I love the presence of UE4 developers on the forums and answerhub. However, I think there is an opportunity to provide an additional type of support that would be beneficial for both Epic and the community.
When I’m stuck, I would like to have the ability to pay Epic to pair (remotely) with an official engine developer. A service that does this for software development in general exists: https://www.airpair.com. The ability to get the attention of an Epic dev would be a very valuable time saver. I would recommend either working with airpair to setup an official Epic channel, or just accepting requests and doing matchmaking via a simple form or email address. You could keep it really simple to start, and if users like it and use it and you guys are making good use of your developers’ time, then it might warrant an official matchmaking interface.
Eventually, you could train members of the community to become pairs on your behalf. This has a couple of cool effects for both sides:
The community becomes more educated because domain knowledge spreads farther and faster
More community members will forego full-time jobs because they can make a living pairing and then work on and eventually release their UE4 games (I am in this group)
Less community members getting stuck or confused means a lower attrition rate for paying UE4 developers
The entire ecosystem becomes more appealing and self-sustaining, resulting in more users, more free source contributions, more marketplace items, and more games
I think this would have a similar effect as that of open-sourcing a codebase or creating a marketplace where developers can sell content to other developers: the product gets better for free faster and the community becomes more self-sustaining.
What do you guys think? I’m ready for some help right now!
They are indeed. However, I’m suggesting Epic start a remote pairing program, where developers can pay Epic an hourly rate for the one-on-one, screenshare-session-attention of an official engine developer.
I think it’s an good idea in general… but the developers are probably very busy. I love the activity on UE forums, and answerhub, and I think that’s helping enough!
I think he is talking about Epic hiring a new person to fulfill this job. Interesting, but I wonder if they would get enough business to justify the position.
I guess remote pairing is already possible, but it needs a custom license. Big companies like NCSoft nearly sure get support dirrectly from Epic. These forums are used mostly by indies… AAA studios get dirrect support from Epic.
Thanks for the suggestion. This would be an ideal system for our subscribers, however Epic does have a limited number of resources (developers) available and we aren’t prepared to cover the bandwidth of support like this quite yet. It is definitely worth some future consideration though.
No, to alleviate each individual developer’s workload by carving out new, more pointed roles in an effort to cut down on redundant answerhub and forum discussions by spreading expert knowledge to the community rapidly, both by educating individual members and publishing pairing sessions. Maybe my initial post isn’t clear enough, but my suggestion isn’t “have the existing developers do more support work for the same amount of pay in the same amount of hours.” It’s “create new roles either partially or completely responsible for assisting subscribers remotely, and replicate the benefits of those remote pairing sessions to the community.”
Thanks for the response. Is it something you guys would consider as a short-term trial? Perhaps there is an experiment that can determine if the benefits outweigh the bandwidth costs? There is the natural issue of more humans != more productivity (often less, in fact), so I understand any hesitation to try to train and employ additional support developers, but I do wonder if it’s possible to project the longer term benefits to something like this. Not sure I’m equipped to do that though.
I think that with UE4 + Fortnite + Supporting 1st Party Developers et al, like Stephen said, they’re spread thin as is. With AnswerHub, and the forums, we already get a lot of 1:1 support - it would be nice to have a direct line to a developer, sure - but necessary so early on? I don’t think so.
If they were to hire someone new for that then that person would have to have enough knowledge about the engine that it’d be worth more to have them as a developer than doing support.
Plus, having the developers fix problems will also reduce the questions and problems people have on the forums and answerhub.
People like allready offer consulting services via Skype, he is as “official” as you can get without being a direct employee of Epic. His thread is the in the Got work / Need Talent section. Contact him.
This service would not be cheap, Industry Studio wage for a Senior Engineer in my area, Austin Tx is $15,600 per month, which works out to about $94 an hour. That is the rate a Studio would charge per senior Engineer in fulfilling a contract on full-time work. That is with consistent 40 hour weeks. For a quickly filled short session of an hour or 2 the minimum possible fee would be much higher, because the Studio is going to need to provision for this engineer’s downtime. It would be $200 to $300 an hour at a minimum for a Studio to even consider this.
It would be much easier and cost effective, if you need this type of support, to contact an engineer directly who is advertising to do consulting / tutoring allready. Even if they are $100 ( I don’t know their prices. ) an hour that would be cheaper than would a Studio could offer.
The same can be said for having developers maintain an open source codebase - that it’s better to have them coding instead of reading, responding to, and merging pull requests - however, the community contributions start to pile up and the time spent (albeit steeper in the beginning) becomes worthwhile. I don’t think having devs available for pairing is the same as asking them to review pull requests, nor am I sure the long term value would be the same (or greater), but I don’t know that it wouldn’t be either.
Thanks, that’s , I will definitely contact him.
Yeah, I would expect ~$250/hour given modern contracting rates. I wouldn’t anticipate it being cheap. In fact, I would expect it to be even more expensive given it’s right from the source.