Should I ask seed questions involving problems I've never experienced?

Question

I seeded this question (10K only link), involving the "You did not earn a trophy" message on the PS3, which was deleted on the grounds that I never experienced this problem. This was intended as a seed question, so is it okay to ask such questions when I've never experienced the problem in question?

Edit: Here's a screenshot of the question for those who can't see it:

Answer 1

Questions need to have an actual backround of having a practical problem and wanting a solution for it in form of an answer to a question.

When you ask questions about issues you cannot reproduce, you cannot meaningfully check the answers for truth. You cannot meaningfully ascertain whether or not the answers actually do answer the question correctly. You cannot really elect an answer as the accepted answer - something only you the asker can do

Since the site is based on a write once, read many basis, it is important that who does write once actually has a clue on what actually they are writing about, to be blunt. Just like we frown on people answering based on third hand reports and hearsay for games they never actually have played, we should require the same of the askers. What game did you get that message with? What were you doing? Is that savefile legit? Is your PSN account limited somehow? You can't know. All you know is someone somewhere sometime maybe got this cryptic 'nothing just happened' message.

Please allow this somebody to ask the question on his own behalf, based on his own situation and maybe reap the reputation connected with it.

The question was also deleted because it would honestly be confusing to see this question closed and another question with pretty much the same body open, upvoted and answered because the asker actually has faced this problem and can provide additional detail.

Anyone on the internet may ask questions here. It's then reasonable to require questions be asked by people who actually do have them.

Answer 2

I've argued several times here that due to the nature of this site, a certain amount of seeding questions is a good thing here. There are several factors that distinguish this site from other sites in the SE network that make seeding less problematic:

• We're often question-limited, we have enough users answering, more questions help this site to grow. This is not really true anymore during big contests, but in general we are not limited by our answer-capacity, but by the number of questions that are asked
• The site essentially changes its topic every few weeks when a new big game is released. Getting good information out there early is helpful, during the first days of a new release we're competing with badly organized forum threads and incomplete wikis, not with well-organized collections of reliable information.

So in general, I have no problem with seeded questions here on Arqade, as long as they are of high quality.

The problem with your question was that it's a troubleshooting question and you can't provide additional information when asked for because you never encountered the problem yourself. This makes the question a bad fit for the site and it should be closed, similar to abandoned questions that don't contain enough information to be answerable.

I personally only ask seeded questions that I've encountered myself, I did that during the first Gaming Grant for "The Witcher 2". This was not uncontroversial, as you can see from the meta post about it.

I don't think asking questions about problems you never encountered are a good idea, you won't be able to respond to requests for additional information and you're also in my opinion not in a good position to judge how important the issue is if you haven't experienced it yourself.