text:
Visual voting trends
From user Icy Defiance in chat

The source query
The excel sheet with the graph setup
Discussion tag applied.  Discuss.

It's a very pretty graph.

We are running out of good questions. Just look at the growth of nobody care/not answered questions.

I've voted very little on this site over the past couple of months, because (from my casual observations): a lot of the questions popping seem to be about little technical issues, mostly about graphical aspects. I just feel turned off when I constantly see questions like this and this, that I frankly just don't care about.

Could someone maybe create a graph, breaking down the questions by tag over time? Maybe tags can be grouped into rough catagories like engine-specific, genre, mechanics, and so forth? (don't have the know-how to do this myself, or the time to invest at the moment) I'm curious to see the number of technical graphics related questions are among those with zero votes and no answers.

Does maybe the number of views (aka traffic) have gone down per question? I would like to see if the ratio of votes / views is roughly constant or went down. In the first case it's lest views per question in the latter it would be voting fatigue.

Here's another piece of data for understanding what's been going on:
Number of votes per month

Something seems to have happened in July 2013.  I don't know what, but the number of questions (as seen in the graph in the original question) and the number of votes being cast (seen here) were both at a peak, the number of zero-vote questions was under control, and then over the course of two months, question submissions dropped by a quarter, and voting rates were cut in half.
This seems to be the point at which the zero-voted questions really started to grow quickly;  we stopped having as many up-voted questions because people had actually stopped voting, and for half a year voting levels were lower than this site had seen at any other point in its history.
It's interesting that there was a brief up-swing in voting activity around April 2014, almost back to its historically normal levels, and there was a surge in question submissions back to their normal level at that same time.  But the number of zero-voted questions continued to expand.
Note that while this graph shows us as being in a steep dip right now (August 2014), that's because we're only halfway through the month.  If things stay as they are, we're roughly on track to hit about the same number of upvotes on questions as last month, and substantially more downvotes than last month.
Caveats: The graph in the original question is showing current scores and open/closed status for questions based upon the month in which the question was asked.  Having gone over the voting data while preparing my graph, I've observed that a lot of votes get cast on old questions;  if I categorise votes based upon the date of the question they were applied to (rather than based upon the date the vote was actually cast), then this graph looks extremely different, because a surprising number of these votes were being cast against questions which were already very old, at the time the vote was being cast.
This means that the whole "look at how many more zero-voted questions there are now than there were back then" premise of the discussion may not be a valid conclusion to draw from the original graph -- it may turn out that there are fewer zero-voted questions in the past just because there has been more time for people to cast votes on those older questions.
It should be possible to correct for this;  perhaps to only count votes which were cast within a month of when the question was asked.  If anyone's interested, that would be a really useful bit of analysis to run.

Assuming I constructed it right (forked your query), only counting votes which were cast within a "month" of when the question was asked doesn't show much difference as far as the trend goes. The numbers are a bit lower, but the trend is pretty much the same.

it would be very interesting to compare this with other se's, there may be some se-wide trends. suggest some basic [data.se] queries be built up that can be run on any site, there seem strangely few std queries related to overall voting trends. a recent blog post pdocast #60, are we that predictable? states "Briefly: the perceived quality on Stack Overflow has been in decline for years. And this time, we’ve got numbers and things."


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Should merging to a blank tag allow bulk removal of that tag?
I am attempting to obliterate a bad tag (subjective, in this case, although it was originally the chunks tag that ended up this way due to some experimentation; also note that I've since manually cleaned up the tags on each question).
When I go to the merge UI for the tag, and leave the merge target blank, I can still click "Preview Merge." This tells me that subjective will be removed from six questions, and added to none (which is exactly what I want). However, when I click "Perform Merge" I am greeted with the "Oops, something bad happened" error message screen. @Noctrine has reproduced the same behavior, so I don't think it's me.
The UX certainly implies that I can merge a tag with a blank tag to remove it from existence, and I think it's a useful feature as I've had to make a pass through bad tags two or three times now and manually get rid of them all.
Is this supposed to work the way I think? If not, it's certainly at least a bug that I'm allowed to preview a merge that will fail.

Yes, that shouldn't happen, and will be fixed next time we deploy.

When you say "that shouldn't happen," do you mean the error, or the ability to remove a tag in this fashion? Because today I tried to merge away the 'indie' tag and was told I couldn't continue until I entered a merge target.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


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Are questions asking how to find where game engines have the code for different things on-topic?
For example: where is the code in Unreal Engine that deals with the player picking up a weapon?
Is this an acceptable type of question?
What about a more general version: how can I find the code for different systems in CryEngine?

If you have an argument for "Yes we should and this is why" I encourage you to post it as an answer.

@SpartanDonut I don't have an argument for either side.  I'm just wondering what the community thinks.

Sure. No worries there :)

Absolutely not.
I don't think it matters what the content or circumstances around the question are. I cannot think of an example of a question along the lines of "Where is the code for X?" isn't an XY problem.
The following example scenario was provided as a counter argument to this:
"I may know how to implement an achievement for picking up a specific weapon, but not know where the code is located."
This is clearly an XY problem because the question assumes that their solution includes finding the code for how to pick up a specific weapon. The reality is that the code for picking up a specific weapon may not exist. Even if the code did exist, maybe the engine contains the ability to handle certain triggers such as picking up a weapon? Maybe there is an OnItemPickup event that the askers code could hook onto? Wouldn't these be better solutions than modifying engine code directly?
If the asker had asked something more like "How do I implement awarding an achievement on pickup of a specific weapon?" instead of "Where can I find the code for picking up a specific weapon?" we end up with a better quality question and a better quality answer that more people are going to be able to use because of it.
One final note, if the solution to a problem actually requires locating and modifying code it will be answered as such regardless of what the question is. If the question is an XY problem (Where is the code for...) I would say 99% of the time the question should be edited / improved to remove Y.

The second question, "how can I find..." is too broad and not game-development specific (the art of navigating a complex code base is generally discipline-agnostic).
The first question is, I think, not good. It's an XY question. That is, you are asking about what you think is the solution, rather than the actual problem you are trying to solve. That certainly makes it a bad question, but does it make it off-topic entirely (and thus suitable for closure)? I still think so; I don't think it's our job to host questions that effectively serve as documentation for third-party source code.
I think at an appropriately-high level of granularity (such as "what file handles the picking-up of weapons?) this may be okay. I'd be willing to let a few such questions exist and see how they work out. However, I worry about the fuzzy line between appropriately-granular and too-granular ("where's the function that gets called to enumerate available D3D adapters?") and about the time-sensitive nature of the queries if phrased improperly.

I disagree that the first example should be considered an XY question.  I may know how to implement an achievement for picking up a specific weapon, but not know where the code is located.  Ideally, those example question titles would be followed by a question body that goes more in depth so in the case of an XY question, an edit can be made.

Yes, if there is substantial additional information in the question itself, it can be fine. I'm still not sure about the applicability of essentially documentation questions. At what point do we draw the line? Asking for the files where the code exists is probably something that will have a stable (in time) answer for a given version. But asking where individual functions are? Asking for individual lines? I worry a bit about the time-sensitive nature you can have when you get extremely granular, is all. I think we could certainly try them and see how they go.

I imagine the line we draw would be as specific as the answerer could get.  While picking up a weapon may fall into a single function, driving a vehicle may be contained in a single file.  However, the OP should not be expected to know this prior to asking.

Yes, I mean from the perspective of the question (that is, "where's the code for picking up weapons" is perhaps fine, but "where's the function that gets called to enumerate available D3D adapters" is starting to get a little too specific. I guess you could give that more leeway if the problem details were sufficiently broad. I don't know. I'm very curious to hear from people other than myself (and you) on the topic though.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Are general reference threads a good fit for this community?
I've got a few questions in mind that are less "What is the best option?" and more "What options are there?" An example would be "How can you scale the difficulty of your game?", where there aren't really any perfect, best or wrong answers. However, I think this question might be too broad, and I already considered the alternative "How can you scale the difficulty of your action game without resorting to massive HP pools?", which is only slightly less broad.
The main problem I think these questions have is that they're not really a good fit for the stack exchange type of conversation, but I still think that a question like this would be a valuable resource for developers looking for this information.

This question has been asked before, the response is always the same "if its subjective it doesn't belong on GD:SE". General "How do I implement feature X" type questions are always subjective. That includes your example about difficulty scaling.

Maybe. The help is fairly clear on what's allowed in this sense:

Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:

inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”
tend to have long, not short, answers
have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone
invite sharing experiences over opinions
insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references
are more than just mindless social fun

For more detail, read about our guidelines for great subjective questions and blog post about how real questions have answers.

You can have good subjective questions. However, something like "What options are there?" is not really any different than "What do you think the best option(s) is/are?. I can't imagine a good subjective version of that that type of open ended question. It can't be a question where you're just polling what's available. You need to say, "This is my problem, how can I solve it?". The problem can't be too specific, and it can't be too broad. It can't be left open to interpretation.
Unfortunately, deciding if questions are good subjective or bad subjective is often a subjective process in itself. You'll often just have to try asking these questions, and see how well they're received. I suggest you follow the quoted guidelines above to achieve optimal results.

I wonder if according to the guidelines above you would say a question like "How can you scale the difficulty of your game?" would probably be rather okay or rather not okay?

Most likely "How can you scale the difficulty of your game?" would not be OK. Though it's hard to tell from a single sentence question.

Personally I think this type of question should be allowed but have some sort of flag linked to it that marks it as subjective in some way but others feel that GD:SE is more about "i have this specific situation what is the absolute correct answer".
My thinking though is that game dev is mostly subjective as solving virtually any problem can be done in many ways and just because there are many ways to solve a problem it doesn't mean the commmunity wont benefit in some way by having a listing of those solutions somewhere.
However I agree with your point that these questions should be more "How can you scale the difficulty of your game?" and less "What is the best option?" as the latter is implying I have done no work and just want the community to give me a solution whereas the former is more "I have a game and this part of it needs some external input ..."
But it does open up an interesting extra bit of blur in an already often very misunderstood blurry line of rules.

Stack overflow, Super User and Server Fault were the first sites that used this format, and GD is based on those. those first 3 mainly had questions that had a single answer to them. They even discouraged questions that have multiple options. However, many of the more recent SE subsites don't have the "single correct answer" property. I think we should discuss this on the overall Meta.

GD Moderators seem to be much more eager to focus GD on specifically one size fits all solutions, more so than the other sites IMO. This has nothing to do with the other sites and is specific to GD. This type of question comes around time and time again on here and yet the decision still stands that these type of questions should not be allowed my answer was merely me expressing my views that actually there could be a place for some subjectivity in the context of GD. The down vote suggests disagreement from someone.

@Wardy A single downvote in a question that is viewed only 28 times doesn't mean anything statistically speaking. I counteracted it. :)

Yeh I know ... it was just an observation ... :)

Depending on the type of game there might be many totally different ways which might all be equally suitable to scale the difficulty. Many of the answers would have to be very extensive to be good. It happens but not very often. Also it could happen that people start discussions if the answers can be opiniated. That's why too broad/too opiniated questions are often seen as not a very good fit for a Q&A format. A discussion place (reddit) or a wiki (wikipedia) would be better places.
"How can you scale the difficulty of your game?" - I'm sure I could give at least 10 different answers to this.
On the other hand these questions are useful and would attract a lot of views.
My advice is:
A) Narrow them down a bit until they are answerable better. Like: "How can you scale the difficulty in jump and run games?", ...
B) Ask and answer these questions somewhere else on the internet where the format is more suitable.
C) Get a number of relevant, canonical topics and make the Qs and As community wiki. That way it is absolutely clear that this is something special.

I think this "difficulty scaling" would be a very useful question, because it's something that every game developer has to deal with at some point. Maybe it could be one for all genres, and each genre has its own answer where the community can curate the different methods.

Its also subjective and dependent upon an individuals implementation ... the point I was trying to make but was down voted for. As you say, these questions have value but are clearlyoutside of the rules of GD:SE at the moment.


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Tiny number of high rep users and the consequences
A user from outside our community mentioned something that I found rather interesting and I'm not sure it's been discussed here before. Our website only has 17 users with a total rep >= 10k. I did not check the following myself, but as I've heard, it's the lowest number of all graduated websites, and even lower than that of some beta sites.
Is this a valid problem that needs attention and immediate fixing? Are there any consequences that could be caused by it (e.g. if a graduated site started not meeting the criteria for a beta to graduate anymore, though the rep amount specified on area51 is 3k, so this might not be the case here)?

Well, you could at least do a cursory investigation before passing rumor. There are a number of graduated sites that have fewer users below 10k:

Android Enthusiasts: 16
Bicycles: 7
Christianity: 12
Graphic Design: 7
Personal Finance and Money: 10
And so on...

How many have active users above 10k? Hard to say.
No, this is not something that needs immediate fixing.
Maybe everyone can starting voting more often. Not only vote up posts that are great, but posts that are good too.

My bad, 17 users seemed like such a low number it felt surprising for it to not be true. 7 users is baffling imo. But since it doesn't require immediate fixing, I guess it's not that big of an issue.

Really, the 3k rep level is more important. Voting to close questions is something we need more of.

Statistics on 3k and 10k rep users across SE here - http://data.stackexchange.com/gamedev/query/223453/user-count-by-reputation-across-stack-exchange

This has now been edited to show all privilege levels. Not that each includes ALL users who have that privilege: e.g. the 17 10k+ users are included in the "create posts" (1 rep) level.  Thank goodness its cached because this horrible query I wrote (I'm bad at SQL) took almost a minute to run.


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Do the rules allow opinion-based discussion, and should we allow it?
There are a number of opinion-based, discussion-oriented questions on this SE, some of which (like this one, the closure of which prompted this post) have attracted a significant number of upvotes and several quality answers.  And yet, despite the community's evident interest in such questions, many of these questions are closed on the basis of the site's content guidelines.
There is a blurb on every SE two-minute tour page which reads:

This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.

Taken at face value, that would seem to settle the question.
So my question is twofold:

Do you think that the content guidelines on this SE are just boilerplate, and why?
Despite what the content guidelines actually say, would you personally prefer it if this SE allowed opinion-based discussion similar to that thread that was recently closed?

I edited your question because it's not just "a small number of moderators" closing opinion based questions, for example, your question. And removing the remaining bits of arguments from your question.

We already allow some sort-of opinion based discussion:

Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:

inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”
tend to have long, not short, answers
have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone
invite sharing experiences over opinions
insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references
are more than just mindless social fun

For more detail, read about our guidelines for great subjective questions and blog post about how real questions have answers.

An argument for opening the site to "opinion-based discussion" is an argument for "anything goes". "Anything goes" fills the site with junk.
The reason this site is so great is because people can come here for informed, valid and useful answers. Allowing opinion based discussion allows answers that have no backing in fact or experience.
We should keep the site rules as they are. Allowing subjective questions as described above, but not opening the site up to anything more lenient. Take the opinion based discussion to a more appropriate site, it's not what stack exchange is about.

Other than perhaps its title, the question that you closed earlier today conforms to all of those guidelines.

@KevinKrumwiede Read the question again. It's clear the OP is after opinions: "Would it be fun if I center my game around the concept of getting to know your characters/champions, instead of serving all stats readily to the player?"

It's no different in that regard from any of the questions deemed good questions here: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/904/51736

Yep, a lot of older questions fall outside the current guidelines. The site was still learning how it wanted to operate. There are a lot of questions on the site, we don't go back and remove all the old questions that no longer fit the guidelines.

So where are these "current" guidelines?  The guidelines you linked in your answer predate that list of "good" questions by a couple years.  If this is evidence of the site "learning how it want[s] to operate", it appears that community opinion is evolving away from the guidelines you cited.

The current guidelines are found in the help and meta. There are certainly different ways to interpret the rules of the site. Questions like this one help narrow the interpretations. You only think the site is evolving away from the guidelines because you're interpreting the guidelines differently than most other people on the site.

I would not assume that my interpretation is common if not for the long history of other users expressing similar opinions, being told they're wrong by a small cadre of die-hard rule-followers, and shortly thereafter ceasing all participation on GDSE.  This site's great potential has been destroyed by heavy-handed moderation.

That's right, brand new users to the site find that it's a site with a great community, with knowledgeable people. And who wouldn't want to pick the brains of that community with opinion based questions or polls? However, the reason the site is so great, with a great community, is the rules. Changing the rules breaks the site and diminishes the community.

Based on their subject matter, I think it's undeniable that some SEs were created for opinion-based discussion.  A prime example is the Role-Playing Games SE, where the content is almost entirely opinion-based and everyone likes it that way.  Another example is the English Language & Usage SE, where it could be argued that every question is opinion-based.
The reason such SEs exist is because the user communities on SO and the SEs that are topically well-suited to the Q&A format are valuable assets to Stack Exchange, Inc., and it would not be in the company's interests to drive those users to other sites when they can easily satisfy demand for the discussion of related (or at least correlated) interests that are not as well suited to the Q&A format.
I think this SE was intended to be one of the opinion-based SEs for the simple reason that if it were not, there would be no reason for it to exist at all.  There is nothing unique about game development that separates it from programming in general.  If the boilerplate content guidelines are strictly observed, then there is no question that can be asked here that could not also be asked of the much wider audience on SO.

Whether or not a SE was intended to allow for  to be allowed is irrelevant. The actual site policy is defined by the community and meta. So far, a meta proposal to loosen the policy on acceptable opinion/subjective questions that doesn't blatantly flout overall SE policy, is actionable and clear, and which has achieved an overwhelming majority vote in favor has not emerged.


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Can this question be salvaged as "good subjective" with proper edits?
The Question: Are hidden stats a good idea?
Background
This meta post led me to the question at hand of which I made several observations including:

The question had 18 up votes
The question was closed (unilaterally by a mod)
At some point in time there were 3 close votes on the question but (unless I am mistaken with how / when users show up to have voted to close the question) there were no close votes cast in its current state
The question had many answers - some were good with many up votes others were bad with negative scores
The question had 2 updates amended to it which served as a dialogue between the OP and people who answered the question

After reading the question, comments on the question, and the meta post I had come up with my own conclusions on the question:

The question deserved to be closed as it stood
The question was attracting bad answers which ultimately lead to its closing

Given the number of up votes, it would appear to me that this is the type of subjective question that the community likes to see asked, and subsequently answer.
My attempt to salvage the question
My personal analysis of the question is that the two amended updates were by far the biggest problem with the question. These updates served as dialogue between the answers the OP was receiving and how that user would like answers to be catered. This ultimately lead to answers addressing the OP's specific needs and "bad subjective" (in my opinion) additional questions that were added as opposed to the "good subjective" (again, in my opinion and perhaps the 18 users that voted up) original question.
My general thought process for salvaging the question would be as follows:

Remove the updates to restore the original intent that likely drew in the up
votes as well as the good answers. This would bring us back to a good, albeit poorly written, subjective question
If the question was not reopened effort would then be taken to actually improve the question to be higher quality and to advocate needs of answers often found in good subjective types of questions

Given the time I just wanted to get the ball rolling on this and see how the community reacted, though ideally I would have addressed both items at the same time so that multiple edits did not have to occur. That said, I completed step one above. I removed the two updates leaving the top section intact to see where things would go.
The process ended much sooner than expected.
My edit was rejected with the following, rather unexpected, reason by both users who reviewed the edit:

This edit changes too much in the original post; the original meaning or intent of the post would be lost.

I don't have the privileges to review edits so I don't know what canned options are available so maybe this just comes down to having limited choices when rejecting edits... I can only speculate. Needless to say I was certainly glad I didn't take the effort to complete step 2 with my original edit because that would have changed the original post even further making the close reason seem slightly more valid - but with the edit that was made the reject reason is a bit baffling to me since I edited the question down to the original question.
Is there anything that can be done to save the question?
At this point I don't know exactly what to do. I thought that my opinion on the matter reflected that of the community, given the number of up votes the question and answers had so I made an effort to begin turning (I'll admit the work wasn't 100% complete) this into one of the elusive "good subjective" questions we always hear about and I did not succeed in this attempt. Is there something that can be done to salvage this question?
I realize this is a specific question about a specific question but advice / insight on improving quality of edits that attempt to turn bad questions into good questions (subjective or otherwise) in the future is appreciated as well.

I can confirm that the post had 4 close votes shortly after it was posted. They aged away after not gathering a 5th vote for a week.

Good to know. Thanks!

Sort of a side-issue is length. The question currently weighs 599 words. If a question takes longer than a few paragraphs to explain, it's probably getting too broad or it's starting to answer itself. I'd usually aim for 300 words tops, but then again I seem to be GDSE's resident minimalist. :)

@Anko my edit cut the question down to 168 words... the updates should have never been added IMO.

@SpartanDonut *slaps self in face* Of course, right, you even wrote that down. Twice. Sorry! (Yes; totally agree with you.)

If the edits to your question are being flagged as significantly different, that to me says you're entitled to submit it as a new question.

I think it certainly could have been saved at one point. However, now that it has a number of answers, those answers are all answering the question as it is now. Even if we could find a way to change the question to be good subjective, it would mean either eliminating a number of the answers, or finding ways to heavily modify them as well.
It highlights the issue of catching and editing these questions early, before there's too much activity. Probably my fault, I made a comment two minutes after it was created, but didn't suggest an edit to change it.

Here's a novel idea. How about moderators take discussions such as closing popular questions to Meta instead of unilaterally imposing their opinion? Seems much more in the spirit of community moderation than the current process of making unilateral decisions and directing the fallout to Meta.

@ClassicThunder I'm sure we can try that in the future for older questions like this one. However, there are cases where, as I mentioned, catching questions early is important. Additionally, I think you're being a little over dramatic about "unilaterally imposing their opinion". Cleaning up old questions that don't fit with the current rules of the site is a very common thing, and it's something that's far less likely to be done if a committee has to be created for every off topic question.

I understand that and I'm not suggesting you it for each and every topic. However, for popular question that are in a bit of a grey area I think its worth it. Also doesn't have to be a committee with a majority vote. Just you saying "hey I'm planning on doing this any objects?".

Well, if you're wanting to remove moderators imposing opinion, defining the rule with something subjective like "a bit of a grey area" doesn't work very well. I didn't see the question as being in a grey area, it was clear to me that it was seeking opinions. Just look at the edits, particularly: "So to get straight to point: Would it be fun if...". OP wanted to know if people thought their game idea was a fun one. That one isn't in a grey area for me.

@ClassicThunder As I stated in my post, the question as it stands today needs fixing without a doubt. I believe Byte was right to close it. I created this meta post because I thought it had some potential as a good subjective question and was personally unsuccessful in fixing it.

@Byte56 This highlights my main issue with the current moderation. OPs ask a question that benefits them, expecting them to take the larger community and write their question around that is unrealistic. Very often these questions are a few generalizations / assumptions away from being a good question. This is such a case thus I consider it a grey area. Donut and Ankos idea of lets take this, improve it, and make it a contribution to the site should be an attitude / culture shared or even championed by the moderation team.

I'm not sure why you think that attitude/culture isn't shared by the moderators. The moderators helped with this in chat yesterday: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/83543/what-kind-of-gaming-experiences-does-hiding-game-play-stats-and-formulas-cultiva. I believe I was the one who suggested posting it as a new on-topic question.

And yes, I think when posting questions people should try to generalize for a wider audience. See here: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1545/do-we-care-about-the-ops-unclear-intent

@Byte56 I never said they shouldn't... I said its hard and suggested we make a better effort to fix those questions instead of closing and moving on. And while the moderation team helped. Without the intervention of others the question would have been closed and forgotten.

@ClassicThunder Realize that a closed question is not gone. It's still on the site, it shows up in searches and it's visible to everyone. There are a number of closed questions that still get plenty of views and are still useful to people.

(robotic voice) Directive, commander?

Analyse the present situation.

(robotic voice) Affirmative. Commencing analysis and outcome simulation.

From Dr Strangelove's war room scene; coloured DEFCON-style by unknown artist
Mission briefing
Situation: The core question is good. The most valuable answers homed in on it. However, the asker's polling-additions distracted some answers into uselessness. The question was closed because of the polling-additions.
Objective: We want the core question, but without polling. All answers should target the core question, not the polling question.
Examining potential strategies.
Strategy 1: Repair
Spartan attempted this independently but failed for administrative reasons. Route to objective:

Rollback/edit to condense the question to its core.
Flag/delete answers that only targeted the opinion-based questions, because they then miss the question.
Edit other answers to remove references to the opinion part.
Flag/delete comments debating question closure.

Discussion of issues:

Original asker might resist. Threat of re-closure should silence them.
Some opinionated answer material is deleted forever. Unfortunate collateral.

Strategy 2: Redo
This means simply declaring the current state of affairs a failure and re-asking the core question as a separate question altogether.
Discussion of issues:

Many great answers are left behind in the closed question. Unfortunate collateral.
Both questions may be closed as duplicates of the other by popular vote. Linking to this meta post should silence that. However, that may re-ignite this same discussion at a later time.
Readers might confuse the two questions or be confused by them. Could rename the old question, or attach a banner to clarify the situation. This may again cause this same discussion and will remain confusing to some degree.

Conclusions
Repairing the question is harder than redoing it.
Repairing the question causes opinionated answer contents to be deleted.
Redoing the question causes answer duplication and general confusion.
(robotic voice) Analysis complete.

OK, I'm back to human now. :)
I think we should try to fix this question with edits. Losing opinionated answers isn't as bad as all the confusion caused by duplication if anyone ever wants to ask this question again.
It would take work. I'd be up for it though.
Before I start, do I make sense? Have I missed anything that might accidentally cause a bunch of chaos?

I had started to work on a rewrite earlier today per Byte's recommendation and after some encouragement from Noctine I was finally brave enough to post this version. If you have any feedback ping me in chat and let me know. - http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/83543/what-kind-of-gaming-experiences-does-hiding-game-play-stats-and-formulas-cultiva

OP here.
It took me over a hour to compose that question plus at least 3-4 cancelled attempts in days before, because I already have experience with pedantic privileged users who bite when they see a tiniest bit of imperfection or non-conformance on StackOverflow.
Nowadays I know I can only ask a question on any SE that can be answered with a black on white "here it is the correct answer". I learned that it's pointless asking anything "just out of curiosity" because it would likely have some subjective elements that cause it to be closed quickly. My question only barely escaped that fate (I didn't have enough reputation to see the close votes piling up, only know it from the comments).
In the question I expected game devs know some psychology, because in order to be able to sell the game, you must find hooks so the players want to play it. I expected answers like "This, that and those research papers say players like full control and will be frustrated if you don't give all information to them." or something like that. Not their personal opinion.
If you can reword it so it can inspire answers backed by evidence or research and not personal opinion. Then edit it. You have the powers, do whatever you want with it. I'm just a casual user who is sometimes curious...

SpartanDonut has given it a shot here - http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/83543/what-kind-of-gaming-experiences-does-hiding-game-play-stats-and-formulas-cultiva

It would be fantastic if a question could receive real evidence for good-subjective topics, but it is a very difficult scenario.  The far more likely result is that it will turn into an opinion poll.  So based on reality, closing is the correct option.  However, there are occasional surprise answers that meet your description.  It would be a shame if we closed questions before those could be posted (though the question may be closed regardless).

I think the way I've phrased the question makes it clear that I would like opinions backed up by experiences or resources / references


text:
Is the Game Development SE also a place for game design questions?
I'm having trouble finding out where to go with some of my questions regarding game design, and was wondering if GDSE was the right place to go. The reason being that most of the questions I've seen seem to be mostly about programming, not as much about design.
Topics like:

Difficulty balance/escalation
Game monitization
PVP mechanics
Game psychology, skinnerboxing ect.
Game community management

Would these topics be welcome here?

I believe this question has been asked and answered here: Is this the site for game design related questions?

Yes of course game design questions are allowed. However, like every other question, they must be asked in a good subjective way:

Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:

inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”
tend to have long, not short, answers
have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone
invite sharing experiences over opinions
insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references
are more than just mindless social fun

For more detail, read about our guidelines for great subjective questions and blog post about how real questions have answers.

You can see these related questions:

Do the rules allow opinion-based discussion, and should we allow it?

Are general reference threads a good fit for this community?

Are beginner "design review" questions acceptable?

Is this the site for game design related questions?

I would like to point out I think we more of these sorts of questions but we also need stricter moderation regarding the answers around them.

IMO these are often the sort of questions that attract the higher quality contributors, the same contributors complain the site lacks interesting questions. More abstract and softer questions benefit from real word experience and expertise.

Unfortunately they also attract some of the worst answers I've seen on the site, but this is because the answering user is being lazy, not an inevitably caused by the softness/grayness of the question.

When you say "stricter moderation," I just want to point out that that really has to be community moderation (via downvotes). It really can't be unilateral diamond moderator intervention in most cases (nonsense/spam/non-answers excepted).

I would say yes !
These things are entirely relevant to game development as they most certainly effect the code required to deliver.

The biggest issue with game design questions, is that they often veer into opinion based questions. But if it is a game design question with a straight objective answer, then it fits Game Development.

I don't think it even needs to be an objective answer. If we restrict GDSE to purely objective answers then the allowed questions would be a subset of SOs.

Most of these questions fall into "good objective". Unfortunately this site suffers a bit from by-the-book mods which follow the rules to the letter, not to the intention.

While the vast majority of questions you encounter are technical in nature, the more theoretical topics you mentioned are also asked here from time to time.
There aren't many questions like that, but when they are asked they are usually those questions which get the highest ratings, showing that they are very welcome in this community.
My highest rated question (172 upvotes) was about balance and player psychology. Only one person thought it was a bad question for this site (unfortunately that one person also happened to be a moderator, so the question is closed now).
My second highest rated question (73 upvotes) was about community management.


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Anniversary Game Jam 2014 Preparations
Actual jam thread: Anniversary Game Jam 2014
One year ago, on November 1st, we held our very first community game jam, and it was very successful. Every quarter since then, we've continued the tradition with a seasonal game jam, with the summer jam having as many entrants as the previous two combined! Let's keep these jams thriving!
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Game Jams, it's where you are given a theme at the start of the jam, then you are challenged to make an entire game from beginning to end over the course of anywhere from 4 hours to 10 days. The jams we run here are solo projects (although there has been some talk about teaming up), and we run them over a weekend, starting on Friday. They can be lots of fun, and you end up with something playable at the end of it.

Theme
Alex started a thread a while back asking what theme we should run this time, and the community has voted for a Potluck theme:

Before the start, everyone submits 5 "foods" (English words) into a common "buffet".
At the start, the words are shuffled and dealt to participants, so everyone has 5 random words from what others brought.
Pick 3 of those. That's your jam theme.

Click here to submit your 5 words
 and a little information about yourself. Please be imaginative and clean. If I don't like words you've submitted, I might have to assign them back to you!
I have left the email field as optional, but if you fill it out, you should get an automated email with a link back to the survey so that you can edit your entry at any time. Your email address will also be used to send you your jam words when the jam is about to begin.
If you do not provide me with an email address, please make sure you have logged in to the Game-Development Chat at least once so that I can ping you with your words before the jam begins. It also can't hurt to save the edit URL provided at the end of survey.

Date
The jam will take place over the weekend of October 31st through November 2nd.
I want the core jam hours to start Friday afternoon/evening, and end Sunday night for whichever timezone you reside. Since the world isn't flat, we have to have a wide time frame to allow everyone these core jam hours. Some people will get all day Friday, others will get some of Monday, etc, but everyone will get these core jam hours.
Edit: Alternatively, you can opt in for the Thursday through Saturday schedule. Your jam will start 24 hours early, and will end 24 hours early. Please let me know if you'd like to opt in for the Thursday -> Saturday schedule before the jam.

Not that your name at the end of your profile URL is not actually part of your ID. Not pasting it won't hurt

Thanks John for the effort in managing this jam! Excellent work on the system for submitting words.

We should hold the jam from:
October 31st through November 2nd

I can't vote on my own answer but this one gets my vote

I'm going set the date sometime on Monday October 6th my local time. Get your votes in before then!

Some of us are in NaNoWriMo and will lose a couple of days to that. D'oh.

Just an idea, since not everyone in the world agrees that Saturday/Sunday should be the weekends, it might be better if we start from Thursday, and end it on Sunday. For example our weekend is Thursday/Friday. I'm not sure if there are any Arabs wanting to participate or not, but their weekend is on Friday/Saturday.

I agree with this.

I personally have no issues with this and don't foresee it being a problem.

@SpartanDonut you live in US! at least for me, it'll mess with my weekly schedule, though I might be able t adopt myself

@Ali.S I was saying I don't have a problem with your proposal and gave you an upvote.

I'm hesitant to extend the jam by another 24 hours for everyone because the games will keep getting better, and I don't want participants to feel like they need to spend 4 days on their game in order for it be as awesome as the others. That said: how about we provide an alternative schedule: Thursday -> Saturday? Those who opt in would receive their potluck words 24 hours early, and their jam would conclude 24 hours early.

@JohnMcDonald That's fine by me.

We should hold the jam from:
October 24th through October 26th

I'm going set the date sometime on Monday October 6th my local time. Get your votes in before then!

Are we going to see the whole buffet before getting our own personal theme?
Personally I prefer to see the whole list.

I don't think I'm going to release the entire list before the jam starts. I would like keep some anonymity behind the word entries so people don't get singled out. However; if this question gets 5 or more votes: I'll release some portion of the list one week in advance of the jam.


text:
What to do about "How do I maintain game balance while promoting interaction between dead and alive players?"
So I think this question started out solidly but recently mutated due to the discussion in the comments into a bad question.

How do you motivate players to be content with randomly selected roles that are often complex to play and differ drastically in playstyle (AND to stick around till the end of game)?

I think this bit here is a good solid question, I interpreted it as "How do I engage and retain players who are assigned random roles that are involved enough to take multiple playthroughs to learn in a Mafia style game?". Mafia style games are quite common and popular so there is likely to be documented opinions and experiences from industry experts additionally there are probably also psychological studies that can be used to form answers. Additionally this seems to be the question being answered by the more highly voted answers.
However the OP summarized the question in a comment that read as quoted below.

The question can be really boiled down to "how to promoting interaction between dead vs alive players while keeping the game balanced."

I don't like this question. It can not be generalized to other games in the same genre and requires an depth knowledge of the OPs game.
So question is, do other people agree with me? And if so should the question be closed and re-asked or edited to what I believe the original question was?
Either way I think the question should be edited so that it is general enough where a link to the OP's game is not required and if that's impossible closed.

I don't like the question, but I don't dislike it enough to unilaterally close it (again).
My advice to you would be to do what you think is right; if you think you can edit it to improve it (in the fact of it's multiple close votes), do so. Try your best not to edit it in a way that disrupts the answers, but in a pinch err in favor of fixing the question versus preserving answers.


text:
Where is the question which lists Game Development SE questions with funny titles?
I could not find the link for the above!

"Funny Titles" is subjective, I doubt there is one.

We hate fun. There isn't such a link.

It's possible you are confusing this site with the meta for gaming.stackexchange.com? That site is more prone to "funny" question titles and may maintain such a list on their meta.

Yeah, I was, sorry for the stupid question.

Eh, I guess I'll self-flag this so someone can delete it haah

According to a moderator at Arqade, they used to have such a question but deleted it because they also hate fun. The best you're likely to get is this (thanks to fredley and Wipqozn).

Man! What a tragedy! But thanks for the link!

I'm not aware of any such post on Meta. Further, I don't see a reason to maintain such a list, so I'm not sure why such a question would exist in the future.


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What value does the "indie" tag provide?
As of this writing, 69 questions are tagged indie.
What value does this tag provide (if any), and what guidelines should we provide in its wiki to encourage correct use?

For what it's worth, I'm not likely to recommend a 5,000$ per seat software license to someone with an indie tag on their question, but I might otherwise.

That's okay, because questions asking for software recommendations are off-topic anyway. Even disregarding that, if price or license classification (after all, some software packages offer difference licenses based on income tiers, et cetera) are relevant to the question they should be described by the question; the "indie" tag doesn't add that information since the definition of "indie" is broad. Tags are about searchability and should be used mainly for that, not for scoping the question.

I didn't quite mean a software recommendation. More a question which would be answered by a certain tool/software/codec/etc.

I know, but I still think if the asker is price-sensitive it should be in the question; the tag doesn't add sufficient information, because indie developers have a broad range of purchasing power (and that's list is hardly exhaustive or accurate). You can probably safely assume most people here can't afford several-thousand-dollar products, since the overwhelming majority of active participants here are not representing large professional interests.

It was an example to show that it has some purpose, not commenting on if that purpose was directly useful here (hence this being a comment, not an answer). That said, the list is completely ridiculous ... it's like having a list of devs with beards. 5,000$ is just a hyperbolic example, that much should have been obvious. The workflow of most indie developers isn't going to be comparable to that of most game developers working on professional interests of any size.I don't know how useful it is to debate that unless you're worried about the semantics of the term (which is equally pointless).

I agree, it's not a worthwhile debate; I just pointed out the list because it's such a pointless and arbitrary list and serves to underscore how pointless and arbitrary the definition of "indie" itself could be.

"The workflow of most indie developers isn't going to be comparable to that of most game developers working on professional interests of any size" is hardly arbitrary. That's why I say you might argue over the semantics of the term, but it's not an entirely useless term, that list is just using it in an embarrassingly nonsensical and useless way...

I don't think this tag provides any useful information, and we should remove it.
indie is a meta-tag, and describes more the context of the problem rather than the problem itself, which doesn't offer enough improved search-ability to warrant the consumption of an entire tag slot on a question.
Further, the overwhelming majority of questions asked on this site are from non-professional or hobby developers, such that the indie tag is actually applicable to all questions. Therefore, like game-development, it's not a valid tag.

+1. This aligns with StackExchange's official stance on meta tags.

I have eliminated the tag from all questions (manually, because apparently StackExchange thinks bulk-tag-removal features are not something we should be allowed to have).

For future reference, I think the good folks at SO have implemented one. There is also a tag-removal (aka 'burnination') script out there.

Yes, I know developers and CMs can do it, but that's obnoxious and neuters some of the community's ability to manage itself.


text:
How can "Best view for 2D Android game" be salvaged?
I'm posting this thread at the request of the asker of this question:
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/86054/best-view-for-2d-android-game-in-xamarin
The asker cannot post this his- or her-self due to the pointless and new-user-hostile reputation limits on participating in meta.
What can be done to salvage this question and make it on-topic and appropriate for this site?

I think the below, while not doing the best at capturing the original intent, would change the question into something generally useful.

What capabilities do more standard views typically used in game
  development (SurfaceView or TextureView) provide beyond the WebView?
  And is it worth incorporating these more complicated views into a game
  that is only as complicated as the example game?

Part 1 can be answered based on technical knowledge and part 2 is good subjective in my opinion due to the below bullet points being hit.

Great subjective questions invite sharing experiences over opinions.
Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references.
Great subjective questions are more than just mindless social fun.

I don't believe the engine part can incorporated without making the question too broad in scope or opinion based.

As written, this question is off-topic because it asks "what would you recommend" of three possible technologies, which categorizes it as a "which technology" question.

I do think there's some potential to the topic, but I'm struggling to see how to phrase it. The (good) bit of the question is the part about using a WebView (or not) for the display of the game. "Should I use a WebView?" is basically a yes-or-no question (the answer to which is, "it depends -- if it works perfectly for you, keep doing it").
Edited to be a question about a specific problem the asker encountered with a WebView (beyond it "being strange") and asking how to overcome that would fit, I think, but there's no evidence in the original post that there is anything "wrong" with the asker's game or it's performance at all.
I think the query about switching to a game engine, and the two bulleted queries about "what would you recommend" need to get edited about. But beyond that I don't know how to reshape the question to be useful to the OP and still fit.

I do see one possibility, though, but it's a massive edit that more-or-less discards the "view" aspects of the question entirely. The asker's problem seems be to centered around the "design paralysis" issue of being halfway through a functional implementation and encountering doubts about the accepted correctness of his or her approach. I can see a case being made for transforming this question into the softer, but possibly good-subjective query "Should I start over halfway through a working game if I'm not doing something 'correctly?'" leaving the original WebView example can be left in as a motivating example.


text:
GameDev "Tour" - factual error
This morning I misclicked the "tour" option instead of logging in, and noticed that, though SE has switched to the "on hold" closing system instead of an actual "close"ing system, the tour still says that questions may be closed. Is this in error?

Questions are still closed, they're just named differently for the first five days. The only other difference is edits made to an on hold question put it in the re-open queue), otherwise closed and on-hold are the same. However, the name change helps people understand that there's still a chance to fix the question.
I suppose we could change the text to read something like:

Questions that need improvement may be put on hold until fixed, questions that are not fixed will be closed automatically after five days. 'On hold' and 'closed' questions cannot receive new answers.

While technically they're closed right away, this wording helps people understand that questions can be fixed and they should try to do so before they're "closed".


text:
What is our stance on "recommendation" questions?
On the main StackOverflow site there is a specific close reason:

Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software
  library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack
  Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam.
  Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve
  it.

What is the GDSE's position on this subject, questions where asker knows what technology he wants to use. Should we keep and encourage that kind of questions here?
For example:

Using L-Systems to procedurally generate cities
Image splitting / tiling software for Mac
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/11548/opengl-book-recommendation
Can anyone recommend a 3D model viewer with shading?

If those are off-topic, should they be closed under this reason?

Questions about "how to get started," "what to learn next," or "which technology to use" ...

I would close such questions as "which technology" questions, generally, if there is no other more concrete problem in the question.

As for the specific questions you linked, I think all of them should be closed except the L-systems question, which is not asking about a tool or specific L-systems library but rather for an explanation of what L-systems are. I left that one alone.
The book recommendation question I closed as "too broad," since it felt like it made more sense than "which technology" (books may or may not fit into your definition of "technology" after all, but the question is certainly a list-generator and thus too broad). Everything else I closed as off-topic due to "which technology."

I suggest to expand the existing close reason:

Questions about "how to get started", "what to learn next", "which technology to use" or "searching for tool/implementation" are discussion-oriented questions which involve answers that are either based on opinion, or which are all equally valid. Those kinds of questions are outside the scope of this site. Visit our help center for more information.

Another solution would be to rework close reasons and borrow some good ideas from StackOverflow.

This is a discussion, if you downvote, please care to explain why.

Downvotes on meta generally mean "I disagree with this," just like upvotes generally mean "I agree with this," I wouldn't worry about it too much.

For myself, I don't see that the bolded addition you are proposing is necessary. A tool is a kind of technology, so "which tool" is equivalent to "which technology," (and is in fact partly the reason why we chose that term). Your follow-up ("rework close reasons and borrow from SO") isn't actionable -- rework them how? Borrow what? Remember we have a fixed number of close reasons to customize (and we are at capacity).

@JoshPetrie: Ah, I did not knew that. Thanks for the info and editing the question! :)


text:
Can I post the same question on Stack Overflow and GameDev?
Is there any etiquette around posting the same question on two (or more) StackExchange sites?
I have a question that is programming related, but involves a game I want to write in Cocos2d-X in Lua here, which could also be suitable for GameDev.
Must I choose one site to post this question? Will it upset people if the same question is posted on multiple sites to get a response from as wide an audience as possible?

Yes you must choose one site, and yes it will upset people.

This question appears to be off-topic because it is an intra-network cross-post.

You should not cross-post between StackExchange sites. This devalues both communities and runs counter to the mission of StackExchange.
If the moderators (or a sufficient number of regular users) of either site notice that you have cross-posted, they'll generally close the question. This usually means you'll end up with both questions closed as the communities don't wholly overlap. So don't do it, please.
StackExchange is about collecting canonical answers to canonical questions in a single place so they can be easily found in the future, and repeating a question goes against that by making it harder (impossible) to determine which is the canonical "best" question and answer. That's why we close questions as "duplicates" when they are asked twice on the same site. The same concept applies across SE sites.
Further, StackExchange is very careful about excessively splitting it's communities (opening new SE sites) and generally only does so if there is compelling enough set of potential questions, answers, and users that are distinct from any existing set. That means for the most part questions are more suitable for one site or another, even if only by a small margin, and so you should ask that question there. In the case where a question may be equally suitable on many sites, pick one.
I understand your desire to expose your question to as broad an audience as possible but StackExchange favors the aggregate, long-term over the individual immediate-term (that means policy is generally chosen to favor "more users who will be here later," than it is chosen to favor "you, right now"). The best way to increase exposure to your question is to ask it on StackExchange and on other, non-StackExchange forums that might be relevant to the topic at hand.
The only scenario where it is acceptable to post the same question on another site is if that question was closed on the first site for being off-topic or better-suited elsewhere.
Don't cross-post.

I'd say its bad etiquette to ask the same question twice. If a question is purely related to fixing a problem while programming you should ask it at Stack Overflow. If a question is related to a game-oriented library or a programming problem that is closely related to games you should ask it here. When 'we' (that includes you) think a question is better off at another website moderators can move it!
When in doubt you can always join the gamedev chat room (see top left button) and we can decide together where you have the biggest chance of gettig a good answer.

In general, it's not a good idea to cross post because there should be one site where a question is a better fit. However, in special cases, I'd say it's ok to cross-post. But these should be rare. In my case, I asked this at StackOverflow:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25128245/what-does-yield-return-false-do-in-unity-c-sharp-scripts
and it got closed by over-zealous C# people who assumed I was asking a duplicate. They did not read carefully enough to understand what I was really asking because they had no knowledge of Unity's "coroutine" system, and how poorly documented it is.
So I re-asked here, because I figured some actual Unity users might see it and give me a decent answer:
Does `yield return false;` have special meaning in Unity3d C# scripts?
I got a good answer, and it's got a decent amount of upvotes both on the question and the answer.

Seeing as there is nothing physically standing in the way of you doing this, and it is a completely subjective topic (one fraught with emotion, it seems), I am going to offer my opinion:
Can I post the same question to multiple sites?
Yes, technically there is nothing stopping me.
May I post the same question to multiple sites?
If Jeff Atwood had his way, perhaps not. But even he is not stopping me.
Should I post the same question to multiple sites?
That depends on a number of factors:
Am I responsible enough to follow up on the same question on all sites? In other words, would I make sure to go back to each one and follow up with the people who answer? If I get a satisfactory answer from one instance of the question, would I go back to all the others, and provide a link back to the answer that helped me and inform other readers thereof (as opposed to just leaving them to rot)?
If I can answer yes to the these questions and follow up in a responsible manner, then surely there is no reason why I shouldn't post the same question to multiple sites.
If, on the other hand, I was just a taker who wanted a quick answer and never followed up with the people who spent their time and energy reading the question and answering it, then I should not be posting my question to multiple sites.
It would help if, in each instance of the same question I post, I also add a note and link saying where else I have posted the question.
Another facet brought up in another answer to this question is whether the sites have the same users and whether in fact I would be wasting my and other people's time by posting to different sites. That too could be a deciding factor.

See, the very fact that you cross-posted this is obnoxious and serves only to fracture the discussion. This is a terrible idea.


text:
Can we prevent the change of post order when moderators are editing meta info?
I have noticed a great wave of editings by Admins recently. Some are from realy old posts and just few things like remove/add of tags.
This is a little unfair with new posts, because that changes are rising theirs posts to the first page of the site and hiding the questions that may need more attention.
If it's not possible to prevent that posts to arise to the first page, at least the admins could have a limite of that kind of editing per day. What do you think?

These kinds of mass editing events are rare. There isn't a way for us to edit these questions without rising to the top of the active list. If you're interested in seeing the newest questions, I suggest you sort your question list by "Newest" instead of "Active":

This is how I typically view the main page, so I can address the newest questions.
The "Active" sorting will always be subject to disruption from anyone editing questions, not just moderators.


text:
Can this question be improved to get it reopened?
I'm talking about this question
First, a disclaimer: I have the best answer at this point, and I heavily edited the question, so do take my opinions with a pinch of salt.
I think that the original wording of the question was not very good, but the general idea of the question is in my opinion pretty interesting.
The question may be thought as of broad, as it does not talk about a specific genre, but I think it is specific enough on the topic of difficulty (as in, how to design difficult games).
I think the answer I provided offers good advice regardless of the game genre, and I would really like to invite for more answers. This is a topic that fascinates me, and it saddens me to find so few interesting and fun questions regarding game level design.
I edited the question, and it has gotten 3 reopen votes at this point. The question itself has 12 upvotes and 1 downvote, so I would like to ask you guys to either vote to reopen it, or help me improve the question to get it reopened.
Additionally, I would like to ask moderator Josh Petrie why he thought the question needed to be closed as a moderator action, even though one of the close-voters (Anko) did not provide a comment to support his vote, and the other close-voter (Krom Stern) provided an answer himself, and was pretty supportive of the answer I gave. To be honest, I was expecting the close votes to age by themselves as the question had improved from its original form.

There is no real general solution to the problem so it's useless to ask a general question in my opinion. For example the highest votes answer of Panda Pajama says almost nothing about difficulty of adventure games or role playing games. So you read all the answers and then you didn't learn anything about the things you might be interested in.
I think reducing the scope of the question is the way to go and this was proposed to the questioner but he didn't like that much.
As it is most answers are about difficulty of action games. So why not reducing the question to action games or the likes?


text:
Would GDSE benefit from an official "back it up" policy?
Note that the below post is not a proposal for the specific rules to be put in place but just an inquiry with appropriate background information and my feelings on how the site could change from such a policy.
If the community feels that such a policy would be beneficial then specific details can be fleshed out in subsequent meta posts.

Game design can be a very subjective topic. GDSE (all of SE?) encourages subjective questions and answers to be as constructive as possible given the following guidelines via the Help Center:

All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. How do we
  define that? Constructive subjective questions...

inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”.
tend to have long, not short, answers.
have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone.
invite sharing experiences over opinions.
insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references.
are more than just mindless social fun.

On the Good Subjective, Bad Subjective post there is mention of a "back it up" principal that has been instated in other SE sites.

Back It Up! means that your answers must be based on either:

Something that happened to you personally
Something you can back up with a reference

They talk about how “opinion, by itself, is noise.” They’re not saying that subjective opinions are to be avoided; they’re attempting to mold and shape their inherently subjective Q&A into something constructive, informative and helpful.

Game design is naturally a rather subjective topic and as a result it is very easy to ask subjective questions on the site which, more often than not, don't meet the above criteria. The subjective questions that get asked are often too broad or appear to be discussion oriented in nature. This results in questions (often times interesting questions) getting put on hold / closed as well as confusion in the community as to whether or not design questions are actually allowed to be asked on the site.
I think that by implementing some sort of "back it up" policy we could loosen up the rules a little bit on questions being asked and be more strict on the answers. I believe this could invite more interesting questions and answers into the site which I think could lead to increased user participation.
I would expect a noticable shift in site activity / moderation to be something as described below if such a policy were instated.
From an asker's perspective:

Less focus on phrasing subjective questions so that they fit perfectly in the above guidelines which would allow interesting questions that users like to answer to stay open and receive reputation on.
Less fear of down votes / closed questions simply because the question they have is subjective in nature / design related
Continued effort to keep the question as high quality and narrow in scope as possible, though some broadness may be more forgivable under such a policy

From an answerer's perspective:

More focus on providing high quality answers that are backed up by facts, references, and experiences rather than opinion
More effort put into answers to subjective questions due to policy that is in place which doesn't allow an answerer to simply throw up their opinion for quick reputation

From a voter's or moderator's perspective:

Increased moderation and voting on answers to subjective questions to make sure that answers are not just spouting off opinion which makes the answers more useful to users who would visit the site
Decreased down votes and close votes on questions simply because the question is subjective, broad in scope, or discussion oriented
Continued voting down and/or to close questions and answers that are not a good fit for the site - i.e. not all subjective questions should stay open just because the policy makes the rules a little looser than they currently are.

Such a policy could have some negative effects on GDSE as well

This would absolutely require increased moderation on answers. Currently it's easy to close questions that would encourage bad answers and such a policy would provide more opportunity for bad answers since some questions that may have been closed in the past could stay open under such a policy.
This potentially would create an even larger grey area of what types of questions are allowed vs what types aren't which could result in a confused user base and an increase of "but this was left open / why was this closed" meta posts. (potentially mitigated by a clearly defined policy but moderation is always subjective)
This does open up the site to questions which won't necessarily have a single best answer (I personally think this is ok but would be a big change and not the traditional SE way)

Do you think GDSE could benefit from such a policy to the point where it's worth having further meta discussion on it? Is it redundant with current SE policy and subsequently unnecessary? Or do you feel this would be an unwelcome change for a Stack Exchange site?
This probably goes without saying, but please do not vote on this question as your response. Create a new answer or vote on an existing answer you agree with.

Question subjectivity causes the most trouble, in my experience, but I think the guidelines in "Good Subjective, Bad Subjective" and the [help] are sufficient. "Good subjective" questions usually get a citation on them indicating that we're looking for substantive answers backed up by references, at which point we usually delete answers that don't qualify.
I think it would be worth pursuing a more formal discussion of this policy, if only to provide a record of that discussion on meta so we can link to it when enacting it on subjective questions. I'm not sure that we actually need to formalize the policy and further than it already is, though.

A strict "back it up" policy is hard on new users who end up running into the 2 link limit for <10 rep users on their first question or answer. On Skeptics Stack Exchange, where much of the value of an answer is in the sources it cites, it became nearly impossible for new users to contribute useful answers at all because a lot of questions need to cite more than 2 sources to cover all sides of an answer. The developers had to put in special coding for that site to disable the link limit.


text:
Are "advantages/disadvantages" questions on topic?
For example questions like this that ask about if feature/algorithm X has an advantages/disadvantages over feature/algorithm y. Such questions encourage discussions and some of the questions and answers might be subjective. Should we consider them on topic or now?

Advantages and disadvantages are rarely very cut-and-dry, and as such tend to have some subjectivity to them. They seem to me to be highly-related to questions where the answer is "it depends," which we don't have a clear community view of.
So I would say that unless the advantages and disadvantages list is very broad, then these questions are generally subject to the "good subject/bad subjective" barometer.

In my opinion such questions are not subjective when the topic in question has a proved advantages or disadvantages. For example it is mathmatically proved that A* has an advantages over Dijkstra. On the other hand, such questions might become subjective were topic X doesn't have proved advantages/disadvantages and it becomes subjective to the observer interpretations. One example could be "What are advantages of Quick time events cut-scenes over playback only cut-scenes"1.
1 I just made this question up

I don't think you can ask an advantages / disadvantages question without it boiling down to a "Which tech to use" question (unless you are very crafty). These kind of questions are very situational and don't offer much useful insight to future visitors. They don't solve a problem.
Instead of focusing on general queries like what are the pros & cons of X, the question should simply be how could I get Y done, I used X so far and result are unsatisfactory because...
I think the rule of thumb is that if that once the question is answered, you should have your pragmatic goal accomplished and make real progress. Questions about pros and cons aren't going to help you complete any tangible tasks.
I remember asking questions like this once about Haxe and also about different ways of implementing the Events pattern. Reading the answers was an enjoyable experience but they were obviously not gong to help me make any actual progress. I still had to play around with Haxe and decide if I like it or not. I also never really had a problem with the Observer Pattern. I wanted to learn about alternatives implementations out of curiosity. The answer was informative and well written; I suspect it was not really useful to anyone in a bind.
I think SE really shines when it helps people who are in a bind and we shouldn't let people crowd with questions that are simply there for fascination and enjoyment although it sounds dreary, it helps keep SE lean and effective.


text:
Can I ask a question with an answer in mind that recommends a specific service?
I am a Ukrainian game developer and we are about to run a crowdfunding campaign for our first title. For quite a while I was looking for ways to run the campaign on Kickstarter (it does not support Ukraine), but could not as there are zero information on the web about it. Our only option was to run the campaign on Idiegogo instead which is, shortly speaking, 10 times less effective. Recently I heard from a friend that there is a service that facilitates using Kickstarter in other countries.
So I believe that the following question should be on stackoverflow:
"How can I launch a Kickstarter campaign for my game from all over the world?" with an answer, of course.
Here is why I believe Stackoverflow is the best place for it:

Transparency. Stackoverflow allows to upvote/devote questions, therefore, in the end of the day it will not be a dumb advertisement but a credible q&a evaluated by public. If the service is good, the answer will have upvotes, if it's not - it will go below zero, therefore visitors will immediately see a)a possible solution and b)the quality of the solution.
Gamedev is the right place to be. Kickstarter is unparalleled in it's ability to raise funds for indie game developers and stackoverflow's gamedev section is the place where every self-respecting game developer goes at least several times a week. I believe that it's only logical that such question appears in this section.
Gamedev already has similar questions. Marketing aspects of game development are quite often discussed on Stackoverflow. And Kickstarter, while being a powerful croudfunding platform is also a huge marketing engine, I believe this question would fit well among:

Casual games market share distribution?
How was the world game market segmented in 2011?
Marketing: Angry Birds - How it's done
Finally if there is no way to post it on Gamedev's section I believe there should be some other section on Gamedev where this question can be posted, but still in my opition Gamedev is a place to be. Stackoverflow is getting bigger every day and it covers almost all the aspects of human lives nowadays, there is no way such intel should not have it's place on this site.

Just to confirm: you want to post a question about using kickstarter to crowd-fund your game?  Also, you are free to answer your own questions on Meta, so you should relocate the portion of your question that offers an answer and post it as an answer.  This is the usual method when people post a question and their opinion about its answer.

Sorry, I am new to meta I have no idea how to properly structure posts here. I know that posting questions sometimes result in them being deleted on the main site and wanted to ask if this question will be approved?

No. I deleted the first question these guys posted. It was quite clearly spam. I also edited your post here and comments to remove reference to the service, as this post itself felt very spam like.

All three of those questions you linked as examples are bad questions for the site, in fact; they're just old. I've close them all.

The contact details for the advertising department are that-a-way.
Yes, this is off topic, as per Seth's post.
But it's also an attempt to insert what is clearly an advertisement into the site content - which alone is reason enough to keep it firmly off of the site.

I can see your point, yes it is a clear advertisement, I just feel that there should be a room on Stack for such intel. Oh well.

@cubrman There is room on Stack Exchange for such info. By way of paying for it with advertising.

There is "room" on StackExchange sites for tons of information, but StackExchange doesn't want all the information possible. It only wants a particular subset (opinion-oriented discussions are information that SE could have room for, it just does not want that kind of information).

No, you should not post that question here.
Gamedev.SE is for posting technical or design challenges that arise during game development.  These questions should cover topics to which a game developer would have the most to offer.  In spite of Kickstarter being used frequently for game development funding, your question is not about developing games.
More to the point, your question isn't about using kickstarter; it's about a specific issue with Kickstarter's terms of use that forbid certain countries from using their service.  Again, this is not a game development issue; it's an issue with Kickstarter's terms.  It might even be a legal question, which is discouraged almost universally across all StackExchange sites.
I don't believe there is a SE site dedicated to crowdfunding services and their terms of use.  Even if there was, I would recommend writing directly to Kickstarter or other services.

I think you completely misunderstood the idea. In no way can it be regarded as a legal question, as there is no dispute here: this service is allowed by Kickstarter team and proven to work. Moreover, just like it is about a specific issue with Kickstarter forbidding certain coutries, it's about a way to overcome a this issue. The specificity of the question makes it a great fit for the stack's specific-question-specific-answer format. Once again, I see no difference between this question and a question about marketing strength of Angry Birds, where the answerer states which aspects of the game

... help it's sales on iOS market. I cannot see the fine line you are trying to draw for the stack's format.

Its definitely a legal question as you ask people to try and find ways around the rules imposed on the site. Your argument that KS condones it doesn't hold (a few projects slipping through is not legally condoning anything, and the terms of services explicitly prohibit it. As they state the project must be identified by a member of the project team who is eligible to use KS). Even if it were no legal question,  its not a technical question, so it is definitely not something for GD.

@RoyT. I can't see how there can be any problem with KS rules any time in the future as the person confirming the project is always a part of the development team. This service creates a Canadian corporation on developers' behalf where the owners are shareholders, which effectively makes him a part of development team.

For what it's worth, non technical questions are allowed here. That said this is indeed a legal question because as far as I can tell the jist of the question actually is "How do I get my game funded on KS when their ToS doesn't allow my country to use their service?"


text:
Anniversary Game Jam 2014
Congratulations, everyone!
The jam has ended, and the voting has started already. Check out the answers to this question and the games inside them, and vote them up if you think they deserve it. Downvotes are fine if that's how you want to vote, but at least leave a comment so the creators know how they should improve.
The voting will end on Sunday, November 9th, at 00:00 UTC (7 days after the end of the competition, minus a few hours so that I can be awake to close it) If you wanted to participate but didn't have the chance, don't be sad! There will be another jam in the Winter!
Original text:

Time
The Anniversary Game Jam 2014 will officially take place between
  October 31st
  5am
  and November 3rd
  7am
  UTC. Effectively Friday evening through to Sunday night for your time
  zone.
Please submit your game before Sunday late-night for your time zone as
  you will not have time to work on your game on Monday.
Rules
We're going to keep the same rules as before:

Participants are allowed to write games for any platform.
All publicly available libraries and middleware are allowed. All publicly available creation tools (e.g. Photoshop or 3DS Max) are
  allowed.
The entrant is allowed use any premade assets as long as they're freely available on the web before the start of the jam, and the
  licenses allow them to be used in an open source project (e.g.
  opengameart.org). If you plan to use assets you've created prior to
  the jam, release them to opengameart or the like before the jam
  begins.
Assets created by the entrant during the game jam may also be used.
The forming of teams is not allowed.
Each entrant may ask questions on the main gamedev.stackexchange site, as long as the questions are on-topic as per normal site rules.
  Alternatively, the
  chatroom
  may also be used.
Each entrant must release their game as open source after attaching a license of their choice.

Theme
Potluck Jam! Before the jam, everyone submitted 5 words into the
  potluck. When the jam started, each participant was assigned 5 random
  words from those submitted. Contestants pick 3 of these words to use
  as their personal theme. If you are late to the game, come over to
  chat, and
  we can hook you up. Here are the word assignments:

afunplatypus:
  Force, Redirection, Following, Underground, Explosions
ali-s: Concurrency, Laser, Delusion, Airlifter, Attack
almo:
  Experimental, Acid, Mace, Armory, Energy-shield
anko: Explosions, HYPER-challenging, Heights, Automation, Destroy
ashes999:
  Spy, Flat, Bread, Lasers, Dream
attackinghobo:
  Water, Skis, Spider, Latvian, Dodging
bbdude95:
  Mana, Turtle, Sisyphus, City, Pacifism
byte56:
  Industry, Bum, Parallelism, Heaven, Hat
congusbongus:
  Earth, Existential, Honey, Empire, Crossbow
costava:
  Space, Floating, Piece, Flogging, Ocean
cyborg: Mustard, Pancakes, Warp, Fruit-tree, Detective
delkaan: Panda, Imagination, Blue, Timetravel, Explosion
joe: Matter, Flat, Backtrack, Light, Population
john-mcdonald:
  Wind, Power, BBQ, Gear, Cows
lasse: Evolution, Vortex, Non-combat, Roomba, Upgrade
lokkij: Harvest, Fluidic, Square, Elevator, Paranoia
micklh: Experimental, Acid, Mace, Armory, Energy-shield
mlm: Meats, Lasers, Deep, Blink, Void
paraknight:
  Meta, Wormhole, Tactical, Unity, Bears
pip: Generator, Cespool, Marble, Boxes, Future
spartandonut:
  Ninja, Battlefield, Bouncy, Panic, Crafting
the-phantom-derpstorm:
  Romance, Polka, Work, Detcord, Caves
trilarion: Fast, Fire, Interruption, Defend, Robots

All Done?
When your game is complete, add an answer here with a link to a
  playable version, a link to the source, a screenshot or two, and what
  your 5 words were. Don't forget to vote on the other games, and have
  fun!
Please refrain from voting on your favorites until the jam has
  concluded. You will have an entire week to vote on the games at the
  conclusion of the jam.

let the brainstorming begin!

Unfortunately I can't participate, I just wanted to bring some food to the potluck, not eat. Though, "Bum Hat Heaven" would have been a fun game.

Closed to prevent new submissions during the voting period.

Panda Replay

In this puzzle / platformer game, you control a panda. The goal is to collect the yellow token to advance to the next stage. The panda can push the light brown crates and bombs, but can not be blown up by the bomb. The panda has the ability to "time travel". Time travelling allows the panda to maintain his current position on the map while "resetting" the puzzle to what it was in the beginning, allowing him to perform actions that were previously not possible. He can only time travel a limited number of times per stage.

Given words: Panda, Imagination, Blue, Timetravel, Explosion
Used words: Panda, Explosion, Timetravel

Play the game / Code
Note: It might take a while to load. If you get a black screen, it's loading. Also, some people have had problems on Firefox. If you do, try it on Chrome.
Controls
Use the arrow keys to move the panda. Spacebar or the up key to jump. Use "T" to time travel. Icons on the top right of the screen allow you to jump between completed puzzles and reload the current puzzle.
Technology
Phaser, Tiled

Great job! Loved the puzzles you were able to produce with the gameplay mechanic. FYI: I had a weird issue where level 2 was impossible because my panda was slow. I switched from FF to Chrome, and the panda was much more responsive.

Bohr automaton
Theme-words: Heights, Automation, Destroy

It's a web-based puzzle game; inspired by Niels Bohr's electron energy level theory.
Play it | Browse code
(Works best in Chrome/Chromium on desktop. Others likely have rendering bugs.)

How to play
Aim: Destroy red anti-electrons around your atom, by touching them with electrons.
Controls: Arrange the green electrons on orbits with drag-and-drop, then click the nucleus (center circle) to set them off moving automatically. Click on the nucleus again to reset. To skip between levels, click the little level indicators around the nucleus.
Rules: (The levels are tutorial-like, so maybe just play it.) Electrons move clockwise along their orbits. Each has a "spin" (direction indicated by icon), which determines whether it stays at the same orbit height (square), rises by one every step (up arrow) or drops by one every step (down arrow). Electrons disappear if they go above the highest orbit or lower than the lowest. When an electron destroys an anti-electron, it absorbs its spin and starts moving in that way.
Tech overview
Written in LiveScript, rendered in SVG with D3.js. Sounds in Bfxr and SunVox.
More details and build instructions in the README.md.

Cow War
Play Now! | Browse Source

5 Words: Wind, Power, BBQ, Gear, Cows
Selected Words: Wind, Power, Cows

COW POWER! Make your cows work for you by sending them to the mill where they will increase your cow power. The more cow power you have, the more Cattleium your farm will have. Spend Cattleium on more cows! Alternatively, send your cows to war! The first side to successfully hit the opponent's barn 5 times wins.
Controls: Click and drag \ A \ D \ LEFT \ RIGHT to look around. Click the giant buttons in the top center to do stuff.
Cows cost 10 Cattleium each. You start with 10 cow power (generated by the wind), and each cow increases your cow power by 1, who figured?
All assets were made myself. Thank goodness I found a decent cow to trace.
Moo

I just wanted to come and say Moo!

I played and got 137 cattleium when I played it days ago. I just tried playing today and none of the UI is showing up :/

@MLM, That is really strange, nothing has changed. Try refreshing.

@MLM, I tried it out and was able to reproduce the issue. I suspect that the recent Unity update from Beta 20 to RC1 caused an update in the players and broke my UI. I have installed RC1, recompiled, and re-uploaded. Everything should be like it was.

Traces
Play Now! (online)

5 Words: Meats, Lasers, Deep, Blink, Void
Selected Words: Meats, Lasers, Blink

Traces is twin stick shooter (currently only mouse and keyboard) with a pseudo-3D aesthetic. The goal is to power each building with the laser beam in sequential order all while killing or avoiding the enemy blobs. Activate the first building in sight and find the next building at the end of laser beam. Eat meat to restore your health.
GitHub (source)

Homebound
Guide your crew home by programming your spaceship to reach that distant wormhole. Don't get too close to the planets or their gravity will crash you. Try to win with the fastest time, shortest script, lowest fuel expenditure, or most acrobatically awesome gravity assist! Gameplay is self-explanatory.
Play (Web)
View the source code from directly in your browser; it's all just raw, unobfuscated JavaScript with 0 libraries!

My themes were: Meta, Wormhole, Tactical, Unity, Bears. Try to guess which ones I picked!
I wrote this in a hurry (single digit hours) because of a busy weekend, and you can tell by playing and looking at the code just how rough around the edges this game is, so I'll definitely be taking this further after the jam!
P.S. If a level seems impossible, refresh to regenerate from a new seed.

Time for pancakes!

Given words: Mustard, Pancakes, Warp, Fruit-tree, Detective
Used words: Pancakes, Fruit-tree, Warp

You have 2 minutes and 30 seconds to grab fruit from a stubborn tree that decides himself when to drop his fruit while managing 6 pancakes at once. Good luck! I also did something with the last used word, but you'll have to play to find out...
Technology
Unity 3D 4.6
Builds and Source Code
Here

The URL you pasted is linking to your private files. You need to paste in the public URL

Fixed it, thanks for letting me know!

Diamond in the Rough
A lone ship defending the planets.
Play Online
For best results, download the entire src folder from Github, unzip it, and open index.html.

My Five Words: Space, Floating, Piece, Flogging, Ocean
Don't forget to brag about your score in the comments!
Known Issues:

Sounds may be absent or delayed in Chrome (if you hear some sounds, it does not necessarily mean that you are hearing all of them)

The game works perfectly fine if you download the src folder, unzip it, and open index.html in Chrome. The sound issues in Chrome are ONLY when it is hosted online.

May not load if open in multiple tabs

Source on Github

The .zip is biiiiig: 37MiB compressed, 44M expanded. The culprit seems to be audio/Dream_2_Ambiance.wav, weighing 22M. That might be the source of your sound issues. (I got score 42!)

Gah. I can only get to 26.

You should include credits for your assets, since some of them would be under CC-BY.

@congusbongus You are completely right. I added a section in the readme and an attribution file. I knew I needed to give credit and should have done it ASAP.


text:
How are users with insufficent reputation getting the Custodian badge?
So according to this badge's requirement, we need to complete at least one review task.
The lowest reputation requirement for a review task is 500. So can someone please tell me how a bunch of users with less than 500 rep are somehow getting this badge?
I can't get access to the review tasks (since I lack sufficent reputation), but somehow a bunch of users with as little as one rep and hardly any activity on the site somehow have.
I don't know about anyone else, but something seems very wrong, possibly even broken somewhere.

You don't need to change the title to indicate the status of the question. Accepting an answer below indicates that the question is resolved.

Users at any level of reputation can always review suggested edits made to their own posts.
Looking at the first handful of single-reputation users on the badge list, it looks like all of them have approved a suggested edit to their own post. This counts as a review task and awards the badge.

Ok, so my next stupid question is: how does one approve of a suggested edit to their own post? I can see the edit made to this question appear in my inbox here, but nowhere does an 'approve/deny' button or link appear.

When a suggested edit is made to your post you'll get an inbox notification with a link that will let you review it. However, "suggested edits" only come from users below 2000 reputation. At 2000 reputation, you gain the ability to make edits without approval (that's why you didn't get the ability to approve/deny my edit; I have more than the required reputation).

Ah, ok. Thanks for that.