First of I want to say that I really appreciate the effort put into the Engine and marketplace to keep all the content on a High Quality level. But I have noticed over the past months that there is a huge lack on communication and order in the marketplace trello and forum.
Let me take an Example of the “RSV02 - 20 AAA PBR Nature Mats”.
This Item was put on the public marketplace Trello on November 17 and then Moved to “In Progress” on Nov 24.
After a short while on December 9 it was on “Scheduled/Finalist for Marketplace Release”.
It was in the “Coming Soon” section of the Launcher 2 Times. One in December I believe and then 2 weeks ago.
Still it has yet to be released even though it was in “Scheduled/Finalist for Marketplace Release” for more than 3 MONTHS now.
Furthermore there is no single piece of Information on when it is planed to be released or why there is this delay etc.
So there are a few questions here. Why was it even put in “Scheduled for Marketplace Release” when there are apperently still Problems / legal issues with it?
Why is there no information on what caused the delay and why is there no real visible schedule?
Additionaly there are of course a few more Items on the Trello in “Scheduled/Finalist for Marketplace Release” which are experiencing long delays.
And if that all wasn’t annoying enough there are quite a lot of Items in the trello “In Progress” categorie although they have already been released!
So there is stuff apperently “In Progress” which are released and out there, and stuff “Scheduled/Finalist for Marketplace Release” which seem to be no where near a release.
So the categories seem rather pointless if they aren’t organized the way it should and for me as and outsider it looks like a huge mess.
I understand that you guys are pretty busy and that the whole process considering the marketplace is still a “work in progress” kinda situation.
But still I would really love to see a better organized Trello and beeing able to clearly see the current state of each Item and if delays occure on an item a short note like (delayed for XX weeks because of double rainbows) or something. Doesn’t need to be specific just a short piece of information that can let everyone know that Items X/Y will probably be delayed.
And not ending up like me waiting for more than 3 months now, looking every week to finaly see some item, but getting disappointed every time. Then getting the hopes up to see the thing I was looking forward to in the “Coming soon” section and still be disappointed 2 marketplace released after it second apperance there.
Sorry for the short rant, but I really had to put this off my chest since it made me quite furious the past weeks.
Still I want to thank everyone at Epic for their work and effort put into the Engine and marketplace and I am a loyal and otherwise happy customer
Honestly the market place needs a ton of work, not just getting items on the market place (to be honest, I have no idea why items need to be voted on if they are already passing through an internal review lol) but also being able to find items you want/need no the market place. It needs a search function, a “filter by category” feature, etc. Not to mention it really needs to be hosted on UnrealEngine.com in addition to the launcher.
The marketplace is a great idea on Epic’s part, but it just needs a bit of work
P.S. Epic, if you need someone who’s really good at these types of things and won’t cost you much… I’m currently a jobless business student, beginner 3D Artist, and aspiring indie developer… cough cough INTERN ME FOR GODS SAKE cough lol
I agree that there is otherwise also a lot work to do with the marketplace and hosting it on UnrealEngine.com would be great to easily send/share links of packages .
Absolutely. It doesn’t even have search or tag functions right now. As it grows, these will be vital for tracking down the content you want. That and the home page needs better organisation to represent the various categories more evenly. For example, at the moment, you need to scroll right down to the bottom of the page just to see there’s an audio category.
I wanted to weigh in here to give some insight on what’s going on behind the scenes with Marketplace. We made a fairly substantial planning error this year. GDC preparation has taken more time away from Marketplace than we anticipated. We’re working on adding more people to help, but as I’ve said numerous times - its a manual, intricate pipeline currently and one that is difficult to train. That said, we’ve certainly made major improvements in response times since our backlog from the holiday in December. We’ll continue to make strides, and improve processes here over the course of this year.
As you know, we started using the Trello board as a way for the community to give input on what goes out. That said, you’re pointing out some of the serious flaws in that system. Also, as and easy of a tool as Trello is, we’re using it in the way that adds extra steps to the process overall, making it more difficult to maintain on the backend. The best i can say at the moment is that we are evaluating either overhauling how we use Trello, or alternative ways to get community involvement that is more meaningful and less taxing on getting things out faster.
Filtering, search, better categorization, and web discovery are all high on our list of updates to hit this year as well. Sorry I can’t give more exact timelines yet, but we’ll also work on being more transparent with what’s going on through our blog an forums. Thanks for being patient and helping us make Marketplace great.
Glad to hear that improvements have been made concerning the response time of items. It would be really to see an overhauled Trello (although the current version is okay from my perspective, just having a lack of order in the last 2 categories), or another System which allows a good look on everything with better status Notes, where you can really see the progress of each item. Really looking forward in what you guys come up with.
Would be really cool to have in the marketplace forum a Thread with all the latest news on whats going on, similar to the “Engine Feature Preview” Threads in the “Announcements and Releases” section, which could come everytime something changes. Currently most of the time I have no idea whats going on marketplace wise other than the weekly Content Releases.
Glad to see that the concerns are taken care of sooner or later.
Glad to see this response. When things start getting backed up it makes people tend to duck down and avoid communication - even while they’re still hard at work. Knowing that mistakes have been acknowledged, various solutions will be tried, and more resources will be put into this makes me feel better about the direction of the marketplace as well as UE4 in general. I’m buying in when 4.7 is released.
For the record I totally understand and expect you guys to be aware of the issue, it’s not something that I’m upset about at all. I just think it has a lot of room for improvement. Also, just to clarify the “intern me for god’s sake” joke wasn’t meant to come off like “even I could do a better job for god’s sake” or anything like that, rather it was me ‘desperately’ begging for a job as I’d love to intern for Epic lol (worst thing about forums, without emphasis anything can seem derogatory)
I think Trello should be scrapped, and Epic should build their own system. Also the forums should be incorporated to the main site.
As it is, there are 4 completely different applications (answerhub, trello, forums, main website), all those should be one and connected with each other.
Nobody wants to register to 4-5 different sites with different designs etc.
The login credentials for the forums (and I believe answerhub) are the exact same for unrealengine.com. Unless you mean to have logging into one do so sinultaneously for the others? One bug I’ve had on the main website however is being logged out after a time even when I clicked the remember me checkbox. Fortunately I don’t always need to be logged in for that site, but it would be annoying if that were extended to the main forums.
One thing about trello is that not many people see it unless you go to the marketplace forum. It would be good to either have that sort of system integrated on the main site or showcased there to let more users know it exist, and what the weekly submissions are etc.
Whole adventure with marketplace took 5 months for me!:))
So after Trello voting and submission of content, I’ve received a mail that the pack is rejected because of a few errors. This took 5 months, I could have a lot of time to fix all errors honestly in 5 months.
I can’t describe you the level of frustration and disappointment I’ve experienced when I’ve received that mail with submission rejected. Sincerely I’ve lost all my will to submit something.
I am not blaming MarketPlace peoples for my errors, but I am confused of how this MarketPlace works, clearly is more in alpha stage that “ready for business”.
