am I right?":
- Is gaming.stackexchange.com a “Minecraft and some other games” site?
- Are there too many StarCraft 2 / single game questions?
But I'm wondering if the community promotion sponsorship, with its selection of The Witcher II, have artificially inflated this problem for a new game. In the last week, there have been 58 questions tagged the-witcher-2, exceeding the number of portal-2 questions in the last month, arguably a far more popular game (estimated: 675k day 1 sales vs. 200k 3-day sales).
Right now, 16 out of the 50 questions on the front page are tagged the-witcher-2, and of those 16, (almost?) all of them are asked by high-rep, well-known users, which would indicate that those are people who were selected for the promotion.
Indeed, and I don't mean to pick on anyone for doing anything wrong, people presumably selected for the promotion have a really high ratio of the-witcher-2 questions:
- Fabian's last 22 questions (out of a total of 91 questions ever)
- StrixVaria's last 12 (out of 56)
- Raven Dreamer's last 8 (out of 69)
- Mana has 5 (out of 44)
Now, of course, the whole purpose of the sponsorship was to get questions asked and answered for popular new games, but this seems to be getting close to the idea of a content farm. That is, content is being generated for the sake of latching onto a keyword for its Google juice rather than for the sake of solving people's problems.
To that end, of the 47 questions by the people I mentioned above:
- 7 have no answers
- 23 were self-answered or answered by another one of the identified
- 14 only have self answers or answers by another of the identified
That is to say, the people who are finding these questions interesting are also the people who happen to be in the promotion.
Is the seeding of the site in this manner good for the internet? Rather than trying to seed the site with questions we hope people would ask (but aren't really being asked), perhaps the emphasis for future rounds should be on answers to questions that arise organically?
I don't mean to say that there shouldn't be seed questions, but that perhaps the number of them should be dependent on the general interest in the game (that is, the number of organic questions or the number of questions being answered organically).