I guess ignoring my question means shovelware is there to stay?
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Hi James. Thanks for your detailed response. But I feel the need to clarify some things hereâŚ
Firstly - with regards to the removal of reviews being a sore spot for some sellers:
As a seller I do lament the loss of reviews as I worked very hard (and continue to do so) to provide excellent customer support and the reviews were a great way of showcasing this. But it is as a customer specifically that they are a huge loss for me. I no longer have a way to ensure a product I am considering is reliable. I understand you guys have a system planned to come in the future, but in my mind that should have been finalized and ready for the launch of FAB given the importance of something like this.
I do understand that both reviews and questions were open to abuse in various ways, but as it is now, there is no way to really know the quality of a product we are purchasing because of the loss of these features. They were not well designed or maintained features - but having NOTHING in their place unfortunately just makes things worse for the customer.
With regards to the copyright issues:
I think you may have perhaps misunderstood the issue here based on your response. At least for me, the issue is not with fan made content, editorial content, etc. but rather content that is strictly not permitted for redistribution and/or sale. As an exampleâŚ
This dragonball z model ripped directly from another game and uploaded - the user specifically states in the description that they did not make the model and have ripped it from a game. They have multiple models listed on their account that match this.
Other problematic listings are things like weapons taken directly from games like Escape from Tarkov being uploaded, company logos being offered on models (there is for instance a product labeled âbombs for gazaâ covered in logos for dominos, mcdonalds, etc. which Iâm fairly certain would not be allowed), etc. There is a HUGE amount of content here that is not going to be allowed in peoples games, projects, etc. but is currently being sold regardless.
I understand the agreement sellers agree to and that Epic is not necessarily responsible for ensuring listings are legally okay to share - BUT the issue, as I stated in another response, is not that. Its that there appears to be absolutely no policing of blatant disregard for copyright that has already been highlighted by the community, so it makes it very difficult as a customer to trust that any product is legally viable. In the past, the UE marketplace team were fairly good at removing content that broke the law in this way when it did get through the submission process, so while you had to still trust the seller there, there was a lot more confidence as a customer that if content was not allowed, it would at least be dealt with when reported. On FAB, it does not feel that way because I can literally search for star wars, mario, kingdom hearts, dragonball z, doctor who, etc. and find content that, in some cases may come under the banner of fan art or editorial use, but in most cases is blatantly in breach of copyright and very often the user is not even trying to claim that they made the model at all and have ripped it (which of course makes it easier to know not to get that model - but again - the point is that it makes every listing questionable and basically shatters and confidence as a buyer).
The current marketplace FAB provides is just full of content that is not fit for sale on a commercial marketplace and its incredibly easy to come by. This isnât a few isolated listings.
Several things you said were known issues that are being worked on
Thatâs great to hear. It would be helpful if a list of known issues were made public - the only one I can see is the âKnown issues at launchâ thread by Flak, but that has not been updated to include the issues listed in this thread, at least.
Filters resetting on new search query
This does indeed seem to be resolved now - you are correct. Please disregard that previous feedback. I had not tested it again since launch day so we can possibly put this down to things being a bit unstable on launch I guess.
I really hope that changes to this platform can come swiftly and improve it, and it is reassuring to see someone from Epic jump in here and respond to individual points like this. It definitely would be incredibly helpful to have a bit more communication though - a list of updated known issues, some sort of understanding of a rough time frame on fixes, etc. would go a long way.
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Thank you for taking the time to answer.
The review problem is a tricky one I agree. I may not have a popular opinion on this but I am to a point where I would be good to start with a clean slate (even if my tools are 5 stars).
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I would hate to loose my reviews⌠but I agree with this. Might be good for the whole ecosystem.
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Same feeling but I would do it for the cause.
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Yep I would agree with this. I worked hard for my reviews, but the ratings themselves arenât the bit that mattered. A clean slate would put everyone on even ground again
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Hi James
Thanks for your reply and explanation.
I realized the review system and question page were abused by many before and I think it was the right decision to remove them from Fab. On this I agree with this decision.
It seems that in unreal engine page, The sort by mode does not work correctly when I choose newest.
I published two products a couple of days ago and they are not in there while the products that were released before mine are visible.
would you please check this too?
General feedback
In regards to the Quixel Megascans, big thank you to the team for providing a one click solution to âclaimâ those assets, and a bigger thank you to the team for working on a solution to add them to our library (that is said to come in the near future).
Suggestions
When looking for the sellers, itâs been a challenge to find a list somewhere of sellers that you can search for. Iâve tried using keyword searches and such like seller: Quixel or from: Quixel or anything like that in the search bar and came up empty. Those types of strict searching would be great.
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To piggy back on that, being able to search our own libraries using similar keyword functions would be great.
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As would having a list in our search filters for the names of the sellers we have products from. Then I can simply click the tag/name for
DekogonorQuixeland it would show me my assets. -
This may be feedback for Quixel directly, but having zip files named the assetid of the asset, is brutal (IE: asg0tl4gf0). If they could at least provide a json of the asset information for the contained assets that would be very helpful for people like myself who can develop solutions using said data.
Thanks again for reading this thread, and I hope FAB continues to do so. Hereâs hoping for fab to continue to resolve issues quickly, and provide further communication to the community.
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To add some other feedback that someone has highlighted in a discussion Iâve see - its a little disappointing to notice that the name of the creator of an asset is not listed in the search results. We just see the product name, the rating and then the category - but it would be good to have it also show the name of the seller (if there is a concern about clutter, this could happen on hover or something similar and does not need to be always visible).
You can search for something and then select the âcreatorsâ tab which I think addresses your suggestion (I think), but it seems to be quite broken and unreliable currently⌠as you can see here lol
After thinking some more, I think having no reviews/rating at all would be better than having anonymous meaningless reviews. The current system is to open to abuse to both review bombing and faking 5 stars.
I know itâs probably too late, but there was critical documentation & information stored in questions and reviews. This has already impacted my commercial work but much more significantly has begun to impact the university students I teach. Please recognise that your most valuable resource in terms of user creation, retention and training is documentation and troubleshooting information and that educators and instructors teaching your software cannot pivot as well as commercial users away from features that are suddenly absent or tools that become undocumented. I appreciate that they were mostly not tools or products created by Epic but they were sold on your platform for your software. Weâre trying to convince massive state and non-state educational organisations that unreal is a legitimate tool and get more technicians into the industry and these sorts of issues impact entire years of students. Good luck with everything.
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Itâs not ideal, but I think orbital market has it all archived. At least that might be helpful for the classes you have going on atm.
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You have to choose between being a store, or a hosting platform. It cannot do both. This is one of the issues with trying to cram everything under one roof. If fab is to be a store, then it cannot also be a platform that hosts infringed intellectual property. These two approaches are absolutely incompatible with one another.
This stuff is mostly NOT fan art but assets directly ripped from other games etc. or copied, and listed for sale at some price. Is this a store, or The Pirate Bay? At the moment, I canât tell which. It is absolutely shameful.
As for text reviews - they are absolutely required. As someone with thousands if dollars in marketplace assets I can tell you I would not have bought half of them without text reviews. Tags are not enough. Meters are not enough. If there is a specific use case issue or fix within an asset we need to be able to describe it in words. Hundreds of people said this even before fab was launched. These other fixes are not a substitute for open text reviews.
The issues around bullying and verification could themselves be easily solved with moderation. They are not good scapegoats for justifying text reviews being totally removed.
I would be curious to know why Epic is fighting this so hard to specifically not give customers what they are overwhelmingly asking for. Is it just that open text requires moderation? What about this is such a problem that Epic needs to fight tooth and nail to prevent customers from having this basic feature?
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Just to say that fab.com now works for me when I use firefox but still doesnât work with brave or chrome (win 8.1) and on the site Iâve been able to filter by engine version.
Aawesome thanks! I donât think that was there when I was testing previously, but I could be mistaken.
Regardless, that would be great to have on the âMy Libraryâ tab! With the # of assets I have, being able to find the ones Iâm looking for would be easier by seller/creator
Every marketplace has their own share of shovelware, unfortunately. I just ignore it, for the most part.
Were any of these free? If so, I might have downloaded them.
Yeah, when I saw this one, I assumed that it was just an edgy joke from someone on SketchFab, tbh
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hey guys, I just wanted to let you know that all of your insights and feedback is very much appreciated, and we go through the forum daily to capture it for our bug tracking and roadmap tools, so we can review and address them as a team. Fab is generating a lot of response from creators, and unfortunately itâs not always possible to address all of the comments one at a time, but I just wanted to let you know that it doesnât go unnoticed and we are working very hard to consolidate all the feedback and address it in the meaningful way.
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But seriously, if youâre going to keep the infinite scrolling, can you at least provide an number for the search results?
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Lots of really good feedback with which I agree! Iâm coming from âthe other sideâ as a Sketchfab seller, and would add that the loss of core Sketchfab features is devastating to me as well as to many of the members of my community for promoting 3D art and tools, Interconnect3d.com.
On the Sketchfab store, we used to be able to display a beautiful, performant 3D viewer at the top of our product listings, while now FAB seems to use an inferior 3D viewer as secondary media. We used to have a robust commenting and âlikesâ system in the Sketchfab store, as well as separate customer reviews with star ratings AND comments.
I sincerely hope that Epic will do better than they have with this launch, and listen to feedback from long time customers like us.
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