(reply to the above, @Ares9323)
But that’s the thing - Discord/Github imho shouldn’t be used for Marketplace customer support ! It’s in the interest of customers for support to be provided directly on the product page as opposed to having to register to yet another service.
And of course I am not saying that sellers should provide support for non-legit buyers ; what I am saying is, this is a non-issue because there is already a perfect place for legit customers to get in touch : the written Reviews. I very much understand that the time of sellers is precious, as I too take pride in providing support to my customers as quickly as possible. I am just genuinely puzzled as to why anyone would need a proof of purchase beyond the ability granted to customers to post a written review.
Anyways - perhaps the weird decision to remove Reviews and Questions is related to the above, perhaps not. I guess we’ll just have to wait for more official statements on the matter.
I would agree with that, if the platform was good enough to provide a quick and efficient service, and the marketplace is not!
I often receive emails very late from the marketplace (about reviews and questions), sometimes they have grouped messages (like: “You have 2 new questions and a review”), and the links are broken! I reported it to the marketplace support months ago and they never fixed it (It’s just a link to change…)
I had a positive experience with discord support channels, because the owner can reply faster and you can solve your issue sooner, it’s just a service that you may offer at your client, but it’s fair that you want to know if you paid for the product before offering you a “deeper” support.
Yeah, the daily emails with the questions and reviews summary are half-broken : the text links do not work and lead to the general Marketplace landing page, but the image links function as they should, linking to the proper Reviews and Questions pages of the relevant products. So outside of this glitch I personally find these emails summaries to be incredibly useful. But I guess that’s a thing of the past now …
Please reconsider this policy. The community finds that information useful. Maybe there’s a reason to remove it that we, the community, are not privy to? Hopefully Epic Games can find a better solution.
I did not require buyers to verify via REVIEW at all, I never mentioned this anywhere on my discord, but they do it anyway. So it’s not my fault if users write reviews with their discord ID, I gave them 4 other ways to do it differently, but they still do it. I - as seller - have no control about the review section at all.
I did not even required my users on my discord to verify via REVIEWs, I never wrote that at all. I gave 4 different ways how they can verify, either direct message, discord channel, product page → questions section OR via email. People still writing REVIEWs with their discord ID anyway. So what do you think should I do? @Unreal_Josh should I just remove my discord support community? I’ll not give support to everyone, just customers who really purchased the respective product, since there are a bunch of pirates out there, and I don’t want to spend my time with support to anyone who didn’t purchased the product. You also cannot expect any help from marketplace support about game asset piracy.
This is so frustrating and disappointing to me as a Marketplace customer spending $$$. I was relying heavily on reviews when purchasing assets. I usually don’t buy assets without meaningful reviews. I think Epic is shooting itself in the foot.
User feedback/reviews database is an essential part of this platform. Killing that is quite a questionable decision, to say the least. With all my respect to Epic Games.
This somehow reminds of Myspace “improvement” back in the day when they removed most of their user content “for new improved experience” - and became an abandoned ghost platform.
This is just another headscratcher from Epic. It will make it difficult for anyone to get an idea of whether or not something can be purchased, or when a product has been abandoned but had good reviews from 3 years ago.
I am appalled by the hostility on display in this thread. Please everyone keep in mind that Josh is a community manager; he does not make the decisions. Save your venom. It is entirely unprofessional. Josh is a real person and this is not Twitter. Have some dignity.
I am very upset by this change. I contract with Epic and this was not communicated to my team because we don’t work with the marketplace in any capacity, but I wish I could see the Slack thread where this was decided. To be a fly on that wall.
As others have pointed out, this is a poor decision that seemingly has no real solution in place. To completely remove a resource as valuable as questions, even abused as it is, is awful in and of itself but to not have a replacement ready for the removal is baffling from an agile software development perspective.
As a buyer, I’m going to be less likely to purchase much of anything. As a seller, I’m worried about people not buying my plugins because they’re less informed. Also as a seller, I can’t wait to field the same questions via email over and over and over.
Does anyone know the method to download the Q&A in JSON format? I’m not interested in joining yet another Slack instance and searching. Please post it here if you have it handy.
This is so Insane, I thought the JSON export was an official method provided by Epic to let users download data, and I’ve just discovered that it relies on user-made Discord bot…
From my bot dashboard (https://www.uebot.net/) Add Bot to your discord, search for your product in the drop down and it will cache your reviews and questions.
If you are technically savvy and dont want the added hassle or worry of inviting a bot to a discord:
Question:
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/api/review/$%7BproductId%7D/questions/list?start=0&count=10&sortBy=CREATEDAT&sortDir=DESC
Review:
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/api/review/$%7BproductId%7D/reviews/list?start=0&count=10&sortBy=CREATEDAT&sortDir=DESC
You will want to replace ${productId} with your products ID that Epic has assigned to your product. You will want to replace count/start based on your needs start = the position of search cursor (0 the beginning) you will see a payload at the bottom of the JSON that says "total" divide the total by the count and round down that will give you the number of "starts" you need to get all your review/questions.
I would typically hold this information close to my chest but getting your reviews and questions is significantly more important than possibly getting a few new users to the bot. I will work on creating a small little website tonight to search for your product and then download the reviews and questions for all to use without the bot for free.
The bot doesn’t seem to work for me and the manual method is a bit laborious, but it appears that this is being taken care of for us by some heroes at the Unreal Slackers Discord (which I learned is a Discord server and NOT a Slack instance, lmao).
https://orbital-market.com/ Is an open-source marketplace data mirror. They’ve backed up reviews already and are working on backing up questions. Thank you to everyone involved with the development of this service. it’s a shame Epic isn’t giving us an official means of data backup, but at least the data exists. I don’t see anywhere to donate to this project but if anyone should find it, please post it so I can buy dozens of coffees.
I’ve literally wasted the last 20 minutes trying to remember the name of this website, and I failed! (I should really organize my bookmarks).
I really hope that they backed up date, but I fear they are using Unreal APIs to read data in real time.
EDIT: No, they are not in real time, this is positive
However, in the meanwhile I realized that you can still easily get the json they were talking about with Postman (Or even with a web browser, if you use a json beautifier).
I noticed too late that it’s just a regular get request with parameters .
I feel for you the most, sir. I saw how hard you worked and the hundreds of questions you answered on your product, which I bought a license to & love btw. To see it all just poof like that is sad. I used to scroll through the questions all the time just to find all the useful things you’ve said. I 110% hope that this situation is resolved in a way that makes you & your supporters whole again.
and being honest i still don’t get the issue, because for the system to work all you had to do is "only peoples had bought the product to be able to leave a “review” if when you buy something in the market it get marked as “owned” then what is exactly the issue??, all you have to do is only peoples which had bought can do a review and add a “report” buttom, for peoples to report if the “review” is a suspicious ones, then the market staff will check it and if they find out it is a a fake review "remove it’ and if the same person keep doing fake reviews get is "rights to leave a review temporally removed, for the question the same can be told , if peoples are not giving questions or some sort of feed backk and are only using the tool to promote “discord” and others stuffs’ then punish the person and maybe the seller aswell, it’s looks so simple to fix, than that "complex issue peoples are calling, a "fake question or review can be easy spot and reported to be removed and maybe punished if needed.
Thanks for the heads up, Unreal_Josh. But, I have to agree with the reaction from most people here. I can’t support the removal of both of these communication components. I’ll share my thoughts from a Marketplace Buyer perspective that buys regularly from the market.
1.) Piracy - I’ve come across various products that sellers stole. When I encounter this, I warn the seller, warn buyers, alert the copyright holder(s), and send a report to you. All of this was expedited with buyer questions/reviews. Without it, piracy increases. Buyers unknowingly buy more pirated products. The ability to take pirated content down takes longer. Lastly, this pierces of the veil of the Epic’s EULA/ECLA § 13.
2.) Verification - I see most people mentioned how it leads to manipulated review counts. What I personally don’t like is when verification drowns out important reviews & questions that affects buying decisions, which hurts marketplace integrity. I just see it as spam. You guys should use a verification bot for approved sellers/Discord channels for buyers seeking technical support to verify purchases with.
3.) Buyer intel - Questions & reviews help me see which sellers regularly maintain their products, fixes problems brought to their attention, accept constructive criticism, receive crucial ideas to improve the product, learn how to use the product for beginners, & most importantly - take care of customers in general. It also prevents me from asking questions that may have already been asked and answered. Removing it from the buyer’s viewpoint & limiting it to private channels only guarantees that the seller will see a noticeable increase in constantly repeated questions, bug reports, etc., on whatever support solution they rely on.
I hope to see some great updates to the marketplace & that the staff will reconsider the questions & reviews restrictions.
“We are currently working on improvements to the Marketplace experience for 2023”
1st thing to do is remove the review feature!? reviews are a must when dealing with products you’re paying for. What kind of decision is that!?
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