No; but indie devs and small studios are completely dependent on community. If UE4 community shrinks while Lumberyard’s or Unity’s increase, for indies using UE4 that becomes a major problem overtime.
Epic is going be just fine, I’m much more worried about the community around Unreal Engine and new comers giving up because they receive 0% backup.
Actually I am fine with current ‘offering’… my only gripe is actually quite unrelated to this: I wish the major version (1,5,1.6 etc) should be done in longer iteration eg 6 months for each, instead of 3 months. This way, it is more feature-rich for major version, more bug fixing (which include those that get fixed in next major lol). Marketplace creator also do not have to update their items that often… programmers also do not have to port their code too…
The support while it is not wrong to ask for more,is perfectly fine with community forum (for indies like us)… Epic may entertain paid support for corporate which is less headache (no offense, they have more discipline in requesting support, they usually have more able programmers and artists and they can pay more)…
Just chiming in my opinions based on personal experience over the last few months. I’ve made several answerhub reports in the last 2-3 months, all of which have been totally ignored. I haven’t even received the go-to “we are closing this due to inactivity” response.
Epic have always encouraged folks to use Answerhub to reports bugs and issues, or other random findings. Why bother though, when you get a faster response on the forums from the community? I understand that we don’t want bug reports here because the forums would end up being flooded, but people need solutions to their problems faster than Answerhub can ever provide.
Here’s my big quarrel, and I’ve been saying this for years:
Answerhub is awful, and counter-intuitive. It’s slow, it’s terrible for searching, it’s UI is horrid and it’s UX is even worse. Even the Karma system doesn’t encourage me to post answers over there. It didn’t even load for me for OVER SIX MONTHS of last year.
Replace it with stack-exchange style system, and moonlight the existing answerhub.
I **guarantee it will be a more useful source of information that WILL ENCOURAGE THE COMMUNITY TO GET MORE INVOLVED. **Sometimes I find myself going to answers.unity.com to find more useful responses than I can find on answerhub.
But considering we’re still waiting for the abomination that was the forum ‘upgrade’ to be sorted out (still bitter about my dark theme btw) - I don’t think we’ll see this anytime soon. I hate having a whinge on here, but honestly, it’s hard to talk about this stuff repeatedly for years on end without getting frustrated.
What about hiring out some outstanding Answerhub devs, giving them a small contract for “priority” support.
Make the Priority Support $25/month or so. Let’s say these contractors make $40k a year. Or less, doesn’t matter. But to pay them, we need $111 or so a day per dev, $3333/month.
Let’s say we see 1000 devs opt in. That’s $25,000/month for those devs for pri support. That’s roughly 7 additional solid devs. Coming from the community with lots of experience under their belt, especially Q/A and troubleshooting.
Maybe community devs/ contractors is out of the question…then what?
Pay full-timers extra money, bonus pay, or overtime with this influx. They work an extra few hours everyday from home or wherever.
I just can’t see why something can’t be done here. Just do something. Please attempt something. Maintaining the status quo is obviously not working.
Just a tad bit more effort could go a long way.
I think this is good proposal… this is like ‘marketplace’ but mainly for technical support…
Gents, who are complaining about lack of technical support and potentially suggesting paid priority support, could you post a few specific examples/references/cases where, according to your opinion, you should have received better responses/more attention? It feels like whole topic is a big vague without specific examples.
I’m probably going to come off as an elitist jerk right now, but I believe this ties into the whole discussion here. You and your team leaving is not something I’d consider to be a sign of a declining community here. I am very supportive of the “UE4 is NOT for everyone” mindset. I personally embrace the fact that it has a higher learning curve and bigger initial hurdles. No matter how welcoming a community might be, seeing a million beginner posts that have been answered time an time again flooding the forum and AH does not help keep the more dedicated veteran members around. I would be delighted if this could boil down to a small, tightly-knit community of regulars, with Epic taking a more active participation in the forums.
That being said, I am of course aware that new members are needed to keep the community alive, but a conscious effort needs to be made to educate people and to have resources available that new users can peruse. AH is the number one reason that new people have a hard time, as they expect to get help on AH which never comes.
Would you be willing to elaborate, please?
Let’s me explain me why I’m asking. I work few years with Unreal, worked around year with Unity. All this time spent in indie studios, small time. I never need a “team of monster engineers just to get basics”. UE4 is extremely friendly to artist and designers, while Unity is not. Actually I have this “team of programmers needed all the time” issue with Unity 
On the other hand Unity is very programmer-friendly, total freedom. Unity is great for small games thanks to its low entry level. But using it’s getting harder with time when you need working on complex systems, awesome visuals. And I know lot of indie studios that abandon Unity while they’re working on bigger titles. Often happening when mobile-focused studio moves to console/PC market.
Of course I can see only small piece of industry from my chair. So… it would be nice to know what kind of game you’re making?
Because there’s no engine that would satisfy needs of every kind of game and elaborating on this would make it easier for readers to understand issues.
For me UE4 awesome engine for indie devs, very stable. But I started my career in AAA studios, games made with in-house engines. Well, that was truly “unstable and shiftable grounds” for me
That what I think there should be paid support between UDN and answer hub. I would be willing to shell out 100$ a month, just to have clear Q&A answer site, forums and more developer interaction.
That beign said, everyone should be able to read it (non NDAed information here), but only “premium” members should be able to post.
UDN is much better for getting interesting information, but most people don’t have access to it.
I love how the GameJam theme (which is the biggest community event) is literally describing the situation. However vast the darkness, we must provide our own light… I think it fits very nicely, but I also have JammerLag, so I might interpret 2 much…
LOL… I didn’t even think about it like that… Someone should do a quick 48 jam on this.
Hi,
I have been following this thread as a silent reader now for a while and now I’d like to throw in my two cents as well.
First, when I saw this thread unfolding, my initial impression was “Oh, wow. Im indeed not the only one who got this notion”.
From my initial perception, the activity of Epic devs in the forums became less as Epic projects became more numerous (UT, Fortnite, Paragon, RoboRecall, etc).
But I think its too simple to just dismiss it as staff shortage due to internal projects.
There have been many speculations about why AnswerHub response rates are low and why PRs are not dealt with.
Does Epic think UDN and other high roller licensees are enough to keep the boat afloat?
Is TenCent pushing for revenue and the community is not a cash cow while UDN is?
Were they only happy with the community to make the engine popular but now considered a nuissance?
However without working at Epic and knowing how things are behind the scenes its just conjecture and guesses.
But Epic cannot frown upon the userbase having their thoughts and making guesses. I think that is just normal.
And its not just the forum or AH. Subconciously we also miss the enlightening Zak Parrish skits.
For fixes, when I check the issue tracker what gets fixed, more fixes seem to reference a UDN problem than an AH post.
Not to speak about documentation. With UDn support one can live with sparse documentation. Without its sometimes pure guesswork.
That again leaves the impression of a two class society in the unreal community with a taste of feudalism.
On another level I still keep thinking that Epic tries its best an we just dont have the whole picture.
And Im not really sure if its warranted or if Im just being naive.
For example the issue of Prs piling up. Conclusion: no interest from Epic.
Then again with each new release, dozens of people get credited for contributions.
People say Epic is only interested in well funded studios but then dishing out dev grants.
Its all a bit ambigous to me.
But since Im generally a positive person, not only gloomy philosophy but also something constructive.
Id like to make a suggestion for the AH mess:
Yes, AnswerHub is cluttered with contless iterations of trivial/beginner questions.
It makes it impossible to filter out relevant posts and own questions are smothered by those posts.
People have proposed to make post importance/visibility depend on post count of the author, etc.
I dont think that post count is a viable metric for user expirience/knowledge level or general expertise.
the problem should be tackled right at the root: The abundance of repetitive trivial posts.
I think the main reason for beginners to post a question that has been answered a thousand times already is their mindset.
I have a problem -> AnswerHub is there to get answers -> Post the question an AnswerHub - > Wonder why noone replies -> Being mad at Epic/community.
They appearently never consider the option of looking for an answer before posting their question.
Granted, the name is AnswerHub and not LookItUpHub, but thats what people should do BEFORE they post.
Couldnt the following be implemented:
That would force people to look up for a solution.
So thats my idea for AH…
Cheers,
Klaus
All it takes is to have a dedicated person to sift through AH and make a FAQ (categorized). Some things could be moved into official documentations to compliment existing info.
No. Not enough.
Beginners will still post straight away before reading the FAQ or the docs.
That is the point. People post questions although the answer is already there. Just having them in a different format changes nothing.
That’s because sometimes it’s hard to find those posts with answers and then there are a lot of questions left unanswered.
Make comprehensive FAQ, archive old AH, start new one and run algorithms that points to FAQ when existing questions is asked again. Only allow posting questions that aren’t in the FAQ.
So, I just went on AH to double check if they have a feature that UDN has… namely, when you type a question it suggests “similar” question based on your keywords. And they do! So why are there still so many repetitive questions? You start typing “How do I rotate a character” and it spits out at least 3-4 proper suggestions. However, for me, it took almost 5 seconds for that auto-suggest list to show up. I wouldn’t be surprised if many people didn’t know it exists in the first place.
For me, the far bigger problem with AH is the lack of… how do I put this… skilled support? I remember back about a year or two ago many users complained about a certain support technician who often dismissed genuine bug reports as the user doing it wrong. They clearly didn’t understand the issues and weren’t knowledgeable enough to tackle them. Nowadays, I get the feeling that, if I were to get stuck on something that’s NOT a beginner-level question, there’s no one browsing AH that can even give me an answer. I personally think we ought to open up a help sub-forum that would act as a hub for support. We could maintain a sticky with frequently asked questions, and I’m pretty sure things would get more visibility that way.
rename it to QuestionHub, problem solved 
Agreed. The longer I am part of the UE4 community, the more I am annoyed by the lack of community support by Epic, not to mention the marketplace is a disaster where most assets shouldn’t ever have gotten through their “quality control”.
This. I have the feeling that Epic is catering more and more to the big businesses & titles that make them a lot of money, and more and more ignore the indie devs and the “free” community. Which is crazy, because without the community, there wouldn’t be any way for newcomers to learn how to use the Engine at all. Not to mention the Engine wouldn’t even be where it is right now.
I will finish my current project in UE4, and then move on to Lumberyard or Unity, to never come back. It’s just too much a waste of time and money trying to find good answers to engine / blueprint problems, “testing” broken marketplace assets or after 6 versions (I started around 4.12) to be still hoping Epic will finally decide to give dynamic lighting / open worlds some love.
You are right. I was a bit depressed after days trying to get broken shadows fixed, just to see that Epic still hasn’t responded to the problem since 4.13… 
Lumberyard, being the CryEngine, has the best features when it comes to dynamic lighting & open world, which is really what I need for my future dream “exploration game”. The AWS implementation is amazing too.
In my opinion, the docs are actually better than Epics, which are mostly outdated or very limited. They have well explained videos for almost every feature, which is great. And just look at their Youtube channel, they are going crazy with adding new tutorial videos.
They also keep making nice updates, and the build in engines kinda blew me away. For example it took me sooooo long to get basic lighting and a day-night-cycle working in UE4, and it still has a lot of problems due to the engines dynamic lighting problems.
Now I just found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KdwKZtzzo0 honestly it makes me sad how much time I wasted trying to get that simple stuff working in the unreal engine…
Also, being a visual design nerd, LY has such a great looking UI compared to the ugly, ancient interface of UE4! It’s such a pain to use the unreal editor, especially on a small screen.
To be fair, I love the UE4 blueprint system, but LY is building something very similiar. See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zNVytjan7w
The only reason why I keep working with Unreal Engine and aren’t switching over is that I already put so much work (and learning time) into my UE4 project, which would feel like a waste to abandon now. And because I don’t want to spend another year getting to the same level I am in UE4 now.
Oh, that and the hundreds of euros (dollars) I spend on the marketplace. 
To be fair I think some of the doom and gloom here is getting out of hand. The only reason why LY / Unity etc. are looking so good now is because you haven’t dug deep enough to find the actual issues (for Unity you won’t have to dig deep). People mustn’t forget that UE4 is industry-hardened and extremely powerful. The issue here was never the capabilities of the engine, it’s not even documentation really. Creating a dynamic day / night cycle properly is something that’s beyond the scope of any document (more like a book in its own right), so documenting that isn’t happening any time. What’s REALLY missing is dev support to assist you as you learn all the bits and pieces that go into something as complex as that.