Hey guys, the Marketplace team had an idea we’d like to run by you.
The Marketplace has expanded tremendously over the past few months all thanks to you, the community. This is great! We are always listening and working on presenting the Marketplace content in the best possible way for both the sellers and the buyers. This subject has been brought up a few times in the forums and we have talked about adding an indicator to allow the Seller to set what level of difficulty they think their product should be categorized as. For example, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced. We’re coming to you guys today to get your feedback: Is this something you would like to see added to the details on the product page? What parameters should we determine the level of difficulty of a pack? Let us know what you think!
Maybe try to fix the broken stuff first (comments and amount of ratings not visible) before thinking about new features. It’s a general UE4 problem that adding new features are often more important than fixing old features which are broken
I never was very fond of difficulty settings. Difficulty varies greatly from person to person, it has the potential to cause more harm than good if someone bought something that was labeled beginner yet still struggles to use the pack as expected. That’s just my thoughts on it. =)
Difficulty is such a subjective topic. It depends on people’s individual skill and what they want to do. So I would recommend against difficulty ratings.
I have to agree with this, we’re still missing in-launcher comments and ratings (just being able to see them without the need to go on the website will be good).
We’re still unable to set our Vault on different drives and it’s clogging our precious SSD system drive. (I know I can use junctions, but that’s not the point)
To be fair, I don’t think Reuben is saying they will prioritize this over past feedback. The team is just trying to get a sense of what the community thinks of the idea. =)
Well I think your answer already covered the main issue with it
[rant]
Also I don’t think there’s anything difficult about implementing Marketplace content, what makes it difficult is if it is poorly commented, poorly organized, no documentation/video and poorly supported.
Eg.
Look at Monokkel’s Advanced Turn Based Tile Toolkit , there’s good comments in the source, he makes videos, he’s always there ready to answer everyone’s questions.
Look at anything from Manufactura4k, I think he doesn’t even care there’s a Marketplace forum in here, if anyone got issues with his stuff there’s no support here nor by email (I tried contacting him by email and on Facebook). This makes something so simple, like implementing and using ready-made 3d models, a nightmare.
[/rant]
This is correct. As we are working on issues that have been brought to us by the community, we feel that it’s always good to throw new ideas into the mix and receive your thoughts.
Never fear good sir! We have not put anything on the backburner We are continuing working on bug and fixes to the Marketplace launcher/webpage. As these issues are being addressed, we are also getting ideas on how to improve the Marketplace features for both the sellers and the buyers.
First, a fix for the comment and rating number visibility is in progress. Also, we’re bringing search, comments and ratings in the launcher in the very near future. We’re seeing it in our dev environments right now and tweaking the overall layout and features to polish it up before wide release. It’s in the ‘finishing touches’ stage right now, and it’s looking pretty sweet.
Second, having a publicly-visible difficulty setting for content isn’t a “new feature” so much as it is a string of text in the description of an item in the catalog. The intent was to see if people here thought it might help potential buyers know what they’re getting into. The reason this idea came up was to help set clearer expectations before purchase to minimize refund requests for people thinking they’re purchasing something simple but finding it to be overly complex and difficult to work with, so we wanted to float it by the community for feedback to see if it was worth moving forward with.
Third, on the subject of “fix broken stuff first,” development of new features and fixing\polishing existing ones work in parallel, not in a linear sequence, and they’re spread across many teams here at Epic. In many cases the people that are fixing ongoing issues are not the same people that are developing new features, and there are always a dozen or more things in various stages of development at any time, with people on call and ready to quickly address issues as they arise, and make sure they’re routed to the right people based on their responsibility. That is to say, we’re not putting all fixes and all development on hold just to add in something new.
– I’ll talk to the dev team to see if we have any future plans to place the vault on a different drive. I can see why that would be useful. Thanks for the suggestion!
Also, how recently have you attempted to contact Manufactura K4? I’ve spoken with him about a Marketplace seller’s responsibility to update their content, and he’s been fixing and updating his content as recently as this month.
I agree with most on here. It’s not black and white enough to label “difficulty of use”. Someone may be a blueprint wizard and be running with a complex BP system inside of a day, but then struggle on how to add grime to the side of a model pack because they’d never used the painting designing tools much. So that might be considered difficult to them. Same goes for third point. IF you’re not a blueprint wizard, taking a system and expanding it might seem incredibly difficult to you.
I think the aim here is more to give more details to potential customers before buying so looking for ways to do that and while I’ve had my fair…many peoples fair share of crashes and bugs on my own, I doubt epic is just putting things on hold and not fixing them.
Demo videos are important ahead of time. Then the documentation that follows if need be.
I see videos all the time where they show off their models and they look amazing, then they clip to the lights in the windows of the buildings changing at night. Cool
Then adding splash puddles or grime to walls. Awesome.
But they never show what they clicked on to get that “grime adding” ability.
How they make the windows change lighting automatically and randomly. Etc.
I think this thread is on to something, like something MORE would be helpful. I don’t think its a difficulty rating though.
Perhaps some sort of standardized questionnaire per category, but even then it could get tough to ask the right questions.
For BP systems
Integrates to any project without any code changes to project?
If code changes are needed, are they minor/major?
Basic understanding of blueprints required in order to use out of the box?
etc…
I think some things should be sub categorized as well.
There are blueprint SYSTEMS and then there are blueprint TOOLS. Not just “blueprints”
Hey all! We just had a quick internal discussion – we proposed keeping the difficulty rating as a purely internal designation that we weigh against how much documentation and video tutorials are provided, and whether we should request more of those materials from the seller before release. It sounds like one of the main requests is simply having enough documentation to work with, and this could be a way to make sure we have enough of it before going live with content. What do you folks think?
I would agree that documentation is hugely important. As for the difficulty, well, I’m with the others, difficulty is too subjective to individual talents / knowledge to be a useful “filter” to have on the marketplace.
Need to keep a good handle on what more to request and what is deemed sufficient when it comes to certain releases. BP systems. Is thorough documentation needed to go as far as implementing the product as listed and its features into your project and thats that? or do you need every function properly documented. If the documentation takes longer than creating the product people may just stop creating products etc. A lot are released as is in terms of code and documentation should be around implementing the as is product (aside from bugs). People might want to start modifying core functions of a product and start complaining that they dont understand how the code is set up and there’s not documentation on that and so on. Or can get tricky if material instances need to be created or mats need to be modified by the purchaser in order to get the variations shown in the demo and the buyer has no idea how to use the material editor. Those things can be solved in a single video usually though like Procedural Nature Pack videos seem pretty sufficient.
Difficulty ratings make sense. Stuff like non-BP props can simply be dropped in a level as decoration, and therefore would be BEGINNER. Stuff like BP’s that require lots of integration into your project would be ADVANCED. And it’s not really as subjective as people say. If you don’t know how to modify a BP to get it integrated with your own stuff, you’re not at an ADVANCED level yet This rating would help prevent consumer shock when they buy an pack and they don’t have the prior knowledge to actually use it yet.
It’ll be great if we could have some mandatory additional info when browsing marketplace content, eg.:
For Environments I’d like to know in advance if one or more demo levels are already in (they usually are).
For animations it’ll be great to know in advance if you’re just getting animations or a test pawn already setup with all the animations for you to test.
For blueprints I’d love to know whether there’s exhaustive comments.
For everything I’d like to know if there’s online/offline documentation and videos.
I think you’re doing a great job anyway and the fact that you’re here listening to our rants and sharing your ideas with the community is proof enough
Thanks for your feedback on this. As far as documentation goes, we only require the documentation needed to be able to implement your asset pack into a project and use the features as advertised. If your customers have any specific questions or have a more technical question, we do encourage you guys to open up support threads for this reason. For broader questions in regards that aren’t specific to your content but maybe the type of asset you’ve created, you’re welcome to point to documentation on AnswerHub, the Epic wiki’s or the forums if you’ve found that there is documentation that already exists.
If you have any questions about this please feel free to reach out to us.
Beginners will know that purchasing the advanced labelled product means they’re doing so to aid in their learning rather than quick snap an entire system into their game without understanding anything.
Moderately labelled products are more tools than they are systems, things to aid in creation of games rather than a pre-made system to function in the game.
This wouldn’t change much as it is now, but it more or less lets the purchaser know it’s not a simple copy and paste ahead of time as well as takes away the purchasers feeling of having the ‘official’ right to complain about something that is really due to their own lack of learning the basics.
We are continuing working on bug and fixes to the Marketplace launcher/webpage. As these issues are being addressed, we are also getting ideas on how to improve the Marketplace features for both the sellers and the buyers.
This rating would help prevent consumer shock when they buy an pack and they don’t have the prior knowledge to actually use it yet.