We want our review system to help buyers make informed decisions when choosing what products to purchase, and we want our sellers to experience the value of having ratings that are fair and accurate. Unfortunately, some members of the marketplace community (both buyers and sellers), are abusing the current system. The review system needs to be fair, clear, and useful, and we want to mitigate the possibility of abuse. To that end, we’re having ongoing conversations internally on how to update the system that will meet the needs of the overall community.
As an additional note, we don’t like that some people use the reviews or questions system to confirm product ownership, and we want to solve that by giving the seller community the ability to verify product ownership (no big announcement on that, but it is high on the priority list).
@spacegojira I’m tagging you since I’ve moved the thread to the Marketplace section and wanted to make sure that you could still find it.
I agree that using Reviews for Verification is not a valid option and I would also see that as manipulating the product ratings.
I started using the Questions Area for Verification since 3 Weeks, but I ask everyone to delete their Verification Question after that. It also revealed some people (4+) who didn’t purchase it, but have access to the product from piracy websites. This allows me to not waste my time supporting those kind of people.
It’s good to see that you do plan to give us Sellers a real option for verification, but I am wondering now If Epic wants us Sellers to stop using the Questions Area for verification until the official option is available?
While using it for verifications dramatically hurts the intended usefulness of the questions feature, we aren’t preventing it since we don’t have a self help system for verification. We do not want people using the Reviews section for a similar purpose, and there have been some cases where we’ve had to intervene.
@Unreal_Josh Thanks for tagging me. I can still find the discussion when I click on the profile symbol here. I also changed the thread title to better reflect the nature of the discussion.
On a sidenote, I noticed that once you refund a marketplace asset, you can no longer review it. It would be better to still be able to leave a review for a refunded asset, as it can help others to be aware of issues with it (in my case the asset has some serious technical issues, which I now can not warn about any longer).
Steam does this too, where you can still leave a review after you have refunded a game.
Could you please consider making that change, to still allow reviews for an already refunded asset?
I’ve bought a lot of assets from the marketplace, a lot were good, but one developer was very rude and didn’t fix problems in his assets, so I went and wrote a negative review for the purchases I’ve made from him.
To my shocking surprise, Epic deleted my reviews.
Wow.
That’s really bad.
When did this happen? If you believe your review was correct, you can write to the marketplace support team and demand it to be reinstated - or at least to give you a reason why it was deleted. It could have been a mistake on their side, they are human after all.
I can believe that the dev was rude to you, I have met a few devs who take negative reviews or criticism of their assets really personal and become really rude in response. It’s not very professional behavior, but that’s what you sometimes get when you have an open asset marketplace with that many sellers.
And you can always write the review again. Just make sure it’s “technically correct”, use proof like screenshots and don’t personally attack the seller.
I don’t want to name & shame the developer, what I want to name and shame is the Unreal Marketplace staff. I’ve emailed them several times, they even compared the fact that I’m posting my reviews to spam, just because instead of writing separate/unique review for each product, I wrote one very long describing everything and used the same review for all purchases. I will don’t bother writing any more reviews for this store, as I’ve learned that they might delete it for any reason they don’t like it, I will not lose my time. They’d rather protect the rude developer because they will get more money this way. With less negative reviews customers will be more likely to hit the buy button. This is unethical and it’s cheating, manipulating customer reviews for own benefit of Unreal Marketplace profits. I’ve lost interest in using this store. I will use other stores. My review contained facts only, quotations, example issues, and developer actions, all written in polite manner. But my simple right to share my experiences has been blocked by the Marketplace team.
The harassment / Spam reviews are getting out of hand. They only seek to damage reputation and sales from the Seller’s product and deleting those comments is not enough. Those Accounts need to be permanently ban from the Marketplace. They’re not asking anything, they simply Spam the product with intention to harm.
I support @Unreal_Josh but way more needs to be done. Heavier punishment for the Bullies and Spammers.
And now they don’t remove negative reviews at all even when they are technically false just because its not considered spam. Great work @spacegojira, you’ve thrown us all in the 1 star for no reason ditch. This probably doesn’t even matter to you but for us creators it is detrimental, some customers are so unskilled that they can’t even add a mesh with cloth simulation to a bp to save they’re lives, that’s not the creator fault but we still get blamed for it. You say we need to improve as creators? How are we supposed to improve on that as creators, do we make skeletal meshes that automatically get added to whatever bp’s the customer has in they’re project when they press download, you sound like a real genius I’m sure you can code that.
And even worse some customers don’t want help to resolve they’re self created issues or even care how true or false they’re reviews are, and they will not respond because they’re much happier knowing they’ve messed up someone else’s hard work with a 1 star review and you my friend, you empower them.
Doesnt help, but this forum post probably had less than 0 impact on the reportong system.
Epic just dgaf and doesnt have the man power apparently (thats what they say, i call it BS) to monitor comments.
As a marketplace creator you can go around it. Release a new version with better sruff in it as a new peoject. Axe the other one.
Hopefully the user causing issues stops being a problem too…
So after reporting the review as technically wrong and providing them with evidence the marketplace team responded to me saying if a customer has a problem we take it at face value.
No investigation what so ever, it doesn’t even matter that the customer was sold a working product.
Deleting projects causes negative feedback for epic.
So…
If any time someone gets BS ratings by a bot, a child, or just some id1ot which epic doesn’t handle you delete the thing…
Then eventually Epic’ll have to start wondering why so much ■■■■ gets deleted…
