Are Dragonvale questions that are easy to answer bad questions?

Question

When I asked this question it seemed to cause a bit of a stir which I believe has been simmering for a while. Clearly some folks are of the opinion that some/all Dragonvale "How to I breed dragon X" questions are bad questions on the grounds that they are too easy to answer.

Previously, Fluttershy brought up the topic of how to address the monthly Gem Dragons, and I believe the consensus was with BenBrocka's response to the effect that these questions are valuable, even though they are tied to a limited time event. Gem Dragon questions are a special sub-segment though, because the breeding pairs are non-intuitive, and there is a sense of urgency since the dragons are only available for a limited time.

So, aside from the specific allowance for Limited/Gem dragons, should general Dragonvale breeding questions not be allowed?

Answer 1

It's been about four months since this was originally asked, and in that time I've gotten a shiny new phone that is actually capable of playing this game. So I got it, and I loaded this game up, and I checked out what all the fuss was about.

This is a complicated game with very little user feedback. It is probably one of the most impenetrable "casual" experiences I've had to date, and I feel lost a lot. If you've never played it, and your assumption is that the game is trivial or easy or simplified for a casual audience, there is nothing further from the truth. It's simplified in that there is virtually no documentation on hardly any feature, and what there is is often either contradictory or useless.

The fallout from this discussion was that we're against questions where the information is ostensibly given in-game. We also believe that the Wikia site is a good source of information. Let's test that theory and see if the community at large can be a good judge of these questions, shall we?

Let's play Identify That Breeding Pair!

Here's a sample of dragons, tell me which ones are trivial or have significant Wikia info. I'll even give you the in-game store's information for each, so you don't feel left out if you can't see it.

1. Frostfire Dragon - The game says "Cold" and "Fire"
2. Love Dragon - The game says "Lightning" "Plant" and "Fire"
3. Gold Olympus Dragon - The game says nothing.

While you're pondering and consulting Wikia, enjoy this picture of Alex Trebek back when he was rocking a monster 'stache:

If you answered anything besides "this is meta, and he has a point to make, so agent86 is giving us a trick question" - you failed. Let's take the "simplest" one and break it down.

Frostfire

The Frostfire Dragon seems easy enough from the store data. Breed Fire + Cold, bam, Frostfire. Only, the game won't let you do that. Turns out there are opposites in the game that can't be bred together, and Fire + Cold is one set of those. The game doesn't mention this, it just grays out one when you select the other. For all intents and purposes, it looks like a bug.

You can breed hybrids that feature both elements together, and knowing this you might assume that any hybrid Fire + hybrid Cold combination would work, given that you're going for Fire + Cold. You'd be wrong, enjoy your hours of wasted time as you wait for these combos to yield things you don't want.

The Wikia is slightly more helpful, in that it tells you you must breed a Fire Hybrid with a Cold Dragon. This narrows the field a bit, but still leaves you with 20 possible combinations. Again, every time you fail, you're looking at hours of waiting until you can try again.

We've exhausted the Wikia's information on the subject, and most other sites are just parroting that data. However, the game has a statistical model behind it, and it's possible to understand it if:

• You're a gamer who invests significant time in Dragonvale, enough to understand how the model works
• You've got enough expertise in math and statistics to be able to SCIENCE your way out of the complex potential statistical combinations and their various benefits.

This sounds an awful lot like the kind of expert we are supposed to be cultivating here, doesn't it? The kind of question that yields intelligent answer that SE is in a unique position to provide? That cuts through the "this worked for me" anecdotal answers you find elsewhere? Hmm.

Love Dragon

I won't go into the derivation as deeply as I did for Frostfire, but suffice it to say that only a subset of the dragons that feature the three elements are actually valid. Wikia here tells us that to get the Plant and Fire, you must use a Plant/Fire hybrid, specifically Flower, (even though Poison is also a Plant/Fire hybrid). You might now think "OK, well, then that means that I can just breed Flower + Lightning and that's the only way." Except, no.

In this case, you can breed Plant + Lightning or any Lightning Hybrid. There are 19 possible combinations. This is also a limited time dragon, so there's a maximum amount of times you can try given the long delays you experience on failure. If you're in this situation, you want to know what the statistically "best" pairing is - the one that optimizes the breeding time curve for fewest possible failures AND shortest failures when they do occur. This is a complicated function, but it's solvable if you've got the math background and Dragonvale experience to figure it out.

Wikia doesn't provide this information, and googling it turns up a bunch of unsourced info on sites that seem more concerned with ad revenue than informative content, and shudder Yahoo Answers is in the top results.

Gold Olympus

The gold olympus seems like the worst of the bunch, and there you'd be correct. Not only do you need to know the pairing, you've also got the problem that the pairings can produce "junk" dragons (like the other two, not the one you're looking for) as well as "lesser" Olympus dragons. Your chances are so slim at getting one that it is easy to lose hope, or break down and just pay Backflip so that you can own one.

Again, the Wikia helps, a little. It narrows the field to just the "possible valid" combinations. But, knowing the optimal solution to the breeding problem can save days or weeks of breeding time.

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Conclusion

Advancement in this game is a complex problem tuned to get you to spend money - and lots of money. Some of these dragons cost $80 or more if you don't know how to breed them. However, you can make progress in the game without spending money if you are patient, and you can get a leg up by having an expert in your corner who knows how to game the system.

What we've done here is reject that expert, call his motivations into doubt, and harm his image of the site.

Meanwhile, we created a hostile environment for question askers who must be able to prove that their question is sufficiently non-trivial to avoid downvotes and votes to close. We did this even though most of us don't play this game and can't judge these questions.

In a community that is supposed to be open to newcomers and provide expert advice, shouldn't we embrace the easy questions? Shouldn't we embrace the ones that require a bit more work to communicate with new users and edit to bring up to our high standards? Aren't we introducing these people to new concepts and encouraging them to participate, teaching them that gamers are a welcoming crowd and always ready to help, and this is the premiere site to get that help?

Meanwhile, shouldn't we encourage our experts? Let the reward systems designed by SE and in place on the site encourage them to continue contributing?

In my opinion, making decisions like this makes us look elitist, gives us chances to look down on people without completely understanding their problems, and causes arguments and strife where it shouldn't. To me, this is a capital-B Bad Thing.

Answer 2

There's a few things that haven't been said that I think we should consider.

There appears to be some amount of voting on the poster instead of voting on the post.

This comment in particular makes me think that the reason for at least some of these downvotes is that people feel like this is some sort of blatant "badge grab" question. (See another similar comment here)

If I look at a cross section of similar Dragonvale dragon breeding questions, I don't see this pattern of downvoting and accusatory comments. If people feel like these are bad, poorly researched questions, then I would expect to have seen downvotes on far more of them. (Of course now, I'm opening the floodgates for people to go downvote ALL THE THINGS on that tag :P)

The rewards for asking these questions appear to be minimal - the rep is abysmal, and the badges count for very little. Of the more than 7,000 rep this user in particular has, a whopping 330 (4.5%) has come from asking dragonvale questions.

Can we stop assuming they are asked in bad faith?

I think the argument that these questions are super trivial and add nothing to the internet doesn't really hold water.

The answer on that question - even the initial version of it - is actually better and more complete than the results from a google search. It contains more directed information in a single click than the Dragonvale wikia does, and the other two sites that were ranked above it in Google searches contained little information and seemed more geared towards getting ad impressions than anything else. Collating and organizing information that is potentially available elsewhere, and sorting bad information out is the point of the SE model, right?

Otherwise, we've got a hell of a lot of Skyrim questions to downvote, since the UESP contains most of the information needed to answer almost every question on that subject. I picked Skyrim out of the air, but there's a whole lot of questions across Stack Exchange that could be answered by the official documentation, or a Wiki on another site, etc.

If a question can be answered "properly," but is attracting bad answers from people who don't understand the Stack Exchange model, the answer is to protect it, not close it or ban that class of questions.

Any question can do this, and popular questions about casual games are more likely than most to get this sort of bad answer spam. However, we handle a ton of bad/non answers in a given day, and from experience I don't feel like the dragonvale tag produces significantly more. If anything, they quickly get to the "3 deleted answer auto-protect" and then they can be safely ignored. I used to preemptively protect them, but I would like it if occasionally they attracted a good first-time answerer to the site.

This also feels like a different beast than content seeding.

This is an actual problem that people are facing, and this person in particular is also facing. Content seeding is more along the lines of anticipating problems and posting questions that we think might be a problem in the future.

Answer 3

Alright, so, I figure since I'm the one who sparked this debate (I think), I should probably chime in with my two cents.

First off, this was in no way an attack on EBongo, nor did I downvote the question solely based on the one asking. I genuinely feel it's a bad question, and here's why:

For anyone unfamiliar with the game, this screen is what you see when you enter the in-game market, select "Eggs", and then select the dragon that you're wondering about. It's really not hard to get to this page, at all. Anyone who plays the game is going to be able to get there (even the ones who have posted complete crap answers on our DragonVale questions).

The circle on the left, the one circling the little brown and red flags? That shows you what two elements are needed to breed that dragon (in this case, Earth and Fire [it even says "Earth, Fire" in the top right!]).

The circle on the right shows the incubation time. Right there, plain as day. "Incubation Time: 8 hours" (Yes, that's an s behind my poorly drawn freehand circle)

This question shows little (zero) prior research, and, honestly, isn't actually about a problem.

The argument about the best combination is really null and void, given the edit history of the question. Sure, that's what's being asked now. At the time of the downvote, however, and my comment, that was not the case.

Does that make it a better question? Absolutely not. Honestly, in this particular case, it seems to me the "best" option is a Fire dragon with an Earth dragon. That's all. Fire, and earth. And that is usually the case with any dual-element dragons. Why? Because that severely limits the possible outcome. In this case, Lava, Bone (for the time being), and Obsidian. That's it.

Does this mean all DragonVale questions are bad? No. It doesn't. Take this one for example. There are quite a few dragons in the game that don't have that sort of information readily available to anyone who plays the game.

These dragons require, in most cases, a particular breed of dragon to breed with another particular breed. As in, there is only one specific pair that has a chance to offer the result for which you are aiming. Those questions are perfectly fine, in my opinion. If for no other reason than the fact that, in the majority of the monthly gem dragons I've looked for, the information was found on a 3rd party site far quicker than it was found on the DragonVale Wikia.

tl;dr: Allow DragonVale questions, unless there is just no need for a question in the first place. i.e.: when the information is right there, plain as day, easily obtainable.

Answer 4

Edit:

tl:dr: I propose that "What is the best(fastest) way to breed Dragon X" is a good question, even though simply "How to I breed Dragon X" is sometimes not.

After thinking, reading some comments, some answers, and writing one of my own, I think there may be some confusion. As Fluttershy points out you can see in the market the elements needed to breed these dragons, so the question of "how do I breed" one is a little poor on the grounds it is obvious. However, I mentally translate "How do I breed Dragon X" to "What is the best (fastest) way to breed Dragon X". That is a different, non-obvious question. It is not provided on the wiki at all, and even if using the DragonVale Breeding Sandbox it involves some research and analysis. You can see in Kareen's answer about the Obsidian Dragon, and my answer about the Ghost Dragon, that even though the element combinations are obvious the fastest pairing is not - in that it is most certainly not just a simple pairing of the base elements as Fluttershy proposes.

Begin old answer

In a short tl:dr summary, I believe each DragonVale breeding question adds value to the site, and should be allowed.

I believe long before my time on the site, the issue of easy questions was broached on Meta. I agree with GraceNote's answer, that easy questions should be allowed as long as they do not reach the point of spam.

So, why do I feel DragonVale breeding questions are not spam? Firstly, like I mentioned in my response to Fluttershy's question, I believe casual/mobile games are a different beast with a slightly different set of rules. On any given day, Diablo gamers and Borderlands 2 gamers may be thinking thousands of different questions, and searching accordingly. For a casual, relatively single dimension game like DragonVale - when a new dragon drops a huge proportion of the playing population will suddenly want to know the answer to a single question - "how do I breed that dragon".

Secondly, and backing up the first point, look at the views. To me, views are a measure (though not the only measure) of question relevance. If thousands or tens of thousands of folks are viewing the question, that means they had the same question I did. I will also point out that on a mobile device, it is not easy to traverse a wiki, or worse yet a FAQ. The Arqade format is much easier to get to the answer quickly, and our Google juju makes us often the top or among the top hits on a search.

Finally, I'll just point out as agent86's blog mentioned, that DragonVale questions make up 2.4% of all site views in Arqade's 2nd year. It is the only casual and only iOS game in the mix, and it beat out several other big console titles such as MW3 and Battlefield 3. If you accept my assertion that views = relevance, then I believe this supports the case that "How to do I breed dragon X" questions should continue to be allowed, and in fact should be encouraged.

Answer 5

While I agree with the spirit behind the monthly breeding questions (they're localized but good localized as they're relevant here and now):

1. These questions consistently attract bad one-liner answers ("AMAGAD I USED BALLS AND STEEL AND IT WORKED")
2. These questions can be fairly seen as excessive content seeding (slow-motion seeding, but seeding still!), which we've determined from the earliest days to be something we do not want.

In other words, we don't want people to take a question, change one word and make a new question out of it. This is the heart of what's wrong with the Dragonvale monthly breeding questions.

I don't play the game, so I have to ask you: do you really have trouble figuring out the crafting recipe of each and every month's dragon? Does the answer, or more importantly, how you reach that answer different with each passing month?

Can't we just have one question about how to breed this month's breeding and close everything else as a duplicate of this one question?

If we can, we should.