Why is 'Ethical F2P monetisation' a good fit for the site?

Question

Ethical F2P monetisation methods

Which F2P methods do players find ethical and acceptable?

So I find tons of issues with this.

• ethical is subjective.
• acceptable is subjective
• players are simply not a single entity
• each answer will be a list of answers
• answers are very likely to become outdated quickly w/ cultural changes
• answers are very likely to become outdated as additional F2P methods are developed
• answers will be backed up on anecdotal evidence
• answers will based upon observations of specific communities

So all answers will (for a better word) expire quickly and be very incomplete. I don't think these issues are made okay due to it now being a community wiki. (I thought it was accepted that community wikis were not a crutch for questions that are a bad fit for the Q/A format of the site). Additionally being a game developer doesn't make one more qualified to answer this question, in fact most people are answering drawing upon their personal experiences as a consumer.

Also Ethical F2P monetisation methods is not analogous to Why might a PC game have a set number of resolutions? as was argued in the comments.

The answers to Why might a PC game have a set number of resolutions? take into account 2 things, limitations in developer manpower, and technical reasons. Being a game developer actually makes you more qualified to ask this question (it doesn't for the F2P one) and the answers are much less time sensitive.

Answer 1

I don't think it's a good fit for the site, but I will admit to leaving it alone (for the time) as something of a litmus test for the rest of the community.

We as diamond moderators get a lot of flack for exercising our unilateral close votes aggressively on this site. There is some merit to that criticism: as diamond moderators, we should be acting as exception handlers rather than active enforcers. There are several reasons having to step in as frequently as we do is bad:

• It shapes the community around our bias rather than that of the larger userbase. There are four of us, compared to many thousands of non-diamonds. That kind of skew in the direction of the community is undesirable. It goes against much of the StackExchange philosophy.
• It reinforces the precedent that we will step in, leaving the people with the power to vote-to-close less interested in doing so because one of us will take care of it.
• It means the quality bar of available questions fluctuates drastically when the four of us aren't around or as active (typically on weekends).
• It upsets people whose questions are closed due to a perception (grounded in reality) of unfairness or arbitrary closure.

I worry about the quality level of questions here, especially since the Graphics Programming SE got promoted to beta and will likely skim off a good portion of our good questions. Part of the problem with question quality is not having the community have a clear understanding of what it's guidelines should be, and if it isn't capable of exercising those guidelines itself it cannot develop that clear picture.

In the past I have justified most of my unilateral decisions by arguing that question quality needs to be kept high to keep the site afloat and we don't currently have enough active 3k+ users to close bad stuff quickly enough for neophyte-but-well-meaning users to post answers and start reinforcing a precedent that those bad questions are not okay.

So when I saw the question, and its similar in structure to a few other borderline questions we've had recently, I decided not to unilaterally close it to see if the community would do so instead. Indeed, I had noted a slight but visible increase in the number of community-closed questions recently. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like enough has changed quite yet; review stats suggest that only a handful of users with close-vote power actually bother to review questions.

Answer 2

I don't think it's a good fit for the site. It's primarily opinion-based, unless someone can cite some studies showing what players find acceptable.