2

Minecraft releases weekly snapshots, which allow players to view upcoming features pretty much as the developers develop them. Since anyone can get their hands on these, they are not considered speculative. However, since they are not considered "released" these features often change, leading to questions and/or answers which are often specific only to certain unreleased snapshots.

One recent question is this:

Does horse-armour degrade? Does horse armour lose durability like with the player wearable armour? Is it repairable or enchantable?

It's a good question, but is extremely localized since many of the answers are likely to change from week to week as the developers flesh out the feature since it focuses on an in-development feature.

Are Minecraft questions about an unreleased feature too localized?

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
3

Questions that ask about features that have been shipped in versions released/published to the public regardless of their weekly/alpha/beta/gamma/rc/testing realm label are on topic and perfectly acceptable because perfectly answerable. (Same goes for closed betas most of the time.)

Questions that ask about how these features will evolve as they trickle towards golden/official/release/stable/final versions of the game are still speculative in nature and thus off topic.

If we hadn't been allowing questions about alphas we wouldn't have been able to cover Minecraft at all for the first year or so of our existence. It would've been frankly ridiculous to close all questions about the game because they didn't have the right label attached to them.

4
  • I agree that these questions are obviously perfectly answerable, but the answers are often localized to a short period of time. If we're okay with answers rapidly going outdated (and hopefully but not always being updated), I can get behind that. I'm not saying we shouldn't have supported the Alpha version, just wondering if we wanted to handle weekly snapshots differently since there's now a "released" version.
    – dlras2
    Commented May 13, 2013 at 17:39
  • 2
    @DanRasmussen something that is relevant to here and now may be localized but it isn't so localised it's irrelevant and thus close worthy.
    – badp Mod
    Commented May 13, 2013 at 17:45
  • That works for me!
    – dlras2
    Commented May 13, 2013 at 17:49
  • 1
    I'd just like to add that asking questions relating to obvious bugs in snapshots (etc.) probably won't receive the warmest welcome, even though they may still be on topic. If it's an obvious bug, it's obviously going to be fixed (or scrapped).
    – MBraedley
    Commented May 13, 2013 at 22:28
-3

Yes.

Questions about or referring to features only existing in Minecraft weekly development snapshots should be closed as "Too Localized". This is because they are very likely relevant only for "a specific moment in time" (namely a week or two until the snapshot changes.) This will prevent answers that quickly become outdated.

If the question is still valid when said feature is released not as a weekly snapshot, it may be reopened, edited and reopened, or reasked (if we decide not to reopen the question.)

4
  • If we're going to treat these questions as speculation of the future of the industry, we should treat it like we do every other question in that category; close and delete.
    – Frank
    Commented May 13, 2013 at 16:58
  • This is not what we've been doing.
    – badp Mod
    Commented May 13, 2013 at 17:21
  • @badp I understand this isn't what we've been doing, but I looked around meta for discussion on it and didn't find any. This question was meant to start that discussion, and this answer was simply my thoughts on it.
    – dlras2
    Commented May 13, 2013 at 17:26
  • @Dan fair enough.
    – badp Mod
    Commented May 13, 2013 at 17:30

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .