Unfair rating system. Devs have no way to defend themselves!

General Feedback & Requests
1

Hi. Today I saw an unfair rating of one of our plugins on Fab. And here are my thoughts:

There is no way to be sure that the rating is fair.
Recently we came up with this Skeleton Swapper plugin: https://www.fab.com/listings/039a7607-105a-483f-bb27-95f0f9570788
that let’s you transfer your UE4 skeleton based project to UE5 or UEFN skeleton project in seconds.
Yes it’s not perfect and more features could be added, but it’s a huge time saver for many people.
The price is low, works as presented, there were no complaints on discord or on youtube for this product, we have approved every refund request, answered every question and still we receive an average 3.4 star rating out of 5 reviews. It means that someone just hating us or trying to put us down. And there IS NO WAY we can dispute this!!! WHY???
I truly believe that this is not fair! This means that anyone can ruin your product page without even explaining their reasons. I think that every review should be backed with explanation. So we know that there’s a real person and a reason behind it, not just hate or an unhealthy competition. So we as the sellers can provide customer support and have a chance to fix the issue, or refund if the client is still not happy with the product.
But in our case there were no complaints and no angry customers.
So who could possibly rate so low? Why? what for? what is their complain?
No question section anymore! No feedback! This doesn’t look like a fair trading.
Now on Fab we as developers have no way to defend ourselves and our products!
It’s just bad.
I wish that FAB team will pay attention to this and provide us more tools to resolve cases like this.

2

They are still thinking on how to tackle this Please remove the 5-review minimum rule, for reviews to show up. - #11 by Hourences

1 Like
4

Here are my five suggestions on how to fix this:

  1. There should be an obligatory written feedback behind every rating. I believe Google has the same. You just can’t leave reviews without explaining your reason.

  2. Implement Reminder on every downloaded product to leave a feedback and Rate the product
    (Usually people don’t bother leaving positive feedbacks compared to negative ones) this will increase positivity.

  3. A questions section should be added too, so people can ask before writing feedback or purchasing or to see what’s going on under the hood.

  4. Dispute in case of bad rating
    Sellers should be able to defend their good name and provide explanation. (In the real world you can’t just walk into someone’s store an sh.t all over the place without a good reason.)

  5. If the product has been refunded the bad rating should be deleted.

This will improve products, avoid refunds, increase sales and as a result benefit everyone.

1 Like
5

FAB should look at how Steam does it

I know that likely makes Epic cring a bit but there is a reason Steam is king and EGS is not and its the user AND publisher experience

Reviews are part of that.

  1. Review is positive or negative, no stars that is far to subjective and it ALWAYS devolves into 5 stars is good everything else is bad.
  2. Written review … you cant thumbs up or down without writing a reason why
  3. Pattern monitoring … the system doesn’t remove sus reviews but it does highlight them as being sus and doesn’t consider sus reviews when calculating the overall
  4. Fuzzy Overall … e.g. Mostly Positive, Overwhelmingly Positive, etc. … its a feeling not a number
    Yes this si a machine so the machine needs to use a number but the consumer is using a feeling understand that
  5. Feels Obvious … but you have to OWN the product, also this indicates how you own the produce and rather or not you refunded e.g. paid vs free vs keyed from the outside and rather or not you refunded as well as how long much use at time of review … for FAB this would be time from purchase to review not so much “play time”

Re-review

Next encouraging users to review and encouraging users to reconsider negative reviews when the system knows they keep using the thing.

So you played a game, you gave it a bad review … you played the game another 2000hrs … Steam gona ask you to reconsider that review. You dont have to its a simple highlight at the top of the game page.

Epic could easily say … o your downloading and importing that asset you reviewed negatively … again … for the 300th time … are you sure its a negative?

First Review

This would be easy to tie into the store similar to Discovery Queue.
So the idea is that first the store asks you to go over 10 of your un-reviewed purchases and let the store know how you feel about them … thumbs up or down … with the option to write a review.

Now the store can suggest more assets based on those sentiments
This is similar to how Steam uses metadata from the user to suggest games not simply a popularity contest but actually understanding the user.

User Tags

Reveiws frankly aren’t all that useful.
No matter what we do they will always be subjective, they will always lean negative and they will always be weaponized.

This DOES NOT mean you can remove reviews
they are required but it is a minimal requirement you have to do … its not however “good enough” so you need to do more!

However there is an alternative.

Provide users with tags they can mark on assets they have used. These tags should indicate factors about that product so not thumbs up or down but

  • Time Saver
  • Works well with 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, etc.
  • Works well with (tag other asset)
  • Fast Support
  • Easy Install
  • Blueprints
  • C++
  • Extensible
  • Samples
    etc.

the idea is that users who have used the asset can tag it up with factors that stood out to them about this asset.

These tags should describe the asset, its usage and its relationship with engines, other assets and any logical services such as community, tech support, guides, tutorials, samples, demos, documentation online and offline, etc.

6

Agree on many suggestions, but I wouldn’t personally make the reviews too complicated and overwhelming.
If it takes too much time and effort it might cause some frustration
But I would add couple of different types of reviews, at least:

-Product quality (shows up in the browser)
-Ease of use
-Customer support (in case customer is angry with the rude seller not the product)

In my opinion reviews should benefit all the parties the customer, the seller and the Fab marketplace, otherwise what is the point of it?

  1. Benefits to the Customer:
    By looking at reviews the customer should determine the overall product’s quality, not a reflection of someone’s flattery, hate or bad mood.
    It should be an honest evaluation or reasonable criticism.
    Reviews should be fair. Period.
    If the negative review can’t be backed, it should be removed. ( I see no reason of leaving those reviews for any reason. They are not helping anybody instead they’re ruining someone’s hard work and making a false statement)

  2. Benefits to the seller.
    They can point seller the strong and weak sides of the product. (only with feedback, stars only don’t have those benefits)
    Reviews can increase the sales.
    Reviews can make the seller care more about product quality and customer satisfaction.
    Reviews should be fair. Again.
    Because unfair reviews can ruin not only the sales of the particular product but more importantly the sellers attitude to work hard on their craft. No one wants to work in the unfair environment.

  3. Benefits to the FAB
    If customers trust the reviews and get their hands on the best products, sellers don’t feel abandoned, evolve, improve their products and get more sales, Fab marketplace generates more revenue and grows in to the greatest platform to conduct business with. Everybody wins.

Conclusion:
Ratings should be considered as a very important topic by Fab since it affect the marketplace big time.

7

Tags would not be part of the written review system

Its its own system … just open up Steam and have a look at how this works in practice

Tags are thigns users can assign to a product, it has nothign to do with the written reviews at all but it has a HUGE impact on how you search for things, how the store presents things to you, etc.

The only real use of reviews is to offer a public voice to the consumer that is not controlled by the publisher. Honestly that is all any review system does

Ideally everyone would write well thought out reviews for everything they had a notably good or bad experience with but in reality … a review is a paltform to rage vent, or a weapon to wield, or marketing tool to manipulate. I get why Epic saw them as an issue but removal of them WAS NOT the answer.

Written reviews are a voice for the consumer and that MUST be present
As to what the store and the publisher want from reviews … that is meaningful data as to WTF is perfomring and how
And for the customers a means to identify and fine useful things on the store

well tags are a MUCH better soltuion for those things … they DO NOT offer the user a voice in that tags are curated. They simply let users optionally “tag” products with various meaningful tags as I noted above.

The written review 100% is a public voice for them to rant when angery and if they really want to, to cheer when things go well.

The idea of a score system on reviews though … there is a reason everything moves away from that model … it doesn’t work in reality

Epic took the wrong part of reviews away

They should have removed the starts/score and left the written part with a simple + or - indicator

The whole idea of a score anyway is to let users say Postiive, Meh or Negative

Issue though is people over time are trained to not trust scores and so they treat anything < 5 as BAD thus yoru score is nothing but a +/- anyway … remove the ambiguity make it a +/- and bring back written text

2 Likes
8

Lot of great input and ideas in this thread! I pinged the team on taking note on the possible solutions to making ratings better, and when we start work on the text reviews and other rating improvements we will definitely use this thread as guidance.

Once we have text reviews, I think requiring a text review to go alongside a rating is probably good and something we should do as mentioned above. I personally also quite like doing Mostly Positive, Overwhelmingly Positive and so on as opposed to straight off stars, but as mentioned in the other thread on ratings I do think when it comes to ratings there is always going to be pros and cons to each approach, or a preference that people have for one approach over the other.

When we start specing out the specifics on the rating improvements we will post back in one of these threads with our proposal, to get your input. Meanwhile if you all have more ideas or thoughts please keep posting them!

5 Likes
9

I think STEAM and Google Maps provide great examples of effective rating systems. Having features like user comments and developer replies adds a lot of value to any rating system. Right now, Fab only has a very basic rating system, which could definitely be improved with these additional features.

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10

I had a suggestion on other thread that I think it would be really beneficial for everyone if implemented.

Old Negative reviews might say things like the asset having technical problems while at the same time having those issues already been fixed by the seller. The problem is that the negative review is still there even after he fixes everything and the seller rating of the product has been damaged (let’s be honest, anything that is not 5 stars at everything makes people nervous).

I’ve suggested the option of the product review having some sort of tag as “resolved”, just like when we ask something on the forum. The seller might request the viewer to edit his review for a more positive rating if things are working fine. This would encourage people to fix their stuff if there is anything to work on.

By far not one of the main problems FAB has but hey, it might do some good.

1 Like
11

Thank you for paying attention to this topic. :+1: