Current State:
We are at the advent of the future UGC and metaverse platform development, with new features releasing more and more frequently, bringing us closer to a UE6-FN-Verse development environment that lowers the barriers to entry across the board enabling us to share our designs with the world.
We have the future of technology when it comes to animation, visual effects, a brand new development language, but when it comes to the support we get and the infrastructure surrounding it, things start to bring us back down to earth.
The Horse Left Without the Cart:
The state of the forums, the way that the community gets treated as self supporting by the devs of the UGC platform, and 99:1 balance of the priorities in regards to growth vs maintenance and stability seems to be more than ājust a sprintā or a āperiod of rapid growthā and more like a systemic result of a skewed value structure. The drive to stay in front and update features comes at the cost of the usability, support, and most importantly gratitude shown to the user base. Itās clear that we are here because weāre passionate, weāre willing to put in the time and effort to identify and report bugs and even guide each other through the learning process. While thatās amazing to see from a community standpoint, itās also become lopsided as far as being met half way or supported in any of these efforts.
History Repeats:
Thereās a parallel history to be told about the state of support of UE as a platform and product in the forum posts and unfortunately this lack of care or value for early adopters and enthusiasts can be traced back. If you think weāre the only ones getting canned responses from bots and no updates on the bug report we filed after 3 hours of troubleshooting, you can find the same threads for UE with people talking about these same issues spanning half a decade. Instead of looking at us as valued members of the community, investing in the forums and fostering an environment of feedback, detailed analysis and volunteer QA - theyāve decided that and aggressive release schedule for updates outweigh the value of - well just about everything.
Why would we need QA when we can have more poorly documented updates? The community will figure it out anyways, so why not let the collective take the L on discovering, documenting, and reporting these issues, then we can use more of the budget for growthā¦
Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions:
Below are screenshots from the bug report section of the Star Citizen forums:
Categorization that is easy to use, responsive, and functional. It has a high focus on innovative methods of displaying data as well as encouraging collaboration from the community to confirm and rank the bugs thatās easy to understand and participate in.
Clear processes around timelines, amount of reports, documented confirmations, votes from the community, and a giant button that says Contribute. (wow)
An advanced details page which allows for 1 click dashboard like visualization. Why? Because they value the time and effort of their userbase, and if theyāre willing to get involved and help build something good into something great, why not put forward the effort to provide them the tooling? It just makes sense. Itās respectful, its due dilliigence, and its a clear example of how it can be done effectively.
Examples of the community utilizing the tooling available to mark duplicate bugs, and self organize to ensure that the QA team is able to operate efficiently by consolidating information, reducing unnecessary bloat, and making it easier for everyone involved to be productive.
Process Transparency:
Creating a new issue:
Acknowledging the users that spend their time dilligently troubleshooting, collecting data, confirming, and supporting the QA staff of the company with the revolutionary process of updating the status on the bug report. Actually informing the user on whether or not they spent their time in veinā¦ Itās a glimpse of what the future could look like with some effort.
And thatās not all, thereās a notion set up specifically for learning the importance of the system and structure contained in the issue-reporting section of the main website: Star Citizen - Getting Started with PleaseFix on Notion.so
Pass the Copium Brother:
It can be argued that itās ānot that badā, and Iām not here to argue that point, Iām here to point out that there is a way to do it better.
From a business standpoint the value should be apparent, and I truly do not understand why more effort isnāt being focused here. Iām not sure how many people you have leveraging their efforts at 1:200 ratio of effort to outcome, but I would have to imagine with a bit of analysis you may find some room in the budget to hire someone to make this a priority.
Epicā¦ Please:
Epic, you guys just went all in on a UGC platform, and you seem to get the intrinsic value of having a community of developers, while simultaneously overlooking a massive reciprocal value add by that community of developers. (Hi, weāre here.)
Itās 100% on you as an organization to create comprehensive and adequate tooling to enable the community to operate at its full potential, and long term you do harm the platform, the product, and strain your relationship with your userbase by neglecting it. I spent nearly 10 years in Silicon Valley working on the best IT teams in the world, and I know how difficult and exhausting it is dealing with bug reports, queues, QA, triage, and prioritization at scale. But it is a critical part of the ecosystem and it needs to be nurtured. By investing into it and empowering your developer user base, you reduce strain on some of the most overworked, underappreciated contributors to your organization (In regards to your QA team who we work anonymously in partnership with for whatever reason) and encourage us to actually come report our bugs and participate in the QA process for your platform for free.
You should want that, we should want that, QA I presume would love it. Where are the other stakeholders weāre waiting for? Itās been almost a yearā¦ We love the platform, we are committed to its success, but you need to meet us half way. Iām not convincing anyone else to come report bugs here when I have over 1500 hours in UEFN, over 100 posts, and wouldnāt be able to tell you if any of my reports were ever even read by a human let alone actioned on.
Just some food for thought.
Side by Sides:
Alright lets get Roblox in on this party eh?
They have pinned informational posts, thatās really good, probably a pretty low effort way to reduce the total post/ticket count. Some differences Iām noticing off the bat are they have more relevant sorting options like sorting by resolved issues.
Someone seems to have had the foresight to include the visual button for Resolved on the UEFN side, but forgot to make it filterable or accessible.
Big issue on Roblox reported where the game wonāt launch, it takes about a month for human intervention, and overall 2 support staff respond to the thread.
Here we have the 6th highest viewed thread so far in all of the UEFN Issues and Bug Reporting and after a total of roughly 9 months there have been 2 automated updates from bots, and no comment from staff. If there isnāt enough time or energy across a team to address the top 10 posts in each category of the forums PER YEAR, thenā¦ well Iāll let everyone come to their own conclusions given the information provided.
I just want to see the platform do well, and I want to feel good about working on it and contributing to solutions, and right now Iām having a hard time. I wouldnāt have written all of this and provided these examples unless I really cared and wanted to provide ways to highlight where improvements can be made and examples of attainable directions to move in. Iām doing my best to keep it constructive but if I seem frustrated and slightly condescending, itās because this post is not and should not be my job. Iām trying to follow the vision that you (Epic) put forth about start up developers and the UGC platform, and the whole bill of sale.
I would just like to be able to focus on doing that to best of my ability, and request that you please give this the resources and attention it needs to improve its efficacy so we donāt let it compound and end up 5 years down the road with someone else making this same post. We can do better.
