How do I ask better questions?

Question

This is oversimplifying things, but every day I find myself having thousands of questions, which usually fall into one of these categories:

1. Trivial questions: Stuff that I've probably done before, but I'm just too lazy to remember. I ask google, and the first result shows my answer. This accounts for the vast majority of my questions, and certainly have no merit in being asked here.

2. Intermediate questions: Questions that arise whenever something doesn't work as I expect it to. The majority of the time, looking for the cause of the problem, reading the documentation, debugging and the like solve my problem. If after trying a lot, I haven't found a solution, I end up asking, and after a while of trying a bit more, I find the solution, so I answer my own question. I probably should not even create those questions in the first time, and the lack of interest (upvotes) seem to agree with this.

3. Tough questions: This is the stuff that really makes me think, and where I think I actually need help. However, this is usually too specific, and asking it will help nobody else, because nobody has my exact same problem. So I try to remove the details as much as I can, and end up with a question as generic as I can, like this, this and this. But by removing all the context to make the question generic and useful to other people, I end up dumbing it down, and end up attracting controversy instead of answers. I also fail at making it into a better question, which the extreme lack of upvotes reflect.

So what I now have is a bunch of questions that not only created some useless controversy, but also don't have any useful solutions, and end up wasting both my time and that of the people who answer them and that of the people who may come with a similar question only to find no useful answers.

This is of course not the fault of the people who helpfully try to answer my questions, but my fault by asking bad questions. I try to bring only what I consider to be the most interesting questions, that other people may also have, but I'm pathetically failing at it. Of course, my accept ratio stands at a solid 0%, but I can't accept something that doesn't answer the question, nor can I delete the question.

I would like to know of the expert askers in here, how do you find a balance to ask questions that are both helpful to you and other people, while also attracting useful answers.

Answer 1

The important point to understand, I think, is that StackExchange sites are archived Q&A repositories, not simply Come-Here-To-Get-Help sites.

That is, questions and answers are preserved here in perpetuity to serve those who visit the site in the future, and we only want questions and answers which will be useful to those future visitors. This is why "debug my code for me" questions are typically closed as "too localised"; nobody else is ever going to need an answer about how to fix that particular bit of buggy code.

A simple criteria you can use to determine what questions to post to this site, and what questions to post elsewhere is just this: If you think it's likely that someone else will want to ask the same question here someday, and an absolute answer which applies to everyone can be provided, then absolutely post the question here (after searching to check whether someone has asked the same question here before). If you think it likely that you're the only one who will benefit from the question, or if the 'correct' answer would be different for different people, then a discussion forum or our chat would be a better place to ask -- they're transient discussion mediums which are designed to facilitate personal interactions and assistance. :)

In some cases you can modify a question which is about personal advice just for you, and rewrite it into a question which applies to everyone (often a structure like "What factors influence the choice of whether someone should (A) or (B)?" can be used for this purpose). If you can formulate your question in this way, rather than as "I'm (personal details), should I do (A) or (B)?" then absolutely do so. Make the question apply to everyone, and you'll normally be fine. :)

Answer 2

Your 3 questions have problems for different reasons.

1) It's an interesting question and not a bad one but if there was an answer it would likely be of a complexity that would require a paper to be written about it, and yet is of zero practical use considering most people will either rotate the sprites in Photoshop or accept the graphics hardware's native filtering.

2) This blend question didn't really attract controversy; it just attracted one person who disagreed with the premise of the question. I disagreed with that person's answer, but I don't have a better one to supply. Not every good question has someone here that can answer it. Most people never have a use for anything other than the traditional blending mode and occasionally additive blending. You also have to accept that some people here on GD.SE can be quite brusque with their replies, and don't take it personally.

3) This question is too vague. You removed the extraneous text about your personal situation etc. but it was still too vague, because there are many of different types of online game and many aspects you could want to prototype. You've assumed there must be some sort of tool for your problem, but there isn't. There's just hard work and a lot of reading to do.

Remember this site is heavily focused on clearly answerable questions. Not every question is clearly answerable, and that doesn't make it a bad question, just one unsuitable for this site. In such cases, you might consider forums like Gamedev.net or TigSource.com, or even post on the Gamedev subReddit.

Answer 3

First of all, chill out.

The questions you ask about game dev will get better as you learn more about game dev.

There is nothing wrong with asking a question and having it closed! Not a big deal. A learning process. As you ask more questions and see responses, you're going to find out what this particular community likes to answer (yes, there is an "it's not you, it's them" somewhere in here).

If your question isn't getting upvotes, that does not mean it is not a good question. It just means no one who saw it can relate to it or answer it.

The highest voted questions are basically the ones that everyone can relate to and everyone feels needs a good answer: "What are good games to “earn your wings” with? [closed]", "fixed time step vs variable".

Asking these questions is sort of luck of the draw - you can into the problem and thought to ask it first.