Just asking because back in the days of 5 years now there was always someone to help around but this days…its like desert with 5 or more people hard to get on community hard;y getting answers or help on the way its just somehow dead ???what is going on i been on Unity and have some tests how community is responding…well Unreal this is not good at all dont know why
Yeah cant say whoever took over Alex P’s job has done a good job…totally anonymous, turns up for a pointless intro on a spotlight video is about as much as you get. Ironically a bot would probably serve more purpose…
I dont think many people help themselves though in the way they ask a question.
“I want to make a MMO, how do I make a wizard cast a Fireball”
No one is going to answer a question like that in a forum post.
There has to be some form of effort made before asking a very vague and complicated question. Show what you’ve looked at, what you understand and what you dont.
The more info you give the more chance you have of an answer.
Plus like Clavos said…so many questions are the same questions over and over again and the answers are easily findable by just googling or maybe…and i know this sounds mental…reading some documentation or going through some tutorials.
The feedback section is always good for a laugh…UE4 crashes on startup…thats all the info you get…no logs…no crash error…no ones ever going to respond.
Its like working on a service desk and getting a ticket that just says “my puter don’t work”
Few times i replied to such question, and some of them got offended.
Now we have two kinds of questions, such as how do i make MMO, or ones that require detailed knowledge or experience with similar problem. Simple (smart) noob questions are quite rare now.
In first case i am tempted to answer “google+brains” in second it is usually spending few hours on doing project that does exactly what that person is asking about.
Also blueprints do not help here (with people wanting to help), in script you can write in few lines what you want. With blueprints you just cannot.
Explaining what to do in blueprints by describing it is even worse.
And general thing about Unreal Engine and Epic, yes they went for big corporate market, UE got so bloated (for us indies) it is not even funny anymore. It is refreshing how simple (and small) can be other engines (like godot). And writing code in just few lines is much better than screens of blueprints with spaghetti connection.
It does seem Epic have forgotten that they are actually a computer games company. The disregard with how they canned the new unreal tournament…the game that made them what they are is pretty disgraceful. They even sold off Gears of War to some other tin pot company. (Then again whoever came up with the idea of putting a train track in your dads back garden that leads to the enemy HQ should never work again)
Can UT and Fortshite not exist at the same time?
Who wants all these archvis features in a game engine…features that are unusable in real time.
Most of the newer Epic videos are always about bloody archviz or some nonsense for the motor industry…if i worked in the archviz industry Id be using something that wasnt a game engine anyway.
On the other side…back in the old days you’d never get free access to a AAA engine and its source code so its all swings and roundabouts. But that does seem to give the impression from Epic that they basically think…its free what more do you want.
Which is kinda fair to a point but then that brings me back to the actual topic…
Like Clavos said…if theres no official help on the forums from Epic why dont they incentivise people to help more on the forums…currently there is no incentive…not even an empty gesture of a badge or something that shows you help people.
It would even look good on a CV if you could show that you’re a contibutor and have been an active member of the community and helped other members.
Its not like we even get paid so to help someone we are doing it in our own time out the goodness of our hearts…for nothing, what do we get out of it?
Oh my god and blueprints…sort of nice, sort of stupid…anyone can make a game with blueprints!!!
All its doing is teaching bad methods as it encourages new people with no coding knowledge to fudge the hell out of everything. Used correctly they serve a purpose.
I just wish that we have much more people making tutorials going active on Forum helping and giveing they own staff to help others well its not so much hard to help well we have so many talented people out there asking questions looking for help just to start to have some one in here who will help and give a hand like back in the days…i dont have that feel any more in here 
5 years have passed. Maybe you’ve reached the age of cynicism.
Welcome to the club 
what i find disparaging is the string of bad engine versions… can’t remember but 4.10 stable, 4.16 stable, 4.19 and 21?.. after that?.. now that they are down to just a few releases a year, waiting for the next unknown stability release is 6 months away… can’t go forward, can’t go back… the very first advice i gave to them was, ‘never offer anything you can’t deliver’… next stable release… ?
Its probably up to the community to make this forum active. Unity forums are mostly the same handful of people responding and a few volunteer forum mods sprinkled in. Unity as a company has the same involvement as unreal does now. It feels like Unity has more passionate indie devs. I don’t know how Unreal can mirror the same thing. This forum needs a few experienced indie devs consistently answering questions to make the useful and active. Even if it is just linking to the documents and tutorials for typical “noob” questions.
Every help is grateful no meter what questions are as for answers
Unfortunately it feels to me that even on YouTube most ue4 channel have not been updated for years does anybody may be know a frequently active channel like the brackeys one for unity?
CodeLikeMe seems pretty good, he seems to be very active on that.
In a nutshell, nope.
@GameChanger23
few Active and good yt channels
dev enabled
bcloward (relatively new channel but focus on material. But on of the best)
tharlevfx (niagara, vfx)
I don’t use unity but I check their forums to know the gossips and the engine state (I do that all AAA level game engines). I see that unity staff are active on their forums. On unity forums, most of the time the questions are very basic. But for any serious issues staff will chime in. It is only in UE forums (and at cryengine) that the staff does not bother to engage with forum users.
There are situations where only the staff can help. When there is a serious bug, serious packing errors( most are user mistakes, though there are occasional real bugs in packing, as Unreal PIE and packed game works a bit differently). But I see that they silent even when someone reports such engine breaking bugs and makes post here and at the answer hub.
It is not up to the community to make this forum active. Unless there is some level of engagement from the official people experienced developers will not be interested to be active in the forums. Remember how they killed the wiki, disabled it for few years, while claiming that they are working on something better, and on one fine morning droped the news of retiring it …
Unreal is very old engine with baggages from 30 years. If they don’t do something to keep the experienced developers engaged here, once modern engines reach an acceptable level (might only take couple of years), we might see lot of theme switching to those (That is if they care! yet to be proven!). Once that happen, no clamor will reverse the situation. (again why should they care when they have a cash cow and not so so a game fortni…).
I guess my post https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/engine-source-github/1848466-how-to-modify-engine-plugins
would come under the “How do I make an MMO?” style question, but I don’t know how I can word it any better than I have.
I actually posted a similar question a few days ago and decided to just delete it and go ask around on Discord or Reddit as my expectations of anyone offering help I need here are pretty low due to how thinly spread volunteers time is on here. But on reading this thread, especially the part about the lack of people asking smart questions, I thought I would re-post and get some constructive criticism on the quality of my question so that I can learn to ask better questions in the future.
Thanks, that’s good to know. 
I’ve just noticed your signature btw, and to be honest, that’s the way I love to learn, thanks for sharing that link!!!
“Plus, getting help is also tied to how much you also help others (or your own footprint on here).”
That sounds like a detrimental philosophy for anyone to adopt. I can understand people being reluctant to engage with people who appear to want a one sided relationship, but unless people can get help, they won’t gain the knowledge to pass on to others, and will be too busy trying to solve the problems they do have to spend time on a forum passing on any knowledge they do have. A Catch22. It’s a relationship likely to end in Engine divorce.
. Me and Unreal Engine went through a divorce last year, but we decided to stay casual friends. Her parents were too aloof to want to talk to any of her her friends, and her friends didn’t seem to want to give me the time of day. 
Seriously though, in addition to that, it looks bad to find two year old unanswered questions posted by someone having the same issue as yourself. If it remains unanswered because that poster is being punished for a one sided relationship, then it’s a punishment that extends out to anyone else with the same issue who haven’t done anything wrong.
I would say you could categorize reasons for unanswered questions broadly into three.
1.Unwillingness to help.
2.Unavailability to help.
3.Inability to help.
Each of these will have an impact on the other which is why I understand the absence of Epic devs will have an impact.
Also, I understand that people can get fed up with poorly worded questions but to modify a famous quote…
“For if you suffer your beginners to be ill-educated, and their posts to be poorly worded from their infancy, and then punish them for those badly worded posts to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make beginners who create poorly worded posts and then punish them.”
I don’t know what would be wrong with just putting a sticky in each topic with a questions template?