Hi everyone,
We are currently working on improvements to the Marketplace experience for 2023, which will include an entirely new review system. In the interim, we will be removing the ability to leave questions or written reviews for Marketplace products. Past written reviews and questions and answers will also be removed from product pages. You will still be able to leave star ratings for products you’ve purchased, and any star ratings attached to existing reviews will be retained.
As always, you can reach out to a seller directly if you have any questions about their products via the support email addresses listed on their seller profile page.
Marketplace sellers are required to provide email support, and that email address can be found on the seller’s profile page. If you find that sellers are unwilling to provide support over email, please create a support ticket and let us know, and we’ll remind them of that expectation. We recognize that some sellers find other channels more effective, and while they’re welcome to offer them, those aren’t a substitute for email support.
Please consider providing an official Marketplace Discord bot to verify your Discord account with your Marketplace one, and therefore allow users to be verified correctly on marketplace creator discord servers and avoid the review-hijacking that is so prevelant.
You can set up a ‘Sign in with Discord’ connection in the marketplace profile page, which would then associate that account with the Discord bot. Then, allow for creators to assign a Discord server to a product, and invite the bot to join. It can then automatically run rank assigning to existing/new Discord server members if they have purchased the product.
Edit: It might also be a good idea to provide a basic messaging system for Marketplace creators/customers, perhaps off the back of the forum PM system, so that people don’t have to use Discord or email.
Many times, I’ve gotten answers by reading the questions that others have posted. So I didn’t need to contact the author as I found the answer. I always read questions and reviews before purchasing an asset.
How are we supposed to know if an asset is quality or supported without reviews? I’ve found from other users that the asset is no longer supported or that there were issues with it and it saved me money.
Will there be any simple way to verify purchasers from common platforms such as discord like @AhoyGame mentioned? My biggest problem is public support since theres so many websites reselling our plugins and assets, we do not want to give those people support or let them even see answers given by support
I know there are a bunch of issues with the current systems and I’m looking forward to improvements. I also understand that there might be downtime until the system has been migrated.
That being said I hope you still offer an official way to read about and interact with plugins and their developers that isn’t from the last century.(email)
Some sort of wiki or forum platform is absolutely essential for pretty much everything that contains any code.
Outsourcing all of that to third party pages is not a great solution and opens up a lot of issues with usability, reliability, access from different countries and of course security.
I also hope that there are ways to encourage people better to rate plugins, since only a fraction of them have actually usable reviews and rating numbers, especially if some of them are simply paid 5* reviews.
There were useful answers in the questions.
I’m hoping you can at least provide access to the previously answered questions.
You could have created a new verify tap and forced asset publishers to remove discord-related virification from the questions tap.
or, before wiping out the questions, you could have converted it to a "support thread" on the forums (automatically generating a support thread for assets). This way, you can keep the knowledge you’ve already built and reduce your reliance on Discord for support.
I let the customer decide if they want to verify by question or review. I think verification behind a exclusive review-wall is indeed problematic. A proper verification system would make this obsolete anyway.
Omg - this is the wiki all over again. The amount of searches I do on google that lead me to an unreal forum post with the exact answer I want, with a link to a wiki that now leads no where is beyond frustrating.
But what’s more concerning is the significant loss of of data that allow questions and answers bring. At the minimum couldnt Epic just do a “legacy” questions and answers page, behind the main one? Completely removing it is just been lazy. There are many old questions that are very valid, and the amount of times I have spent scrolling old questions to find what I wanted to know is alot.
It is also not because of the original issue about forcing people to rate becasue “…and any star ratings attached to existing reviews will be retained.” - so all that happens is the useful stuff is lost.
And removing it, while not having the immediate replacement? Come on now - it just shows complete disrespect for both the sellers and buyers.
Past written reviews and questions and answers will also be removed from product pages.
This is really, really bad. Nuking existing reviews is bad for obvious reasons, but the real loss is the questions. I just came here because I went to go look under the questions tab for a marketplace item because I knew the answer to an issue I have is there. When I saw the tabs were missing I assumed it was a bug. I reference the questions tab all the time, both before and after buying something. Heck a lot of google searches even lead to there. This is a massive loss of useful info. Is there no way to have the old info viewable somehow?
That’s not true though, just click on the sellers name and it takes you to their product page:
On the top left, there’s the email the seller entered into his profile.
I’ve written many reviews over these 2 years for many products I’ve bought and I am expected to write reviews again? at least send a backup transcript to each user via email for each product review so at least I remember what I reviewed, I don’t want to download assets again and go through each one just to write a review.
@Unreal_Josh
It is commendable that the question and review process is being updated. However, as a seller, I rely on being able to use the key reference that the reviewer or questioner has provided to confirm that they indeed own the asset. Without the ability to ask for a receipt, which is often edited to include my product, I will need to reach out to Marketplace support and have the developer who requires support provide their Epic login email and subsequently have their purchase confirmed by Marketplace support. Any delays in this process will inevitably result in a poor rating from the client.
Is there a plan to provide Marketplace sellers with the ability to confirm that people have indeed purchased their product and are not seeking support for a copied version from an alternative marketplace?
Just purchased something which refused to work due to an error being spat out. The reviews showed me that I wasn’t the only one with the same problem. One of them nearly a week old with no response from the author.
What this tells me about the author is that he/she isn’t dependable enough for me to be spending my $$ on. Two days now and I still haven’t been able to make use of this purchase.
It’s only after trying to leave a review today, and seeing how I couldn’t actually input words, that lead me to this thread.
I hope you guys manage to do right by all involved.
@Unreal_Josh
This is terrible news. Very bad idea.
If someone was hard working over the years to build consumer trust and brand, it is all gone…
Both systems where very useful. Now we (sellers) will have to answer same questions again, that where already answered.