Recently there have been a rash of questions about Tiny Death Star's holiday update ranging from bugs to end date. The event is now over, and presumably most of the questions are now moot. Do they now get closed?
Or should they have been rejected in the first place as being too specific to a time and place? (I don't believe they should have because the problems encountered were real …)
I'm just curious about the housekeeping for stuff like this.
I'm going to have to disagree with badp, as I don't believe we can safely say that dead games are dead. Robotnik brought up a good point regarding Minecraft boosters, as it is now possible to play the old versions of Minecraft simply by selecting them in the launcher. How do we know that any game is gone for good? How do we know that the holiday code won't be reused next year?
I also feel that deleting the questions is going to be very surprising for all the new users who arrived due to this game, and there will be a reputation loss involved, since many of those questions don't have 3 upvotes and it has not yet been 60 days.
So, rather than deleting questions that pertain to out of date mechanics, I would rather they were left behind. If it is required (due to people not understanding that a question pertains to an out of date game mechanic), a quick edit to the question can be made to add a disclaimer. I have no problem with putting a version tag on them to indicate that the question and answers pertain to an older version of the software, similar to the way ASP.NET MVC stuff is tagged on Stack Overflow (though I expect many others will object to version tags).
I wonder why this hasn't been implemented yet, but there should totally be a generic disclaimer saying something along the lines of:
This question is about a limited time event that has ended on January 20, 2014. Be aware that the following may not be relevant.
But! There are also games that have regular events, like TF2 Full Moon (which is active for about 2 days around every full moon), which need special treatment, so I think such disclaimer should only be used on events that have ended for good. Otherwise we'd end up with huge event time tables who'd nobody care to keep updated or implement a system for in the first place.
Also, what's this about "dead games"? It's like saying a movie is dead. Or a folk story. It's like the existing rules don't apply to them. Nonsense.
Delete these questions, for they poison the well. We shouldn't offer our visitors a mixture of relevant and known irrelevant content. If it slips by so be it, otherwise it's negligence. These questions should join the dozen of high quality questions and answers we had about Minecraft boosters because, no matter how good they were, they are now devoid of any value.
Keep in mind that if your post is good enough you'll keep reputation earned from it even after deletion.
Frank mentions the case of a deceased game. I'd say that is different. People googling for City of Heroes have different expectations than people looking for Tiny Death Star. Ones obviously are on a nostalgia trip on the game they used to play, or are simply curious about what they obviously missed on. There's only probably a handful of them, but given that the game is 100% dead there is no point for us to go tend to those questions. The others are exceedingly likely only to care about the game as it is today; if they want a blast from the past there's YouTube or game wiki's. Answers about unavailable content is only going to be confusing and lead to poor questions like "You said to do X to do Y, but where is the button for X? why doesn't Y happen?".
In other words, dead games are dead. Rest in peace. Unlike corpses their questions don't stink and we get to let them lie around harmlessly. Dead features of games that are alive, on the other hand, are like necrosis; they make amputation necessary for the sustenance of the rest of the body. Let us praktice medicine.
