Sharp decline in Official Responses from Epic throughout the community.

[kurylo3d]

ive actually started to get some responses lately with people willing to help!

[teak421]

@M3NTH0S

Is there any chance Epic could implement a feedback system like unity where community votes out most urgent bugs and most important features? but this would be pointless if epic doesnt actually try to fix or implement any of those.
The unity community seems more vibrant and active and closer to the users, epic feels like it wants to keep the distance, which results in quite a pale community especially around these forums.

There is something: https://issues.unrealengine.com/ – Not sure how the votes actually impact the selection of which bugs to work on though…???

teak

[MonsOlympus]

@VictorBurgos

The issue with Google sometimes is being able to get the right terms into the search to bring up what you want. I would like to think that most devs knew how to Google and tried to before posting on AH, and so that should be the assumption on your end as well. I know for a fact that even when you start typing in the Title into an AH post, when it brings up “relevant” posts, that 90% of the time it’s not related to it at all. I’m pretty sure it’s just using keywords in its algorithm.

Just reading through this post now and well, apart from the fact that support threads shouldnt be based on whats hottest as priority they should be assigned via a better metric not design through popularity contest…

Anyway onto Google and search, I have noticed lately Google search has been failing me returning worse results and seems to prefer older pages, that isnt inherently bad but in the world of software engineering a post from 2007, 2010 or even 2014 could be a lifetime ago in terms of the API. This is compounded by the Unreal Engine API documentation not being as easily searchable on this site or through Google anymore resulting in alot more scavenging.

I think the onus is on Epic to provide a good Unreal Engine related search there even though I do appreciate @DanielW comments and agree wholeheartedly. I dont post much on Answerhub in the way of questions because I dont feel like its worth my time, as with Epic the flipside is explaining things out in a way Epic “gets it” takes too long, most of the time longer than to fix the issue (or work around it). @ puts it nicely and I do mirror the sentiment of apathy and is the core reason Im responding to this thread in such a tardy manner.

@junfanbl

I think a paid support option would be nice. If you are a serious developer, and not just a hobbyist, you would likely take advantage of that. That would also encourage people to do there own research so they can save money instead of spamming the forums and AnswerHub. Otherwise, when you are stumped, you pay. I think that is a good idea. I know that is what Crytek is currently doing and I have been taking advantage of that. It’s rather nice actually. You get to talk to the staff about any issues you are having. Which for that engine is even more appropriate.

@teak421

In addition to what you suggest above, how about documentation on the level of QT. Can you imagine how many questions would be resolved with outstanding documentation? (with examples, and the why).

teak

I agree with these thoughts, I was willing to pay for my UE4 subscription even though I had free years of usage. I know that quality and support costs money and was willing to back Epic in the same way they backed me, I feel as though the engine and support has suffered in the realm of the free model but I can understand why Epic had to have some sort of Free version, I just dont see why it had to be at such a great cost.

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.

I have a similar view of Epic with their games, while I appreciate the engine is battle tested by them themselves I feel as though the focus on community has shifted because Epic Games needs the support from Epic Engine to get to where it needs to be, this takes time out of the engine and its support, also features that might not be inline with any of Epics current projects. I do realize we gain features from those projects but I dont believe those wouldnt have happened without Epics games as the R&D still happens for the engine it just wouldnt be on the game branch.

This post is already bordering on too long so I’ll try to sum up, Epics help and feedback is greatly appreciated but I believe everyone is commenting here because they want to, that it costs us all our time and we can all be valuable contributors to the engines development as proven through the communities support of Epic. If this is to work it has to work both ways and for those of us with technical questions outside of the reach of the general community we need some sort of direct path, one that any random who signs up for an Epic account cant take (make forum badges mean something perhaps?).

Bugs of all levels need to be dealt with not just the top of the pile stability issues, the engine has many instances of work arounds purely based on long standing bugs and/or bugs that are just largely ignored, there are also long standing feature requests for the gameplay framework that get passed over for the focus on AR or ArchViz. I know Epic does their best and have limited time but maybe thats the issue, Epic needs more time, time we dont have to spend waiting.

Thanks,

Batten