Is it pathetic to never get actually helpful answers here?

Started by
24 comments, last by jbadams 7 years, 8 months ago

I tend to receive answers that are not helpful to my questions or answerers that have an attitude. Is it a sign I'm not for game making?

Advertisement

I briefly browsed through some of your topics, and what I notice is

- You seem to ask very high-level questions ("In the industry, how does one do ....", or "How I do <something complicated>").

- You don't seem to give feedback in the topic to the information that you're given.

Normally, there are as many answers to a question, as there are persons on this forum. This holds even more for high-level questions. Such question never have a single answer. The answer changes, depending on lots of details that we don't know. The generality of the question doesn't give many clues for us, so we just try to give the best answer with the small amount of detail information that you provide. It is indeed likely that those answers are not what you look for, but we need more information for a better answer.

The second point is more important, I think. If an answer does not work for you, tell us why, or clarify what you aim for. We cannot read your mind. I think most answers are honest attempts to answer your question. If it answers the wrong thing for you, it's a sign there is a mis-communication somewhere. You didn't provide some information that is needed to steer the answers in your direction, or the person answering missed some clues that you wrote in your post.

Writing about a problem that you have is hard. I used to work together with someone that studied CS, just like me. When we discussed something, I always needed at least 2 long emails sent back and forth, just to explain the problem, and to get an understanding that we both were at the same page. Only then, we could start discussing details of the problem itself, and directions of solving it. While we talked in details, I did need those 2 emails back and forth, while we did the same study, and both work in the same field!

Here, there is a lot more diversity in persons and experience. The problems being discussed are also much more varying. It's amazing we solve anything at all.

Capturing a problem in a few lines of text is extremely difficult. Getting the other side to understand what you write is even harder.

For this reason, it is useful to reply on new information that you get. Assume the other side is seriously trying to help you, but there is a problem in communicating. try to understand what you get as response (you may want to think about the answer for a day or 2 even), and if it doesn't work out, try to explain what exactly fails for you. The more details you provide, the better we can answer your problem.

On the other hand, this forum is not a "we solve your problem for you" forum. You should not expect copy/paste-ready answers here. Th aim of this forum is to learn you programming, and that means finding your own way out of your problems. We can steer you in the generally right direction, give alternative solutions, find stupid simple errors, and review your code, but we can't tell you how to solve your problem in the literal sense, as that defeats the goal of learning to program. Also, that service would cost too much time, you would need to give money in exchange if you want a solution without having to solve it yourself.

Please reply.

I wouldn't say not getting helpful answers in a forum is a reason strong enough to stop pursuing game development.

If you want, it would be a good enough reason to leave the forum. Or to change your way of asking questions. Not that I think you're asking bad questions, but if you're not getting what you want from this forum I only see three choices:

  1. Keep doing the same you're doing.
  2. Try something different.
  3. Leave the forum.

I think #1 won't work and I would suggest trying #2 before #3. Tom Sloper has a nice advice on how to ask questions in the internet.

Again, I'm not suggesting you ask bad questions, I haven't gone through your posts, so I can't know. But people won't suddenly start answering differently to the same questions, so the only thing left to try is asking questions in a different way. I hope you find this advice helpful and not too much off-topic.

Since we are on the topic:

A one-line question is less likely to give you a meaningful answer, than a medium-length question with an explanation of at least some context to this question.

For example, unlike Alberth, I wouldn't feel like to search through all your previous topics to see what had happened. So with that in mind, I wouldn't be able to answer even this question. If you gave a short example, it would be easier to see what had happend. Like: "For example, that last time I asked about this, I just got people telling me to do that which was not part of my question".

I just had a brief look at your previous questions and, it seems most of them are kind of short like this. So maybe one thing that can be a reason, and that you can approve on is, trying to give more information towards your question. Nobody likes to read wall of texts but at least show some background, show us what you actually expect, then you might get answers more to what you actually expect :)

I don't believe it's pathetic, it might be like others said that your ask for help/ questions isn't explicit enough.

Normally everybody can go for it if they really want it.

Always know that the answers people give are with the intention to help, which in some cases might be to advice you to go a dit deeper and ask your question more explicit.

On the forum side in general, I have the opposite experience, so it's definately possible (and I'm not a professional programmer).

Crealysm game & engine development: http://www.crealysm.com

Looking for a passionate, disciplined and structured producer? PM me

I find this forum to be one of the best and most helpful there is. I've had a great deal of useful answers here, some that are totally not what I wanted but have convinced me enough to entirely change how I solve a problem (this is one of the benefits of having so many opinions). I also read a lot of people's answers to others and generally I find them useful and they also teach me a few things.

I usually come on here more to answer people's questions than I do to ask my own and I think you'll find the same is true for a lot of people here, they WANT to help you. If they didn't they wouldn't even open your thread. That said you do get a few seemly arsy type answers, the odd one sentence 'Read this FAQ' etc but actually, if you went and read those things they tend to give you far more than you would ever need. Also, some types of question do tend to draw out the less friendly side of people: 'I am making the next big MMO, which programming language should I use?' tend to get some what mocking (yet realistic) answers.

I like helping people who are prepared to help themselves so when I see a question full of detail about what a person has already tried and what research they have done etc I find that not only really helpful (I know what they are talking about now) but also I feel like my time isn't being wasted on someone who is just too lazy to type their problem in a search engine.

Checking your topic history and I see some of your other topics have sparked a fair bit of discussion, I'd say that's good.

Interested in Fractals? Check out my App, Fractal Scout, free on the Google Play store.

This is your second "everybody hates me I guess I'll go eat rocks" topic in a pretty short span of time.

You're either going to do it or you're not.

If you're looking for someone to blame then just blame Chubu and then you can go away and not worry about how you failed.

Otherwise grow the fuck up and do what you have to do to make it work. Nobody here is responsible for you or for your success. If you want it, you make it.

void hurrrrrrrr() {__asm sub [ebp+4],5;}

There are ten kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

I tend to receive answers that are not helpful to my questions or answerers that have an attitude. Is it a sign I'm not for game making?

I don't think so. While I did not read your previous topics, from the title and your statement above I think it is a sign your problem solving and communication skills need work. I recommend thoroughly reading How To Ask Questions The Smart Way, especially the sections On Not Reacting Like A Loser and Questions Not To Ask.

The really tough problems I had to solve I asked about on this forum, but already knew pretty well that it was unlikely anybody had pursued anything similar that would see my question on this forum. Mostly I didn't receive any replies at all and ended up figuring things out on my own. I can attest to the fact that asking questions about complicated and highly specialized things probably won't bode well. I don't know what your questions have been or what sort of replies you've been receiving but I do know that a single forum should not be the compass you use to determine what it is that you enjoy doing.

I would say pretty universally that good-quality questions attract good-quality answers, often excellent answers given the level of expertise around here. If you find yourself gathering low-quality, follow-up-questions, or even aggression, the best way to remedy that situation is to ask better questions. Also, I've seen a handful of people over the years who were upset not because their questions weren't being answered, but because they weren't getting the answer they wanted or expected -- if this is you, stop it. Part of the art of answering a question here is reading between the lines and getting to the heart of the issue, and sometimes the problem that needs to be addressed is not the one you've asked about. No one wan't to give you the right answer to the wrong problem, but without context to your question its easy to come to the wrong conclusion about what your problem really is. Again, providing more context to your question is key to getting useful answers.

Likewise, there's an art to asking questions as well. Tell us the what, where, why, and how of the problem in your question. What are you trying to do? What's wrong with the results you see (and what did you expect to see)? What are the surrounding conditions/assumptions that restrict your solution? Where are you doing this--platforms, libraries, programming languages? Why is this problem important? How have you tried to solve it already?

Keep your question focused -- its easy to drift into giving too many details or irrelevant details.

throw table_exception("(? ???)? ? ???");

This topic is closed to new replies.

Advertisement