Definitely use two different sites, forums and answer hub, fragment the community.
But the worst thing is that answer hub is a horrible site with an awful User experience design that frightens the desire to help.
I hope they block that monstrosity and everything comes back here.
Here’s the thing, I have no illusions whatsoever that when something is worth paying for, that I need and I MUST pay for it! However If an engine as “Big” and as “misadvertised” as UE4 which will take up to 10% of my cut at some point is going to tell me that:
In order to have root motion you must use “character class” regardless of how much of its features you don’t require and good luck changing anything in C++ trying to implement root motion in actor or pawn classes because UE tells you so!
You don’t like using the performance heavy class for the basics good luck paying for it- meanwhile Unity doesn’t care - hence basics
In order to get any projections or modulate mode shades in forward rendering you need to hire god knows who dedicated to again create some magic through C++ that is if it works because it is not mentioned or said that it may and might just end up as a severe engine limitation - meanwhile Unity and other engines this simply works regardless because its Basics!
In other words you can’t ever leave modulate projected decals when a unit explodes on screen and smears a surface with dark debris, Something all games have been doing forever since the 90’s, but you can’t here. PBR didn’t exist back then either!
You can’t use morph targets with skinned cloth! shocker!
Widgets: Just discovered yesterday that I can’t do glowing text- Glowing text!! now I need to write my own custom BP HUD and material systems for it with lots of math just create interactive numbers on screen in order just to have that glow!
There’s a point in time when you don’t need to hire someone in 2019 in order to rediscover fire for you, Creating a game already involves astronomical amount of work for a small team or a large one, I don’t want to worry about the fact if the engine i’m using can do shadows or not figuratively speaking, if you put the light it should cast shadows and let me worry about optimization and performance but it should cast that shadow!
Anyway…
From a legal point of view, I absolutely trust EpicGames 100% to never pull on me a stunt like this at least:
Shameful business tactics by Unity Tech right there.
It’s apparently getting a bit more spicy: https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/10/e…ay-from-unity/
Epic has a tons of Fortnite money and is not hesitant to make it apparent. I am absolutely happy for them, given how much they are giving back to the community. It’s also their right to attract more users to their own platform.
While they don’t have any obligation to service the existing community using the engine for free, it would be kinda nice if they could spare let’s say at least $25k/year to hire some part time community manager to run around the forums, collect issues, pass them on to the technical epic staff, and perhaps come back with some answers. If there’s $25M being spent on potential new users, it’d be kinda nice if the existing forum community could be spent at least 0.01% of that sum on. 
EDIT: Actually $25k would be 0.001% :D. 0.01% would cover such part timer for 10 years upfront And if that person would be external employee, living somewhere let’s say eastern Europe, $25k/year would end up being actually above average full time salary given that region
What is sad to see, some Unity cultists swear all this situation was engineered by Sweeney and Improbable CEO since beginning and nobody should leave Unity LOL
Stockholm syndrome.
Thou is easy to find a competent community manager (I do love ours btw) just for this purpose, it is not easy to find more internal developers with the ability to do what is necessary to fix the engine. You would need to hire and train an entire team of already good developers and this would take at least 2 years to happen, for them to be at same level of the current devs working on the engine (those 2 years might be underestimated!)
My $0.02, money talks. If your product is making you money, it’s likely making them money. In turn, you’ll get a lot more support. I don’t disagree with their tactics – a lot of requests for support are, in a word, ridiculous. Their product has matured, their company is in a great place, and their attention must be devoted to what will help sustain that healthy company revenue. Holding the hands of hobbyists is, unfortunately, not lucrative. That’s certainly not to say that all support requests fall into that category, just that in a sea of rudimentary support requests, it’s often hard to see the legitimate ones.
The engine is available to anyone, and unfortunately that also means people with zero experience are often asking extremely rudimentary questions that have been answered a hundred times at this point. I do agree that the more serious bugs and inquiries should not be taken lightly, but at the same time, it’s an open source engine. Want something in the next minor? Great, put in a pull request 
With that in mind, I have seen some PRs that have not been merged in which I feel should have been by this point. So, that is an area I’d like to see some more attention. If someone is willing to put in the work and put in a PR, it should be taken seriously and merged in, or at a bare minimum comments should be posted as to why it is not being merged.
I didn’t exactly mean bug fixers. I just meant some kind of “forum community manager”. A person, who would be paid to check forums for any questions that meet the following criteria:
1, Are not yet answered with a solution
2, Are well and politely worded
3, Are questions about something non trivial, which can not be easily and conveniently found in documentation
Such person would them make short summaries of these questions, and pass them on to some developers, who would get to those questions IF they have a few moments to spare, and would answer some of them.
The forum community manager would then return to the threads with the answers, or at least some acknowledgement/status report in case the question was about an issue/bug.
It’s not as much about bugs, but more about that there’s a lot of obscure knowledge about UE that’s condensed among Epic staff and doesn’t make it out of the company. For example check older threads where Ryan Brucks used to respond. Many of his posts pretty much shaped workflows of users for many years to come, and were a great benefit to the community which last to this day. Imagine how much more great knowledge and workflows would there be, if Ryan contributed to the forums to this day. Or at least someone would be passing his advice on here
I did get your point previously, I am the one of several that takes some time out of the day to answer questions at the forums for a number of topics, some are really pure knowledge on how to do stuff, but others points on engine issues, which would be nice to have people with in-depth engine knowledge to answer, which won’t happen because they of course need to focus on stuff which will bring money (which we all agree, everyone wants).
Sure, that’s a fair point. But I think you won’t disagree with me when I say that the communication of the epic staff on the forum could improve, at least little bit. And that pouring at least little but money into forum dedicated staff could be a viable approach.
AFAIK there was some talk about Unreal Studio having more direct support channels, but I don’t know how that works since studio still remains free. Also, it’s aimed at enterprise, not games. Even though when it comes to UE4, I am still a hobbyist (learning), not making any money with it, and also not making more than $45k/year (due to living in part of the world with relatively low average salary), even I would be completely happy paying up to $50/month just for access to some kind of “priority support” forums where I could ask tougher questions and still have some hopes of getting reply.
I agree with you.
Hey all! Apologies for the lack of visibility, but we do certainly keep an eye on these threads and report issues back to our internal teams in various reports. We will work to be more diligent about being visible here and we’ve added a new community manager to the team to help support our efforts. This is his first week, so we’ve been getting him up to speed, but expect to be hearing more from @VictorLerp
I am curious if this happened because someone at Epic already got an idea to do the same thing (hire more people to manage community) or if Victor was hired just based on the ideas in this thread. In both of these cases, that would be extremely impressive and encouraging. If it was the former, then it’d mean someone at Epic cares about community to such a degree they thought of it even before our complaints, and if the latter, it would be a reaction to community request at an uncanny speed
We’d been working to grow the team for some time - just needed to find the right person!
I don’t want to sound like a jerk here, but…
If he doesn’t have a large bag of deep knowledge and wide experience with the engine I don’t see how anything is going to change when new users look for help on forums or answerhub.
Why not sponsor a few of the “answerhub sages” on both sites instead of expending more money on yet another PR manager (who in most cases have little understanding of how development in Unreal is meant to work)?!
I agree with this, no need to look elsewhere maybe some of the devs here can be approached.
But I believe the shortcomings of the engine are well known already, some even being asked for years.
I honestly think answerhub itself is a bit of an issue. I never posted there in my life. Everytime I get there, it just looks so archaic I gain an impression it’s some old version of the forum with very chaotic content arrangement, that’s still up for some reason. I am afraid it fractures the userbase between there and here on the forums.
Overall, I’d like to see forum and answherhub merged into one. A forum system which allows for marking posts as best answers in an appropriate section of the forum. I really like the weekly karma system on answerhub, but I think that it and forum being two separate entities brings more issues than benefits.
I am also one of many which prefer to answer here directly into the forums… I really don’t like Answer Hub and when pretty much whenever I tried to look for some info there, some answers are really bad, it does not show a clear discussion structure like at the forums.
Yes, this is a much better idea.
I have to somewhat agree but I’d extend that to any sized development outfit, A recent engagement with Unity showed exactly how fat, slow, rigid, buggy, archaic and convoluted UE can be, it takes ten times as long to do things and not trying to start a scripting war here the WYSIWYG component scripting architecture increased productivity many times over. The worst thing is a lot of it’s completely unnecessary, Unreal is already feature packed and whilst it lacks graphically compared to it’s competitors nowadays as a toolset it can’t be beaten. It’s reached maturity so where’s the common sense bread and butter stuff? Workflow enhancements, extensive stability (Q&A) testing, support etc.? (Python was actually rather cool in this respect).
The reason to use a pre-made engine is to cut out workflow deficiencies, even if you’re a large outfit spending an inordinate time fixing bugs and assigning resources to code bases mean you might as well save yourself 5% and build your own engine that would excel development by years. Not only are they faster, lighter, easier to understand, easier to upgrade and generally more flexible they can be built in a fashion where even a monkey could build a game out of them.
Why would any solo or large outfit throw money into cost inefficient anarchy is beyond me, hence a lot of larger companies don’t even have source code access (again Disney with Unity etc.). If the point is to be a wannabe dev or a game engine developer both Xenko and Godot are in dire need.
I’m not trying to just flame Epic here because frankly I wouldn’t use Unity for a major project (so I’m team Epic), I need to fix issues on my timeline not there’s and scalability / quirks in a black box has brought projects to there knee’s. Never mind things like the Disney debacle, I at least trust Epic to keep me out of the firing line. At this point I either spend a couple of years finishing my own engine or I spend another couple of years hoping things get better, the former seems the better idea at this point.
Due to circumstances, it’s reasonable to be somewhat concerned for both parties. An engine is only a tool and whilst eco-systems take time to recover from it’s not the end of the world if we part ways.