Sharp decline in Official Responses from Epic throughout the community.

General Feedback & Requests
50

This thread hit home, but not just due to the decline of official responses. Here are my two cents on the matter:

  1. Looking at some old AH posts it seems that a lot of the “old guard” is no longer employed. Whatever the reason may be for that, I believe the team has been re-organized quite a bit to the detriment of forum interaction (I don’t really care much about AH due to reasons previously discussed, it’s not a place that can facilitate any sort of community)
  2. The live streams have become more “sterile”. No offense to anyone involved in them nowadays, but the whole thing feels more distant and impersonal.
  3. Even the existing responses of the staff feel more “official”. I understand being casual is a slippery slope since people will rip apart everything you say, but it’s still something I feel was lost.
  4. The new forum software / layout is… well… it’s bad. Even when we disregard conformity and the fact that this place just doesn’t “feel like home”, a ton of features are clunky and the whole user experience has been downgraded. I believe the current forum software is actively pushing away people.

I could obviously be wrong on all of these, this is just my impression.

51

Aye, I definitely agree on all your points. Which is why I wanted to bring attention to it. I love this community, love the people at Epic, love Unreal Engine, I don’t want it to just “disappear” and have people wonder why it did so. (Not saying it would disappear, because come on, we know it’s the best game engine ever) But here are some “devil’s advocate” responses to your concerns:

  1. Changing of guard is going to happen regardless, even if you’re paying them good, sometimes people leave for other reasons. But I would hope that the one you are thinking about left on their own accord.

  2. The live streams…what live streams?! I can’t believe they dropped it down to once per week (only every so often we’ll get a Tuesday one back). I forgot to mention that in my OP. I do wish they would get more varied community members on there though. Even so, I wouldn’t mind seeing it go back to Tues/Thurs, alternating between Community/OfficialDev Tuesday Training streams.

  3. Aye, sadly we live in such a…hmm…what’s a good word… “temperamental” world nowadays, anything can set someone off, get them fired, ruin their careers. GGWP Internet.

  4. Forums aren’t terrible. But I do wish we could get improvements at a much faster rate. Where’s the dark theme? How hard is it? S-ed had it done in less than 24 hours.

53

Monthly jams going away as well… it feels like that hurt more than helped. The official reasoning never made any sense.

54

I agree with most of the points here.

I’m especially wondering, now that there are quite a lot of successful UE4 games like Ark and especially PUBG, Epic has made a huge amount of money with UE4 from all those 5%. Paragon also was a success I think. Fortnite too.
3 years ago, they didn’t have that money. There they still had to live from the old UE3 money. Where is all that new money going? Shouldn’t that money enable Epic to have 2 or 3 times as much staff as they had 3 years ago? Shouldn’t everything accelerate quickly with so much new money flowing into Epic? More engine programmers, more support staff, more everything?

That didn’t seem to happen unfortunately, and I really wonder why. I wish Epic would be more of an Elon-Musk-kind-of-company that would be growing at 50-100% every year (in terms of employees), and I thought the financials would actually allow that due to so many successful UE4 games being released now. Wikipedia still says Epic has 250 employees (maybe 400 now?) vs Unity Technologies with 1500 employees, and Unity isn’t even working on any games. How should Epic keep its lead with such a huge difference in number of employees? I want Epic to be successful of course, especially since I don’t plan to ever switch engines from UE4 to anything else.

55

That’s so embarrassing I would hate to be Sweeney right now

56

Your post doesn’t contribute anything to this discussion. And Sweeney is still awesome.

57

Government funded scam, propped up by theft?

To not to derail :

-Roll back forum “update”.
-Roll back road map “update” and improve it instead of removing it.
-Find alternative to AHUB.

58

I have to say that for me this really sums up the situation the OP is describing. The fact is, even in a forum almost exclusively used by people who take their time to give feedback aimed at helping the community (rather than just requesting things they want), the majority of threads in the documentation forum have no staff response. And it’s specifically this disconnect between what Epic so often say on streams and elsewhere (“We love your feedback/We’d be happy to follow it up on the forums”) and the reality (for the most part, radio silence), that has led to my recent apathy with bug reporting, forum involvement, or giving any kind of feedback to Epic.

To give a specific example, take my last post on that board. Yes my tone could have been better, but that came at the end of a long process trying to follow up what was and still is a huge issue for me; I used to use the offline reference all day, every day. No response. Then this followed. The two threads, same issue, almost the same title, were sat there together at the top of the forum for ages. Is it any wonder people have been giving up?

I hope this doesn’t come across as a complaint directed at you , I have no ill will towards any of Epic’s staff. I know nothing of how Epic work internally, who is responsible for what, and what the priorities are. But that whole issue (beginning with my reporting a bug, then trying to follow it up, and finally just wanting some explanation of what happened) is I think a good example of what the OP, and I think many others are experiencing more and more recently.

59

I personally would be perfectly fine with Epic not giving out DevGrants anymore and using that money to hire more people fixing bugs (like the blocky shadow issue that’s still persisting since 4.13), improving the engine & handling feedback.

In my opinion we would all benefit a lot more from that. But then again, after all these successful titles lately, they should have the funds already, no?

61

To add to it, Unity seems to hiring quite a few of very high profile developers like Mike Acton. I my self evaluate Unity and Lumberyard.

62

Yes; they also hired Natalya Tatarchuk.
If lead says we have to use Unity next year I won’t even have arguments anymore to say no like I did before, specifically because they know I’ve built gameplay frameworks, editor tools, and some mobile games on Unity.

63

I wont go into detail, but I feel the same way.
I’m glad the marketplace team is picking up some slack, but I dunno… for the last few months I do have this underbelly feel that something changed.

64

Are you saying unreal might not be around in a few years if this continues?

65

Unreal is far too big to disappear like that. The community though has taken a turn for the worse, quite rapidly.

67

its definently become very very difficult to get any response on answers unreal… and if there is a response its not usually a helpful one like in the past. I could be mistaken, but no one seems to really be trying to help lately… even when you give them a project with it reproducable they seem to want the steps to reproduce it… even though they can reproduce it on their end with that particular project… Its frustrating

In fact contacting people directly in a private message on the forums doesnt even yield a response anymore… unless the forums are broken… thats pretty messed up…

Seems liek one of the guys i used to go for questions or advice doesnt seem to work in that department anymore… Im having a hard time finding anyone to ask a question or advice too… Posting on the forums or answers unreal seems pointless since no one really responds to that ever… Even though i continue to try constantly… Cmon epic, do you want us to succeed ? Wheres the support at? New features are great, but half the time there broken. Hell i have a bug where merge actors makes 0 poly meshes if its not set to LOD 0 … (auto lod by default…) Which also breaks HLOD … so totally screws everything…

And even though ive given a small project where its reproducable in taht project… i cant get any support for it since i dont know the exact steps that this bug started… i just know that building the current levels hlods or merge actor creates 0 poly meshes… and theres no way around it…

68

This is one thing that crossed my mind too, but Discord honestly amounts to little more than “how do I cast a BP!?” most of the time. For anything really advanced, there’s no place to go anymore.

69

As someone who just recently started using UE and came here from Unity, I can just say that community and a good marketplace is key. You can have a better engine and all, but without a helpful community you won’t get many new customers. Look at VR/AR - Unity got a huge share of the pie, just because of that - lots and lots of support, templates, projects… that’s a long time investment

70

They’ve released around 4 games on a 6 month or less cadence (Paragon, Roborecall, Fortnite, Fortnite: BR). 3/4 of them are “games as a service” which require major ongoing attention, especially in the initial launch period. My guess is they are just busy and have pulled resources to focus on first launching and then fighting fires on those games.

Fortnite: BR has had 810,000 concurrent players, and has probably taken a huge effort to have rolled out as smooth as it has. They’ve said publicly UT4 people were pulled off of UT4 in creating it. Some of the engine community team may have be splitting time helping out with community stuff on those games (I haven’t kept up with the forums for the games so don’t know that for sure), etc.

Fortnite: BR hasn’t necessarily brought in a lot of new monetary resources yet, given that it hasn’t been monetized. PUBG, as mentioned earlier, surely has brought in some major cash: $60,000,000 if all copies were sold at $30 and Bluehole paid 5% without a special negotiated rate (it’s only ~$15 in China though, so that is a big overestimate). But even with an influx of money, bringing in the right people always has a large lead time. Hopefully they can increase staff rapidly and avoid causing employee burnout.

All that activity is having lots of benefits to the stability/performance/battle-hardenedness of the engine. If your game uses a similar setup to any of their production games, things are now really getting solid without as many surprises as you would run into in the past.

71

If that was the case, surely they could just say that instead of hiding and ignoring everyone?

72

Putting my two cents here.

My team and I feel the same way, but we haven’t stuck around to ponder why and how and just moved to Unity for our game and things have been butter smooth so far.
It just makes sense! We are busy developing rather than wondering!

The thing is guys UE4 scares us, it really does, I don’t know what to make of this engine, it’s way too convoluted, you need a team of monster engineers just to get the basic troubleshooting off your back and keep the flood gates closed, there are waaay too many question marks for any indie team to invest time on something still very unstable and on shiftable grounds…

Bottom line is this: If you don’t have the solid backing with plenty of $$$ and lots of time to RnD with direct contact to Epic for support then good luck on betting on this horse.

I hate to say it because i still go back to UE4 and work on personal prototypes/demos mostly because of the visual side, because it can take it… but that’s all i can feel that is goin for it at least from our experience. If unity ever catches up visually to UE’s prowess then i don’t believe i would find a reason to be here at all, and it seems those guys are working on something to do just that.