I agree with on all points on .
Lots of user feedback is better than no user feedback.
That said - Bugs will slip past QA like with any software product.
@newbprofi:
Epic brings fast releases than anywhere else, you have ton of bug fixes, improvments and people working on the docs, and bugs are part of the cake. If you prefer few features per year with less bugs, then you should not perhaps use UE4.
I want to clarify that hotfixes are always made freely available if you were ever subscribed to that version of the engine. That is, if you cancelled your subscription at 4.6.0 you will always have access to any hotfixes no matter how far in the future they may be released. We have no interest in trying to lure people into paying money for things like bugfixes, apologies if that was not properly communicated upfront.
@Ray, That is the first time I’ve heard that and i’ve been here for a long time (Beta :P). Put it up with some nice flashing colors 
I just wanna clarify.
I like UE4 very much, its much better usability and quality than Unity3D and CE3 for me.
I like features, everybody like features. But i dont like unstable features.
The reason why i was motivated to write topic is bug, which is not yet fixed from 4.0.0 version, is really dissappointing for me, because its not hidden bug, its obvious and very good seen visually, which makes bug n1 priority, but not for Epics i suppose:
I dont care crashes, i dont care blue screens :D, i care only UI quality, what i see. But i see bad things…
bug is unimportant u might say. But its obvious, and means for me only 1 thing: QA team is not working at all at Epic.
PS: ofc i care crashes.
But also, i dont like Updates, i like to use stable builds for Years!!! I like Windows XP, i like Windows 7. I like PS3. I dont like changes, i like stability and quality. Each product in the world must have 5 years stable cycle in my plans, but i ask just 1 year 
Oh dam! It is so serious bug, that will stop your project from working!
Guys, be little more serious. Such bugs are probabaly on bottom of bottom list of things to fix ;). Especially since such small tasks can take huge amount of time to fix, compared to scale of problems they cause.
Technology not updated with new features for one year is ancient history. Especially in game development.
If i will make game, which use GUI, with bug. My game will be totally ruined.
More serious problems? Rly? Thats what i am talking about, if you make product with serious problems, just dont do it. Or make 1 year cycle with better QA team.
Technology 1 year is history? Lol, i prefer to use 10 years old tecnology engine with 0 bugs, than next-gen engine with 1000000 bugs. The problem is, there is no unbugged software atm, but in future it will be with new methods of programming and new next-gen language.
Lets talk about feedback. What is better Feedback or QA team? For me the answer is totally clear - QA team. Feedback is only for very rare special cases/crashes, which there must not be at all. I dont wanna be tester, i wanna be engine user.
PS: lol especially in games? last 10 years all games is all the same with totally the same graphics, nothing special is made for period.
I rather have it like it is now to have the people who actually use the Engine help the devs to improve the Engine, tell them what they need for their games, find bugs, ask for specific features etc than have the Devs all on their own for 1 Year and get an Update with a major lack of Features for spefic game types. And I “wasted” 1 Year in waiting for an Update which didn’t even help me further in development.
With the current cycle Epic gets Feedback much more quickly and more often and get constant help from the community in GitHub with new and stuff being added. (Nvidia WaveWorks for example) Which wouldn’t be possible with a 1 Year wait Time between updates.
The engine is perfect for development. It just depends on what YOU as a dev is capable of. If you want to make small games / mobile etc. which only takes a short amont of time to develop, UE4 isn’t ready for that yet and It would be better to switch to Unity/UDK to make them.
But if you are making a medium - big Size Game, UE4 is amazing. You can always put all your resources on things and tell the Devs what you need / where problems are. Keep working on your stuff and 1-3 releases later (1-3 months) a new for your game is there or Bugs have been fixed and you can continue development like nothing ever happend. So you can always keep working with a medium - big size game and can be certain that specific stuff will be there. If I would work with Unity I have no idea what the hell they are doing for the nex update and have to wait forever to see if it suits my needs.
You can still use feedback, and they will do all you ask next year ;d
PS: all you ask ;d
I would rather have a buggy release after 1 month and help development and use that said for a year than to wait a year to have a were you still need to work/learn a lot to use it.
Yeah. Working totally in seclusion, without live user feedback proved so good, that most adamant propent of it (Microsoft), changed their development process totally.
.NET will be developed in the open with live updates (just like UE), and Windows 10… well suffice to say, they released to public version, which is farrrr from finished.
If you don’t want or need new features, just use version you think it’s stable for you.
If I had to wait 2 years for my feedback to be implemented (or integrated into main branch, if I made PR), I would quit right away.
I know buzz words, but that proved to be better software methodology development, than old one.
What you want is completetly deterministic development cycle. Which is totally unrealistic in game development, because you can never predict, what exactly you will need 2 moths in a line, not to mention after year.
Gameplay design might suddenly change, because old one proved to be ****, and new one needs some new features in engine, which must be added ASAP.
Unless you are doing very simple games, with iterative game mechanics, current development model is way to go.
i am like a jesus, who trying to make world better.
PS: but you ruining everythng ;d
updates need to happen as they do right now.
Bug fixes on minor things are going to tend to be put on a list of things, but they could also be added to a different list. the list of We should just totally redo that section of code anyways cause we adding these 10 new features and a slider isn’t going to work for those changes, so lets just work on the new instead of fixing the bug that will be put into code we decommission in a few months. So some times when you see a bug going on for a good period it might of fallen into the we just going to redo category, which takes longer.
Also the more frequent update pattern lets us tailor things to our needs as a community. What I mean is they release a new like UMG, a huge group of people hammer it and go hmm we need , , and added to it. Unreal goes oh yeah that probably would be good to add to it, while we are still sitting at our machines with that code base fresh in our heads, let go ahead and tack those things on for you guys. Next release ok there you go, and we go great you added it but you screwed up, we meant for you to do it way, not the way you guys did it. They go oh whoops, and in the end we get the changes, and improvements we need.
If we waited long periods for features, we wouldn’t get that level of input. We would get a 4,000 line update list, that had a bug list of 3,000. That we would have to suffer for through dozens of hotpatches for.
Also if they changed to longer periods of release I would still be stuck with a crappy canvas system that was horrible to use. down right out impossible. Instead a few months in and we have a good GUI editor.
The only quip people should really be having is that they are wanting the new features but hate the 20 bucks a month to keep getting them deals.
Also keep in mind bugs can be machine dependent having lots of testers especially when it comes to a game editor is key cause you have to consider every combination of hardware as well, will that intel chip, on X mother board, with Y graphic card, work or is there a glitch we didn’t catch cause we didn’t test all 100 million combinations of OS, and hardware.
No, only 1 big per year. More than enaugh.
I really love solution to the problem that it’s hard to ever have a production ready version of UE4!!!
In hypothetical situation 4.8.3 could be a version that has a at containing no development/game breaking bugs.
Whereas with the current system that doesn’t have continuously bugfixed STABLE versions seems impossible to achieve even for Epic.
would mean more work for Epic of course, but imho it could be well worth it if it results in more stable/polished games released with UE4!
The engine is still a work in progress so it does not have all of the features that they or us want currently, therefore is unrealistic. There are too many features still to be implemented, one per year would end up giving UE4 a 20+ year development cycle. 
Sorry, but I think you didn’t get it. The goal is to give us a stable version which we can use to create games wihtout bugs from UEngine side. Otherwise we must stablize it by ourself.
I didn’t read all of the comments but i got to say : Keep on releasing new versions is and interesting !!! for whoever don’t want to use the new “buggy” releases, just stay with your 4.0.1 and update in about a year or so.
Hey Alanir. Stability is a large focus of ours, and the primary goal with making preview builds available earlier on in the development cycle (4.7+) is to gather more bug and crash reports in order to sustain a more stable .0 release when it becomes available to the masses. should better fit the needs of developers moving forward 
As always, the best way for us to get bug fixes out in updates is to report both bugs and crashes with the reporter in Unreal Engine and AnswerHub.