I think there is a flaw in the rules around time based questions

Question

Most competitive games are updated and change over time. I play starcraft and I almost never ask questions here, because the rules make for a toxic environment. My questions get downvoted because I don't care about strategies from 6 months ago. I want information based around the current state of the game.

Example: Starcraft is a game where new strategies are constantly developed. The game is always changing. Pro players push the usage of different unit combinations in drastically different ways. It's impossible to talk about most advanced concepts in Starcraft without putting a time range on it.

Our current rules do not encourage these types of questions. I think arqade.com should revise its rules or ban questions about any competitive game or any game that gets updated frequently. If that mods and admins of this site truly feel that rule is correct, then I think this site will be doomed to fail.

Banning competitive games would clearly hurt the site. So why not adapt the rules to the nature of the gaming industry?

Answer 1

This question should not have been closed.

Simply put, "Too Localized" does not apply here. Let's break it down:

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors

I don't think this criterion applies. A good answer to this question will definitely help others. Even Decency's link based answer would help others.

it is only relevant to a small geographic area

Clearly not applicable

a specific moment in time

I believe this is an often misinterpreted clause of this definition. The fact that some potential hypothetical answer might become out of date has no reflection on the question. The question may not get an answer at all. What does that have to do with how localized it is? The "specific moment in time" clause should be applied to the question, not potential answers. It has been discussed various times that some games are hard to maintain since they are constantly updated - but that's what so great about the Stack model. We can change our votes. We can provide new answers. We have the technology.

or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet

Again, not valid. There is a wide audience of folks that are basically frothing at the mouth to know the answer to this question, especially if it changes over time. The fact that is hard to keep up with is not the asker or questions problem. It is Arqade's problem. We need to solicit and cultivate good users for all games, who can be there to provide the updates when patches occur and rules change. Scaring off users like Robotsushi by closing his question for bogus reasons obviously works directly against this.

In the end, this is just another instance of using the close vote as a super downvote, which is inappropriate. I think it is fair to say that the question could potentially be edited to better understand how to provide the best answer the asker is looking for. For example, asking not just about win rates, but also the root cause that contributes to those win rates, seems more interesting. However, if you don't like the question because it shows poor research effort, or seems not useful, then downvoting is the only appropriate action.

Answer 2

Good subjective questions (especially those based on strategy, like you mention) are decidedly on topic. I don't think there's an issue with the rules here, but rather with the problem of maintaining a good answer with an ever-changing meta environment.

The onus is not on the moderators to allow these questions. They are already allowed. It is on the expert community to continue to strive up update these questions with the newest information and strategies so that they remain relevant over time.

That said, a question like Which race has the best win rate? isn't really a good, constructive question. We're not here to look statistics up for you. That kind of question can't be answered expertly. Asking what race to play, as another example, is a bad subjective question. We don't know what race you'll find most fun, or have the best results with.

Answer 3

I want to say welcome to Arqade but you have been here twice as long as I have, so I'll say welcome back.

I have a few things I want to address in this post and I'm not confident they're going to be popular with any particular group of people on either side of the current argument. Apologies for the wall of text that follows;

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Let's start first with the reason that you posted: in my opinion your question should not have been closed as too localised - at least not yet. Let me explain;

Arqade does allow time based questions and we have many questions and answers that get updated over time as mechanics in a particular game change. Quite a few of them are in fact Blizzard games, including World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, and Starcraft 2 being one of our top tags. Another example is that we allow questions about Minecraft features that exist in nightly builds, and will be subject to change within the space of a month.

However in this particular instance of your question Which race has the best win rate? you're asking a question that simply needs a URL to a Win/Loss tracker to answer. This in itself is not great, but probably isn't a reason to close it. Depending on the quality of the link provided, the answer may stay relevant for some time, as the link may remain updated by whomever is running it. I digress a little bit, since we don't normally like link-only answers as they do not really add anything to our site and as such is not a good fit for our Q&A format.

I'm dealing with this at the moment as though you got a link only answer - why you ask? Well, one of the responses you got was from one of our more vocal competitive gamers Decency, who posted this as a comment to your question;

http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/sc2-international/players/detailed-elo Zerg right now.

I suspect that the link in question will survive for some time, but the clue is in the rest of the comment - "right now". I have no doubt that given the incentive, Decency would keep updating his answer for the next few months, but the moment the answer stops getting updated, you're left with a link and some text which doesn't match the content of the link - this is too localised.

What if you get an answer that isn't a link? Well - in this instance, this answer is going to be very high maintenance. Due to the nature of Blizzard games, mechanics can change - sometimes quite radically - between minor patches. This was seen most recently with Diablo 3 but we didn't go around closing those questions as "too localised". Granted, some have retrospectively been marked as too localised and some have been updated with new answers. There are systems in place on Stack Exchange to cater for both instances (close votes and bounties, respectively). If the answer doesn't receive updates, then yes - it will become too localised to the very specific point in time that the question was asked.

Now that we have got those details out of the way, let's take a look at the close text for too localised;

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.

Line by line, in the instance of your question, if it is not kept updated, it will be unlikely to help any future visitors because it will be out of date. This makes it specific to a point of time if it isn't updated.

Starcraft is a popular enough game that nearly any question about it will be generally applicable to the worldwide audience of gamers on the internet, so narrow situation is out as well.

This means that provisionally, we meet one of the criteria to close as too localised making the assumption that the question is not updated. For this specific point in time though, it is on topic. Using the Minecraft precedent, this shouldn't have been closed as too localised, I still don't think it's a good question, though.

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Another point that I want to address, it probably deserves it's own post but it's directly in relation to the contents of the posts present here so I'll keep it brief; you have clearly demonstrated a lack of differentiation between elected moderators and users on this site - the actions taken against your question had zero moderator intervention:

closed as too localized by spartacus, OrigamiRobot, LessPop_MoreFizz, fbueckert, StrixVaria 8 hours ago

As you can see from the above, which is the list of people who voted to close your question on the main site, not a single one of those users has a diamond ♦ next to their name. The first instance of a moderator getting involved was when you bought the discussion to meta (which was the correct way to handle it by the way, rather than littering the main site with comments). This is no single moderator taking action against you, this is the voice of the community members active at the time you posted your question enforcing what they believe to be the correct action at this time.

Answer 4

If you really want to fix the stale content issue. Appoint some type of community leaders to specif games and/or tags that are active in those specific communities.

Facilitate a process for these community leaders to get questions updated that are still relevant in the community, or to update answers themselves. This would not only prevent stale content, but encourage activity in the community from those who are truly passionate about specific games or game types.

I know some features have been implemented to encourage this, but I think a more hands on approach is required.

There is great benefit to having site moderators preventing terrible questions and enforcing site rules. However there are so many sites and communities that develop around each game, we need people who are aware of the 'meta' of competitive games. I believe that arqade.com should be the #1 source of gaming information, and it's not that far out of reach.

I don't know every reputation based privilege available in the stack exchange network and some of the things I suggest here may already be in place. I do hope if nothing else this encourages a stronger attempt to address the issue here.