You all are acting like Discord communities were created for the publishers. Publishers came up with this approach in order to offer the best support they can for their products.
Problems can be misunderstood, sometimes you need to have a clear discussion about what’s happening, sharing files, videos, audio, screen etc., real-time, all this is possible with Discord. Answered questions and cases resolved are there for other verified members to see and the information can be linked between them. Where is the bad thing?
And the fact that we, publishers, ask for proof of purchase is because our time is valuable. We can’t spend time on people that don’t respect our work and they just got the products for free.
5 minutes of support offered through Discord could mean days in exchanging emails.
We took this burden on our backs as we have to manage the server as well
Discord support servers save time on both parties and the quality of interaction between sellers and buyers is way higher than emails.
Heya @PugLifeStudio - you’re misunderstanding my point. I am not saying that Discord servers shouldn’t be a thing. I am saying that while it is up to sellers to decide if they want to provide such a third-party approach to support, this should never act as the only/first point of entry for Marketplace customers to get support. Buyers should first be able to ask for support using the built-in tools (Question and Reviews, or even email) ; and then, if needed, another layer of support can be added on top.
Furthermore, the fact that some sellers want to use private Discord servers for support is their own decision, and it’s up to them to deal with the consequences of that. Abusing the Reviews and Questions for “authentication” should be completely forbidden. Now I absolutely understand that some sellers do want this level of verification, and do enjoy replying to support queries in realtime. My point is that they should simply request a token feature to be added to the Marketplace, and wait for it to be implemented. Until then, they should just use the tools that the ecosystem provides without abusing them.
I guess am especially annoyed by all this because I feel like this Discord issue seems to be at the root of what we are experiencing today, and just like everyone else here I am negatively affected as a seller.
@Bruce21st : Absolutely ! Glad to hear that we’re on the same page.
I think it takes away from questions that would be relevant for buyers. I have done the discord verification process and been very dissapointed when i saw so many unanswered questions, but i had already made the purchase. Getting a refund is very time consuming.
As someone who started a discord server for supporting my products way back in 2016… I do feel like a big thing being missed by at least a number of people here is that discord servers for support have been the way that a lot of us do things because Epic have not provided an adequate service for support at ANY POINT in the marketplace’s lifetime. Emails are hidden behind multiple clicks on the page, the questions are not super discoverable, and fill with spam a lot of the time. All that said - the verification via review/comment should never have been allowed. But I wonder, if that is the reason, why its now been taken notice by epic. Its been a problem for years now. I really hope this all leads to positive changes.
Also - just to clarify - I am, in no way, saying marketplace creators should have a discord server. Email should be the only enforced way. But Epic make it so hard for people new to the marketplace to get support, and discord not only allows a simple real-time option, it lets people in the community also help each other out, which means everyone wins. This never would have had to be the case, though, if there was any sort of system in place to allow communication between sellers and buyers within the marketplace itself.
That all aside - I can’t be the only one that is somewhat frustrated to return to this topic after a day or two, seeing so many people express their dismay at this situation, and not have a single response from epic at all.
By this interpretation you could charge the user with a non monetary trade, example to access the document you must send me league skin or some Dota items that you obtained for free to my account. Do you know how malicious this idea you suggest is. You are basically exchanging documentation for reviews. Reviews can be paid for just like with anything else requiring time and effort therefore it is a service. This does not fall within “contain, distribute, direct”. It is a service exchange. The word would be exchanged. You are directing them to an exchange not the content. Therefore no interpretation you make up would make that system fit within these guidelines. At no point does the user have access. If I am incapable of providing a review, say because I feel uncomfortable writing or have issues publicly sharing my discord or formulating a statement, then no documentation is provided violating that guideline.
So, if my math makes sense: 2.6% of all reviewed products had a discord ID. (And an even lower percentage of all products had a discord ID). And only 0.5% of all reviewed products were blatantly gaming the review system.
And for this, they scrap the entire review/Q&A database which many of us have spent years participating in and growing? For many of us, due to our dedication to our product (and, by extension) the Marketplace, this system helped drive sales. Like I said above, at best it is disrespectful, at worst, just downright cruel.
This is the equivalent of burning down an entire village because one home had termites. It’s baffling. We definitely deserve more of an explanation than has been provided.
We also deserve an apology and for a better solution to be found here…
A few suggestions to enhance the Marketplace experience.
Separate characters from Humanized characters and other mobs.
Allow to archive products from out own vault, where the archived products can only be accessed through the website at specific subcategory of vault, as many products were owned earlier, or not supported anymore and it’s just taking too much space in vault when looking for something, this could also enhance the products loading in launcher for users who have many products.
Allow a tag “exclude” filter, for example I search for a keyword, but I don’t want to list a specific tag.
You should have removed the star ratings as well, because the reviews provided important critical information about a product (e.g. no documentation being provided or certain features not working properly).
Now these important reviews are buried under all the meaningless 5 star “give me Discord access” reviews. And since we can’t see the reviews, we can’t report these fake reviews anymore either.
The current situation only favors those who “cheated” the system by demanding reviews for verification, which we know was a widespread problem especially among popular assets.
Thus without removing the stars as well, this just made the marketplace completely untrustworthy.
In conclusion I will not be buying any more assets from the marketplace until the new review system is in place, and I recommend anyone else to do the same.
I’d push back here and remind you that not purchasing mostly hurts the independent developers who (at least some of us) earn our primary living from the Marketplace.
As for the stat ratings - at this point, my five-star status is the only thing differentiating my products from others. Never once did I game the system - removing my rating that took years to grow, would only hurt more.
Thanks for everyone’s feedback about the removal of written reviews and questions on the UE Marketplace. The removal was one step in an ongoing update to company-wide data privacy and security policies. We’ve since identified a way to keep existing reviews and questions in place while we work on the next step of re-reviewing and moderating existing posts to ensure they comply with our new policies. So we have restored the existing review system. A similar review and moderation effort is underway in the Unreal Engine forums.
This being due to a company-wide policy makes a lot of sense. Thanks a lot for finding a way to bring questions & reviews back.
I feel more transparency as to the reasons of this change would have been best to have from the start, but I understand why you’d want to keep such details internal to Epic.
Thank you… Could you guys maybe consider talking to marketplace creators in general before making sweeping changes. Even if not for input, but just to give us a heads up because we are usually the ones who have to deal with it the most.
No one should be using the questions or reviews section for verification. Users review before they even use the product, which falsely improves the product’s visibility & rating. This puts sellers like me in a position where they are getting less visibility because they refuse to make their questions section spammy and unusable for it’s actual purpose.
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There are other ways to verify, I made a tool that automates the entire process of verifying order information and applying a discord role;
In essence it automatically intakes information from users through a DM (also messages them in a channel if DM’s aren’t allowed) and sends it to Epic for verification, then assigns them a role if Epic verifies the order information. Can use it with multiple products and it’s easily customizable through an .ini file. It also keeps this information as a hash for future, instant verification if necessary. Useful for keeping track of how many people are using the same info.
If you’re worried about speed, i’ve had epic verify someone in as little as 10 minutes; typically no longer than a day.
This still shouldn’t be on marketplace devs though. I was told there was a verification process being developed but it’s been over a year and nothing yet.
Could you provide any specific details on what changes are being made? Unless i missed something it’s been pretty vague at this point, would love to know the goals of the overhaul.
Well, what a relief ! Really goes to show that all creators should take a minute or two (or rather, a couple hours …) to make and maintain their own backup of Reviews and Questions in the future.
I think the issue – or the drive to verify people on Discord – is more spurred by pirated content than by Discord being itself an inherently more-convenient manner of support. (It’s not. Searching a Discord is not inherently a better way to look for past questions than, y’know, a knowledge base or a forum of some sort.)
To elaborate: if someone has obtained a plugin through illicit means (which, honestly, can be as simple as “someone copied it from their machine to yours”), and they show up on your server asking for customer support (“ isn’t working, I bought this, tell me how to fix it!”), I can absolutely understand a content creator wanting some assurance that the person in question did actually buy it before spending a huge chunk of time providing support for them.
Having people post their Discord IDs on the marketplace for validation is a terrible method, but (at least on a technical level) it works, because you have a person posting their Discord ID, and you can see the little icon that they purchased the product. Huzzah! Proof! You mark them as ‘verified’ on your Discord, and now when they ask for support, you can see that, hey, they’re verified and in the ‘paid user support’ channel!
In contrast, email? There’s no way to validate that. Sure, you could have them post their email address in a comment (thus validating it), but then
you now have to maintain a list of all those email addresses and when someone emails you for support, you look up their email (and hope they emailed from the right address),
the situation – at least in terms of extraneous reviews that exist only for validation purposes – is not really any different than with Discord, and
you’ve had them post their email address in the clear on a publicly-visible webpage, which is just an invitation for them to receive Yet More Spam.
You could set up your own forum and ask people to post a comment on the product with their forum ID in order to be validated, but that’s still not fundamentally different than the Discord situation from the Marketplace point of view. Plus now you have to deal with hosting a forum and preventing spammers from signing up and everything else, compared with just “I make a Discord server, cool, here’s the invite link.”
Needless to say, the Marketplace demonstrably does need improvements with regards to allowing communication between a customer and a marketplace creator in a manner that allows the creator to validate that this is a customer; if the planned changes to the Marketplace make that a less torturous process, I think that’s probably good.
But I don’t think the drive towards Discord for support is driven just by Discord being ‘real-time’ or ‘shiny’, it’s because you can validate someone once via adding a role on your Discord and then know they’re a real customer going forward.
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