Why the downvotes: It's a perfect downvote magnet
I don't know why all those downvotes were cast specifically, but over time I have noticed some trends as to what sorts of questions attract downvotes more easily.
Voters hold questions and answers about sex to a very high standard, since sex is a subject that can easily be mishandled. Great questions/answers about sexual issues get a lot of upvotes, but ones that are at all less than “great” tend to attract a few downvotes, and ones that are merely “meh” attract many downvotes. Actually bad sex-related posts are often outright deleted by community delete voting. The voting standards for sex-related posts is notably quite a bit higher than for other subjects.
Questions that seem to just be a variation on another question are sometimes downvoted even if they're not quite close enough to be closed as duplicates. This is even more so the case when the other question is closed.
Hypothetical questions can attract lots of downvotes. They sometimes continue to attract downvotes even when rewritten to not be hypothetical, if people suspect that the edited version is maybe still hypothetical.
Voters hold self-answered questions to a higher standard than most other questions. It seems that a self-answered question has to be well-written, clearly useful, not make voters suspect it's just rep-seeking, and stand on its own as a decent question without the answer. Without those, votes tend to be absent, or down.
Questions that are near or on the border of our site topic can attract downvotes, especially if it's still controversial where to draw the dividing line.
Unfortunately, this question seems to fall into all those categories, raising the quality standard it will be judged by very high: the question and answer are about sex; the question's a variation on another question, which happens to be closed; it started as a hypothetical, to allow a self-answer; it's a self-answered question; and there is some uncertainty (or at least, the consensus is in question) about whether RP within video games is on topic.
Which is not to say that it necessarily has the potential problems of these categories — just that it has several ways that voters tend to expect excellence, and therefore many more opportunities to be found lacking enough to justify a downvote.
Which brings up another trend:
- Questions with multiple problems attract more downvotes than the problems alone would attract.
If the question or its answer does have any problems in these regards, they are probably multiplying their effects in the eyes of voters, attracting downvotes more quickly than the problems would separately.
Why it's (still) closed
It was closed by a mod. I didn't close it, but another mod judged that the hypothetical-ness of the question made it too unclear. That judgement call isn't absolute… but nobody has voted to reopen it.
And if the downvotes do indicate real problems with the content of the posts, even if the question would be considered clear enough to some reopen voters, they may be refraining from voting to reopen. After all, why reopen a question that's still sinking?
If that's what's happening with reopen voters, it's not necessarily a sensible policy-driven reaction, but it's a “gut feeling” reaction that the site's design is actually built around harnessing. Sometimes the community doesn't have to know exactly what's wrong — just that something is, and that's enough.
So I can tell you why it was closed: one mod thought the hypothetical-ness problem was enough to mark it as unclear. Now that it's been rewritten to not be hypothetical, I can't tell you why it's still closed. But I can say that it looks like the community thinks there's something wrong, and won't vote to reopen it while that “something” remains. And if the “something” that's wrong is multiple somethings, or complicated, or actually inherent in the question and therefore can't be changed, then it may not be salvageable.
Why it was closed again later
After being changed to be about dealing with reports of or prevention of ERP within an unsupervised video game community, in the context of being the server operator, the question is now solidly off topic and has been closed as off topic with the “video games” custom close reason.
It's no longer a question about how to personally respond to unwanted roleplay being imposed on oneself, it's now a question that requires domain-specific knowledge — to be precise, knowledge of Minecraft server management and Minecraft community management. Those are two topics I am personally familiar with enough to know that such off-topic expertise is required to be able to even begin to usefully answer the question.
Minecraft expertise? What Minecraft expertise?
For those who aren't familiar with hosting Minecraft servers and communities, or with Minecraft at all, running a MC server presents a few peculiar difficulties that are basic knowledge needed to answer a question like this:
- How investigating abuses via Minecraft chat logging works (or doesn't work, and how it can be made more robust)
- The difficulties of communicating with new players (which requires either
motd
tricks, command blocks, using bukkit, whitelisting, or a combination; never mind the problem of getting them to read your command-based or link-based policy communication attempt; not to mention the relative practical merits of in-server help
-based vs. off-server website-based policy documents)
- The difficulties of communicating with existing players (same as above, plus
/tell
or /tp
, requiring email registration [and the various methods for that], or 3pp community services [same])
- Jailing or kicking techniques, and how banning works
- …
The list goes on and on. These are just the things peculiar to Minecraft, too — it will be different for each video game, requiring game-specific expertise which is not reasonable to require of experts who are here to answer RPG questions. For a lot of reasons, hosting a Minecraft server is not the digital equivalent of running LARPs.
Why video game questions are off topic, part n of ∞
Incidentally, these are not obvious problems with questions like this, to readers who are not already video game experts.
An RPG expert could look at that question and assume that, because it's open, that their RPG experience is useful and that nothing about the video game itself is necessary to understand… and proceed to post a completely useless answer. That's something we never want to happen here — we want someone who is an expert in RPGs to be able to tell when their expertise is relevant to a question.
That's a large reason why previous questions related to video games(e.g., [1],[2]) have been okay: no part of their problem related to the video game itself, and only RPG expert knowledge was required to answer them.
That's also why we probably don't need a tag for roleplaying in video games — nobody here should be expected to be an expert in the details of every video game in order to understand a question's problem, let alone answer it usefully.