The community is closing "mod rec" questions?

Question

We had a discussion not too long ago about questions that ask for mods as a solution to a problem:

Is "mod rec" really an umbrella category that we want to use? Or is it confusing the situation?

Closed 'mod recommendation' Skyrim question - Can this question be improved and then reopened?

Community consensus at the time appeared to be that "mod rec" is not the same as "game rec" and should not be treated as a blanket category worthy of immediate closure.

In the past couple of days I've seen a couple of questions closed that ask for mods to solve a particular problem:

A way to increase tile working range

Can I move my Kerbals inside a pod?

In both instances, the close reasons and/or comments appear to indicate that the closure is game-rec related. The former appears to have also requested a config file editing solution, but that was edited out. (Perhaps the file edits were considered gamedev related?)

I'm inclined to reopen the questions, given what I understand to be the current policy on the matter. Before I mod-override all of these votes, I wanted to give the voters a chance to either go back and revisit the previous discussions, call for new ones, or explain why they closed the questions in a way that is consistent with the current meta policies.

Answer 1

Editing these questions is silly. Closing, then editing and reopening doubly so.

These questions pose a problem.

All cities have a maximum tile working radius of 3. I sometimes want to try a game with just a few enormous cities.

That's a clearly defined non-subjective problem with no ambiguity at all about what solves it. Solutions to this problem increase the working tile radius of a city in Civ5 from the default of 3 to some other value.

Is there any way of modding the game so that that constant is changed? And if there is could someone tell me where to find such a mod or where to change the game files to make one myself?

This is additional information about the asker's desired solution. It may have bearing on what answer gets accepted, but it does not fundamentally change the problem. Unlike game-rec, the true answer to the question is not the sum of all answers to the question. An individual answer should contain all the info to solve the problem. Unlike game-rec, it does not ask us to make a subjective choice about the "best" of something where the axis along which "best" is measured is unclear. There are probably multiple solutions, like most problems we face, and that's OK.

As mod tools grow in popularity and power, people are going to think "find a mod" when they have an issue with a game. This is not a type of question that is going anywhere, there are tons of them for the most popular games on the site.

Closing the question because a request for a mod is present doesn't make sense. Closing prevents answers, which aren't an issue here. There's nothing wrong with answers that suggest a mod, or answers that don't suggest a mod.

Editing it out doesn't make sense. It's additional information that helps voters understand how to gauge several answers to the question, and helps answerers to give better answers.

It is not a smart idea to:

1. Discard this additional information
2. Start fights with the user about pedantic word choice policy related to a similar sounding term we once had a fight about a couple of years ago
3. Make more work for ourselves

...in these (increasingly likely) situations.

It does not matter if someone asks for a mod. The important parts that should determine closing and voting aren't in the mod request - they are in the rest of the question.

Answer 2

I agree that mod recommendation questions probably shouldn't be closed with the Game Rec close reason, because Mod Recs, while similar, are not quite the same. But I think they should be closed, and mercilessly. Part of the problem is that, if we have a question of the form

I'm playing Deathstorm, and it's great, but I really wish my gun shot unicorns. Is there a mod to make my guns shoot unicorns.

There really isn't all that much meaningful difference between that, and a question of the form

I'm playing Deathstorm,and it's great, but I really wish my gun shot unicorns. Is there a game that is Deathstorm, but with a unicorn gun?

In both cases, what we should instead be considering is what we would do if the question read

I'm playing Deathstorm, and it's great, but I really wish my gun shot unicorns. Is there a way to make my gun shoot unicorns in Deathstorm?

Because that's what a lot of the mod-recs come down to; a severe case of the XY problem. If we can change the question to actually ask about the asker's problem, then we can provide better answers, especially if it turns out that Deathstorm already has a super-secret hidden Unicorn Gun with alt-fire AoE Rainbow Spray, or if the fans of Deathstorm complained about the weapon selection so much that the first DLC added one in. More importantly, by shaping up the question to remove the Mod Rec in the first place, we sidestep a fair bit of the quibbling about whether Mod Recs are the work of the devil, or whether the wide gulf between "Game Rec" and "Mod Rec" instead allows for them, or what have you.

And, the best part is, we even have an entire mechanic here on Stack Exchange for getting the OP of a question to step back, edit the question to be more acceptable, and try again. It's called closing the question. The close reason we've been using for it probably isn't the best one, and should be changed, but oh look, we're already considering changing the custom close reasons on the site, and both the existing proposals, as of right now, have broadened the recommendation-closing reason out in some way.

Answer 3

Billy Mailman said that we should close mod rec questions to encourage users to edit their posts from the form

Is there a mod to do X in game Y?

to the form

How can I do X in game Y?

Our friendly mod Agent86 thinks this is pedantic.

I think when we find a mod-rec question, it would be easier to edit it to a proper question than to mess with closing and reopening it. New users aren't penalized for missing the distinction, and it only takes one user to make the edit.

Answer 4

I've always seen these types of questions as more of a way of saying "I would be ok if the answer to my problem lies in a mod".

I completely disagree with Billy Mailman's suggestion that mod recommendations are an example of the XY problem. They actually seem more like asking about the problem then proposed solutions. The problem is that some users are looking for answers in the base-game while others are willing to mod their games.

Best example of this is probably Minecraft. Take this question as an example. As it is asked, it mentions nothing of mods so perhaps they want an answer in Vanilla Minecraft or perhaps mods are acceptable. If they added "Is there maybe a mod that does this?" then it is clear that answers involving mods are acceptable.

As always, bad questions span across all types of questions. Example: if I ask "What are all the mods for Minecraft" then that should be closed for reasons of any list question.

TL;DR

Questions asking about mods generally fall into 2 categories. Either they are asking about the specific mod or they are verifying that answers involving mods are acceptable. Neither of these seems like an issue.

Answer 5

Even with our mods, mod rec is a contentious topic. I don't see this being any other way in the community, unless we set hard rules. Which we can't, because the topic is so open ended. So you using your mod vote to reopen questions closed by the community, based on our understanding of this issue, doesn't sit right with me. I'd appreciate it if you'd allow the community to handle this ourselves, please.

The way I understand it, mod recommendations are allowable if there's a core problem being solved. Something within the game already that someone just has difficulty with, and needs a little help. As stated in your answer, disregard the supposed solution, and focus on the problem. If there is a problem within the question, something we can address, that's what I edit the question to. If its just someone who doesn't like how the mechanics work, and wants a mod to change them to something more favorable to them, that's something I will vote to close without a moment's hesitation.

Our expertise lies in gaming. There are lots of side skills that accrue naturally as part of that expertise, but those are not the focus of Arqade. And as I've said before, allowing any and all mod recommendations is as bad as game recs. Some games have enough mods to make the scope as large as game rec, and those have the exact same problems. We're not here to provide things that might work. We're here to see the problem the user is having, and providing solutions to that specific problem. If the problem is that the user doesn't like the way the game works, well, not every game is for every person.

We're not in the business of hand tailoring a game to a user's liking. Just as we close questions that ask for game genie/shark codes to do specific things, we close questions that ask for mods that do certain things. The scope is too broad to be feasible.

For those questions that have a real problem, and the user is assuming only a mod can fix it, we can reword it to bring the problem to the forefront, remove the request for a mod, and continue on. Like you said, mods can make valid answers, but not if the only valid answers are mods.