Maybe I’m just blind, but the forum still looks pretty much as when it was changed an eternity ago. What happened to the promised Epic Theme? Did it vanish in the same black hole as the feature tracker, roadmap, bug support and staff activity? And please don’t waste your time explaining that all of this is there and got “Improved” when the majority is not “amused”. I’m happy about any information in regards of the Forums though.
Not only you. It is still as repulsive as it was on the first day after the change. Can’t get used to that, disregarding the time passed.
Alexander was working on it… but he got better job offer and left EpicGames lol
As far as I know, they have stated that they are under no obligation to give any answers, acknowledgements to problems/requests/features, updates, etc etc. The fact that they sometimes do is pretty awesome, but it’s not an entitlement. The problem lies in that people expect that just because they stated some bug/issue/idea/etc, that they are entitled to a two-way communication with Epic developers. Also, maybe they are just busy and can’t be bothered answering a million and one inane questions that can be solved in <30s of googling or when people bump the hell out of the same dead-horse topics that they are already aware of…
I’m going to be brutally honest here but let’s face it, per 1000 people on here, how many do you think actually publish a complete game? I’d bank on <1… People might argue that with more help and such, that number could be higher, but the reality is that the majority of users here don’t even have an ounce of developmental or game design experience and just see a “get rich quick” scheme. No amount of Epic presence is going to correct that. If you don’t understand the basics of coding and 3d art, then you should probably attend a school or spend a couple years really learning about it all from the ground up. The majority of their “high” earning teams/studios/devs/etc probably don’t spend much time on these forums nagging for help and features.
I think the forums are a great tool for getting help here and there, but they shouldn’t be your life-line. Epic is most likely going to spend their time and resources toward a direction that will net them profit and spending a ton of time on here, that could be spent working on other things, doesn’t seem like it will make a significant return.
Oh and yeah, the new forum layout definitely blows. No amount of time has made it any better for me lol…
While estimate of actual end users to generate profit is somewhat accurate, there is absolutely no correlation between quality of forums and mentioned estimate. Not every engine user generates income directly. For each person, responsible for the game, you will have a dozen of ones who work for that person on average, not generating any income for Epic directly, but still relating to the profit in question.
Forums are more of a reputation thing and to be fair, forum maintenance does not seem like it could be an accountable expenditure item. If it is, then things are pretty grim.
The forums have definitely stopped getting the attention it needs, as a moderator it is now quite a chore to actually moderate the posts (compared to the old way of doing things) and I sometimes get very frustrated.
Its still pretty dreadful. The speckled background hurts my eyes if I spend any significant time on here. I’m constantly getting errors such as “not authorized to view” even on my own threads. Notifications are unreliable. The whole thing barely works at all. Epic just doesn’t care.
Using the dark theme on the new forum made it a lot more pleasant to use. But I agree, the new forum is absolutely aweful with all these errors.
I feel like this “Epic doesn’t care” has become a common thing now. Forum neglected, bug reports unanswered, major problems ignored for years, marketplace quality control non-existant, security concerns left ignored as well…
All this is going to bite Epic in the ■■■ hard, when they are dependend on the community again to fix and improve their engine.
And here we go again. Setting unrealistic expectations for company X and blaming them for not delivering it 
Everything except some forum issues is quite normal…
Marketplace will always have awesome stuff and ****. It’s nature of every marketplace since dawn of civilization.
Epic never promised to answer to every bug report posted on forums or AH. Still they do answer for lot of them, for almost every issue I report.
Every game engine has some major problems ignored for years. Yes, it would be awesome if they would care more for it. They could. But that doesn’t mean “Epic doesn’t care at all”.
Do they lack some really smart guy who would push few changes and minimize some issues? Sure! Smart features and organization made Stack Overflow so effective.
Could they hire “bunch of students” to go through all the reports? Sure! IIRC Unity did something like this lately.
Would I like to have official dark them of the forum? Sure. But I still I find a new version easier to read (thanks God for fixed width). And I don’t spend entire day here… Also, I recommend f.lux to you. Seriously, it helps with the entire internet which is usually white. Since I installed it I don’t care about white websites anymore.
Should they deliver all the features you want? No, not necessarily. We have access to source code and help of community - customizing major game engine was never easier.
Although I totally agree engine should provide solutions for more and more common problems with every release. They could do better. Still it doesn’t justify statement “Epic doesn’t care”.
Should they find out way to distinguish all paying customers (this 5% from last project, custom deal, etc) from the rest and always help them? IMHO they should. People who never paid should get the least attention from Epic. That’s simply fair. You usually pay for direct support, something better than “post on forum and maybe community will help you”.
This forum software is complete failure, half the time it doesn’t even work. It would be simple and cost effective to switch to XF2 - there is even an automatic importer for VB5 - but for some reason epic doesn’t want to improve the forum.
Don’t be such a fanboy. How is it an unrealistic expectation to ask Epic to simply respond to a major engine problem, which users have constantly talked about for over 2 years now?
And yes, if all they do is to simply ignore such things, even though it impacts the development of game projects quite heavily, then it is more than fair to say that they don’t care.
But sure, praise them a little more and just ignore all the problems people talk about every day.
Yes, indeed. It is unrealistic expectation to assume there won’t be major longstanding issues in such big and complex software.
Developing such big piece of software isn’t act of God Almighty. Some problems stay for years.
You’re talking about some major engine problem. Does it mean that Epic didn’t solve any major problem in past years? They ignored everything?
If person didn’t forget how much this engine changed and improved over years - it has be fanboy, right?
Oh, so few big issues impacts development heavily? What about tens of systems that work well and are improved with every release? Doesn’t it impact development heavily too, but in positive sense? Still so sure “they don’t care”?
So the big refactor of landscape shadowing in 4.19 (to improve performance) is the clear sign “they don’t care at all”, isn’t it?
Sometimes it’s funny for me. Sometimes it’s annoying. We’re taking for granted that such big software just works and making a drama while few things still don’t work as expected.
Saying “they don’t care” or “take perfect and do everything right” is obviously false.