Is the Mass Effect 3 promotion's timeframe an appropriate length?

Question

First, I just wanted to say this was a great promotion. I'm sure we hit some sort of acceleration record for questions (and answers) both due to the grant and the prizes.

My main concern is this promotion is still going on for another week. I think it is fair to say that we have covered most of the great questions that other users out there using the search engines would want to know. I think most people have hit their desired "rank" in the contest that they can hope to achieve, others might be very close.

What I've been noticing though is lots of new users (or existing returning users) asking a bunch of questions that are extremely similar to existing questions (resulting in lots of closed questions), extremely specific questions which probably are not viable search targets or very vague "general reference" that they could either Google or quickly try themselves. They see the promotion and they struggle with getting in some questions so late in the game.

I wish I had some data to back this up, such as view count per question per date (I'm sure someone could write this for some interesting metrics). Unfortunately the data explorer has not updated for our contest. I imagine the trend would be a sharp decrease in view count for newer questions.

I can see some positives and negatives to keeping this promotion going on so long. On the positive side this means were consistently bringing in new users to the site who try to compete in the promotion, and maybe some of them will stay. However, on the down side of things there is a lot more "noise" being generated by questions as of late with duplicates, too specific or general reference style questions that I personally don't find interesting.

My question is, is this promotion going on too long, lowing the signal to noise ratio of questions in an unfavourable manor? Or do the benefits of new users outweigh the negatives described above?

(edit) I am mostly interested in opinions for future contests as I'm sure the end date of this one should be set in stone.

Answer 1

I think two and a half weeks is a fine amount of time for a promotion of this size. It gives people the chance to play the game at a reasonable pace, and the chance to ask good questions. I'm still coming up with questions that I (and apparently others) think are interesting.

I think no matter the length of the promotion, we're going to end up with bad questions/answers on the site. This is just a problem with giving incentives for people to post - some of the posts are going to be created with the intent of getting that incentive.

Another aspect of this is the trivial questions. ME3 is attracting a lot of new players to the series, so I'd expect that we're going to see a significant amount of what veterans might consider "easy" questions - these mechanics are 5 years old to us, but they're 5 minutes old to some players.

There have been quite a few dupes, but I'd say that's the case with any major release - how many dupes do we have for Skyrim, for instance? There are certain game mechanics that everyone is interested in - romance, respec'ing, squadmates, endings, etc. Reading practically every question means I can spot them immediately, but it's not always clear to others where the duplicates lie.

Downvote bad questions and close duplicates. Things are busier now, but this is not that different from any other day on the site :)

I'd also like to note that I think that the information on the site might be some of the most complete information available on the subjects we are posting on (outside of perhaps the strategy guide). We're accumulating expertise faster (IMHO) than the wikis at this rate. Establishing ourselves as a formidable alternative to these types of sites is going to require the kind of growing and filtering pain we're going through right now.

Answer 2

The time span of the promotion is good, you also have to take in to consideration people like me who did not get the game at launch. I got my game from the give away. It was ordered from UK Amazon, there the release date was the 9th and with the weekend coming I didn't get the game before Monday the 12th, if the promotion was shorter I wouldn't be able to participate much in it, but with its current length I have a chance to reach my goal of doing Mission 4.

As other people have mentioned the solution to having many duplicate posts would be to change the criteria of the missions in future promotions.

Answer 3

I think I have a bit of a Mass Effect hangover, but if this hadn't gone 3 weeks I wouldn't have made it to Fleet Admiral. I just don't have the time to devote daily to get to the upper tiers.

With that said by the end of this week it is getting very hard to ask any new questions since most of the content of this game has now been thoroughly explored, poked, queried and we are now beating the bloody spot on the grass.

2 weeks for a non-hardcore person got me to Captain, 3 weeks let me squeek into Fleet Admiral.

If the game had been a little more difficult (eavesdrop, fly, scan, return to Citadel missions were a big time drain but not terribly difficult) or a lot more open (felt very linear) then the 3 weeks would have probably been perfect.

Answer 4

If this promotion didn't drag into this week, I would have no chance of getting from 13/25 to 25/25, but even that's a real stretch at this point.

It's getting very hard not to ask pedantic, low quality questions.

I notice that there's a trend of leaving questions at low votes and upvoting the begeezus out of some answers ... if an answer is worth 13 the question might be worth more than 2 (but I digress).

One criteria I didn't see used, that might have helped, would have been views. Instead of needing 35 5+ posts perhaps some of the existing badge criteria could have been used. For example I have received several Popular Question badges.

Additionally if we were going to try to have some more difficult to achieve criteria we could do an either or requirement instead of an and criteria.

Get 2 PQs OR 30 7+ answers, etc.