I remember watching a stream recently and some of Epic’s staff were talking about automating the support process and attempting to improve the overal efficiency of awnsering community related questions. I’m assuming this disucssion was relating to the awnserhub. Anyway my idea is that Epic could offer incentives to users that activley help to resolve questions in the awnserhub through a rewards system such as discounts to subscription plans. The idea is that if more users are awnsering questions this would reduce the amount of time the team would need to dedicate to support and maybe offering these incentives might actually prove cost effective?
I’m just a newbie when it comes to UE4 so I’m not making this suggestion for the incentives as I won’t be very helpful awnsering questions myself lol. I just think that something along these lines could potentially encourage more input from the community while also resulting in a higher standard of awnsers as users will have an added incentive to help resolve issues that might have otherwise gone unawnsered.
They already do this, though perhaps it isn’t advertised to the general public. If it was advertised widely, I wonder if we would get more people supporting answerhub for the wrong reasons, perhaps even trying to abuse the system(as hard as that may be).
I can say that Epic definitely appreciates active and helpful community members.
One thing I have noticed with the answerhub though is a lot of the questions are getting more and more complicated, which become harder and more tedious to help people solve. I know this has reduced a lot of my interaction because I scan the wall of posts and don’t see anything I feel I could help with and all the easier questions have already been hit.
Epic does appreciate activity in both the forum and the answerhub but we’re pretty much through the time where people have very basic question. There are a lot of tutorials out there and most people do watch / read them and work with that and then come back to the hub to ask some actually really interesting questions which are not easily answered and either need quite some time to check out by yourself if you know a way which might work or for which you have no idea how to solve them.
You can especially see this with some more specific questions for technical artists. There are quite few around right now and those most of the time stick around for a few weeks until someone from epic answers.
Thanks for the suggestion. This is something that is being considered and there have been some discussions with Chance. I’m not sure at what stage it’s at for the moment, but we definitely would like to have more active participation from the community in the AnswerHub and the Forums. Unfortunately, some of the community devs only participate in one or the other.
Zeustiak is right that there are a lot of questions that are very specific and more difficult to answer these days. As more people become familiar with the engine and it’s toolset that has grown exponentially in the last 9 months there are going to be more difficult questions. It’s difficult to answer a question that is asking how to make a very specific game mechanic that fits your game.
Ie. How to do I make Angry Birds physics while using Street Fighter style battle system with RPG features like SWTOR? ( Highly exaggerated example )
Questions like that typically are too specific for most people and is probably why they are left unanswered or without a specific resolution. General broad focused questions are the most helpful and can help the staff and the devs in the community point you in the right direction to get started. It’s been said many times before, but game development is hard. To bring it back around though, I would like to eventually see something in place to encourage the community to participate in both AnswerHub and our Forums.
I’d like to be able to search the answerhub by resolved only and have exact match as well :/, would save trawling through 50 pages of things that are completely unrelated and still unsolved.
Sorry to hear that, I feel i’m one of them too however i am specialized in the FX field so don’t really know how much help I could be. But people with wide knowledge should try to check it at least once every day.
Might be a good idea to input an answerhub search field in the forums too or connect the 2 search systems somehow like you got from docs to search specifically per site or everything.
Valid points and I should add that my suggestion is not a criticism or anything. Overall I’m impressed by how many options there are for support and finding solutions. With any other software I would be crawling through 5 years old tutorials with broken images and old guides to find answers (e.g…creativecow lol). Still I think as questions get a little more technical perhaps this is even more reason to promote a system orientated towards advanced tutorials by users. I also just found out that there is a tutorial section in the forums but it’s kind of hidden away, maybe a dedicated tutorial section for articles and video tut’s next to the Wiki link could provide a valuable source which could be linked to from the awnserhub and forums.
I thought about an improved usage of tutorials as well especially with the new tutorial BPs.
However the trend I see in the answerhub is that most questions get a lot more complex and covering every case with tutorials is rather hard. Maybe a somehow a section for approved difficult questions which go more directly to great and skilled people in the community but that brings a lot of issues as well and should work with the answerhub alone already.
We are facing quite an issue here. It’s important to talk about. It works pretty good right now but it should be fixed in the long run since with an larger community this issue will just increase.
And my hope is that this community will become quite a bit larger over the next few months / years. Especially the indie scene should bring a lot of people in here and this is a great engine which enables people to bring great projects alive. With more people it will also have a lot of plugins like the WebUI from back in may and so on.
It’ll be interesting what will happen and I think your point and what epic does about this will have an impact of how this community will continue and grow or not grow in the long run.
However, tutorials are pretty solid concept and maybe it would be cool if we will have ALL tutorials in one place?
Website, dedicated to UE4 tutorials with different content categories(Like page with video tutorials) and user-created tutorials.
Here a structure mockup:
Different categories by content type and tags to define authors, video/text tutorial types and etc
Yeah that sounds like a great idea to me and from an SEO perspective I would imagine Google would prefer to rank one official source with user friendly search and navigation.
Thanks for the feedback on all topics here. As Tim mentioned, we’re always discussing ways we can help reward participation and we have a few things in the works!
Re: Tutorial feedback, location, naming, SEO, etc. - We’re in the process of transitioning some items and consolidating a couple channels for a lot of the reasons mentioned. The Jeff Wilson is heading that up, we should see some improvements on that soon
IMO EPIC did a mistake using different pre-made applications for the Forums, Answerhub, Trello, UE4 (custom) etc.
These are basically different sites that don’t communicate with each other, each require separate login and have different design/layout, making it very hard to use more than one.
It was a good choice for having something ready and fast but bad for the long term.
In the current situation an idea that comes to mind is to show feedback popularity from answerhub under the user’s name in the forums, and maybe few info about unanswered posts that link to them.
Totally. We’re fully aware that we need better cohesion with our web properties and have plans that should meet a number of needs similar to this thanks for the suggestions, Errvald!
On another note, I have found myself searching both sections to answer a question I might have. But I think the biggest issue is no control over identical questions, which is really hard to do without seeming rude. But I’ve found myself searching something up, and have to filter through 15 identical questions for the one that was actually answered. With that being said, I think having the ability to fast “link” questions to maybe a question that of the same nature and answered could make it a little bit more tolerable and cleaner. So same the same questions are not being answered time and time again. Just a thought though.
In response to Chance.
I’ve found that I like the way the Atlassian suite of products work together. Jira is more of an internal thing, but Confluence and Confluence questions are superb. With the ability to directly link from Confluence to Jira its super easy to tag/track issues.
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