Hello! I have been thinking how to make answerhub, well, more functional. As now the questions have a high tendancy of getting buried very quickly, and it really is a lottery if someone happens to click your question. And have mainly thought of a one thing that could, if not fix, at least help the matters:
People would be able to rate their questions in 4 categories: “Beginner, Intermediate, , Bug”.
That way people answering them have more control of what they are getting themselves into (you know, sometimes you go there to help someone that just got the engine in their hands on some simple they ran into, and sometimes you want to challenge yourself and see what you can do in the toughest questions).
Possibly people viewing the question being able to vote in which category they think is most representative, so that right people would find the right questions. (even an intermediate can easily help the newbies, so that seasoned devs get to tackle some of the more difficult issues).
Possibly adding 5th category for those who have never been licensees of the Unreal Engine, so that they can get their questions answered, but the 20€ or 20$ (grrh! 20$ != 20€) paywall would keep the, how should I say , “Least talented”? “people who will ask someone to make them a DayZ for 100$”?, well, you probably-know-what-I-mean type of people out from flooding our answerhub.
Thank you for reading, and would love a bit of feedback on
The real problem is not having enough community members following AnswerHub. So even though you have those categories it wouldnt help if you dont have the man power. I dont have AnswerHub open all the time but i set the notifications on so i get emails whenever people ask questions in my area of expertise. Then i go and help out if i can. But of course you cant force everyone to do that, so…
yeah, that is the real problem, but how would you fix it? When you get more manpower, you also increase the need. Of course there could be done some systems to reward people answering questions (like discounts from the monthly subscription, so that the ratio of people asking/answering could be pushed to the right direction.), but these categories could at least make it more organized, and possibly make the manpower we have a bit more effective.
Of course Epic could hire more community workers, but that would get incredibly expensive (and I am very much unsure if they could provide it), but fixing the answerhub is fairly important step to be taken to make the engine more competitive (Unity 5 is going to be released fairly soon, possibly even during 2014, and it has very much comparable features to UE4. If everyone was undecided, it would be a tad easier, but as UE has to not only gain customers, but convert them from very different engine. Having a great customer support & possibly other systems to make the change less painfull is a key here.
Of course I could be wrongfully assuming UE is trying to compete with unity, but, I think it is a fair guess, as Unreal is trying to get stronger on areas where Unity is leading (e.g. marketplace), after all, they do have better pricing&material system + many tools that built in that unity has in its marketplace.
(would be quite cool if Epic could buy some of the more popular tools that rise in the marketplace, and implement them in system. And by buy, I do not mean for the customer price, but have discussion with the developer if he wants to accept such a deal. Improbable, but still a cool idea :3)
Frankly after seeing the mess that was Unity Answers I just assumed game development Stack Exchanges weren’t worth my time, so I haven’t even thought to check out the Unreal one. I’ll actually go do that now…
I’ve had some luck with UEAnswers, more than a few times. I think maybe some kind of incentive to get programming/UE4 gurus more involved would be best. I don’t know what that could be, X amount of legit answers = 1 free month of UE4 or something? Not sure, but incentives to get the really knowledgeable people to waste their time on us would probably be best.
well yeah, that’s what I was thinking. And it’s not really only the gurus, we need incentive for everyone teach the others as they learn. (which seems to be working on forums far better than on answerhub). UE community at it’s best is like a little communistic society isnide the big open capitalistic world, so that you get the best of both worlds
Free UE4 would always be great, EPic doesn’t really lose anything (afterall, the fact they are answering the questions makes it more likely for new games to arise, and it is that 5% the Epic is after.)
I’ve had some luck with it too, few months ago it worked FANTASTIC, and I loved it. Then it started to become more and more unresponsive, and now I have completely given up on using it.
Thanks for the feedback. We are thinking of a few ways to improve the AnswerHub experience and encourage users to become more involved, and we will add your ideas to our considerations.
Something that somehow connects the forum and the answerhub would be good -> e.g that you can see the latest answerhub questions somewhere here in the forum.
I would like to see the search tool at the top left of the forums perform a search in the same way as the Documentation search works. Searching from the documentation site will search through the forums, answerhub, and the documentation all at once, and I think should be the way searches are done on the forums (and answerhub) as well.
Hi there, as someone just getting into the ecosystem, having two places to look for info (forums and answerhub) is very confusing. Why am I posting on a 5 year old thread? Because I had to google for the URL. It’s “answerHUB”, but “answerS.unrealengine”
