This new rule, where star ratings only show up if you have over 5 reviews, is a disaster for small and new sellers.
But not only that, it’s extremely unfair and only favors the already established & popular sellers.
I have an asset with less than 5 reviews, which were all 5 stars and very positive. Now thanks to FAB, I have none - while the competition with more than 5 reviews got all their stars showing up.
How is this fair? This is artificially favoring the old sellers - something that Epic specifically said (before the FAB launch) they would not do, and make sure new and old sellers are treated equally.
So please make good on your words and remove this awful rule, and show ALL star ratings, including for those assets with less than five.
One of my client got confused because of that limitation. He add a 5 star review but just didnt show up on refresh for him. We also no more receiving email like we did on ue marketplace.
This is nonsense, the 1 star review will just show up later, this does not keep anyone from leaving a bad rating.
If people think your asset sucks this much to leave a 1 star rating, it’s much more likely you will receive five 1-star ratings instead. And them showing up all at once will surely ruin your product.
If Epic wanted to avoid troll ratings, they could just bring back the reporting feature.
Even Better way to Stop Troll would be by Bringing Written Reviews, Comments (Even if it is Opt-In) with Top Priority.
Currently these are on Last and Second Last Column in Roadmap.
It’s a good temporary system and they have plans to improve it. It also doesn’t have nearly as big of an impact as you would like. I have zero ratings and my sales have gone up.
Yes it should be higher on the roadmap, but don’t go blaming it if your sells have dropped.
It would be good if there could be a pending star rating.
This product has star ratings pending.
So each time a rating is left the buyer can see the that their rating has been acknowledged and is pending and we can also see a rating has been left for the product.
(As an extra…
…Of course it would be good if we (sellers) could see the rating. Maybe a page in our dashboard.
If a product gets a low star rating we get a heads up and can look into why.)
Definitely open to changing this, but our thinking was that if someone would want to be a troll and leave an unjustified 1 star review on a new product, or any other product that does not currently has any ratings, and their 1 star rating would show up right away, it is going to make it look as if something might actually be wrong with that product and discourage others from acquiring it.
This is particularly bad for any free assets where it would not cost the troll anything to acquire it, and leave that review.
I am not sure if a reporting feature would help with this without accompanying text reviews, as without context it is hard to report someone who left a one star review?
Again open to changing this, for example maybe paid for assets show reviews right away and free ones need at least 5 ratings, but just stating that this is one of these things that I think will always leads to some pros and some cons no matter which approach we take.
Now you’re lying to your customers telling them that there are no ratings while there ARE ratings. Lying is never good business practice (while it looks like everybody believes in opposite).
You had working system in UE marketplace, just stick to that. There were known cases of abuse with Discord verification and possibly troll reviews but they’re easily solved by “report” button accessible both for sellers and buyers (and proper reaction on that button from store officials, of course). It’ll work equally for free and paid assets.
Hide current ratings altogether, when text reviews will be in place, reset and reimport taking into account only reviews longer than 500 symbols. This will filter out meaningless reviews and Discord verification scam.
Thanks for the reply Hourences! I think your suggestion of showing ratings right away for paid assets, while free ones require 5 ratings at least, is a good compromise and a fair solution.
I would be very happy to see this implemented, as I can also understand free assets being more vulnerable to troll ratings.
Of course I would prefer text reviews to come back, but until that happens your suggestion really sounds like the best option.
Especially if ratings only show up if the person actually downloaded the asset, which would probably stop the most lazy trolls and should likely prevent bots ruining ratings.
I have seen many 1 star reviews that were not the fault of the product whether thats a discord ban, someone didnt read the documentation, a crash happened due to an edge case use that got patched but the person never updated their review.
Having text reviews doesnt solve this because 90% of people won’t read the reviews, they see the star and decide from there. if you get a single 1 star review for any reason your product is dead in the water, you would have no chance to recover unless you could contact the person and get it changed. having a minimum of 5 ratings makes it have a more accurate rating aggregate.
Please keep this rule in place, I have had people leave negative reviews that seem honest but are lies because they got banned from the discord server, people who didnt read documentation, and other reasons. products sell fine without reviews being shown.
There should be an obligatory written feedback behind every rating. I believe Google has the same. You just can’t leave reviews without explaining your reason.
Implement Reminder on every downloaded product to leave a feedback and Rate the product
(Usually people don’t bother leaving positive feedbacks compared to negative ones) this will increase positivity.
A questions section should be added too, so people can ask before writing feedback or purchasing or to see what’s going on under the hood.
Dispute in case of bad rating
Sellers should be able to defend their good name and provide explanation. (In the real world you can’t just walk into someone’s store an sh.t all over the place without a good reason.)
If the product has been refunded the bad rating should be deleted.
This will improve products, avoid refunds, increase sales and as a result benefit everyone.
Then lets just settle on removing ratings altogether from FAB, including those ported over from the old marketplace.
Either show ratings for everyone, or for no one. The current system goes against the equal treatment of all sellers, which Epic promised before the FAB launch.
Not to mention that it makes FAB look broken to customers, when their ratings aren’t showing up.
I am sorry you can’t review bomb new products anymore but this is a good thing for sellers. The fact people are upset about sellers not having bad reviews they cant recover from is wild.