Why I quit purchasing from the marketplace

General Feedback & Requests
1

Hello Epic peeps,

I want to first say thank you for provided us small folks with the opportunity to learn and work with the magnificent engine you have created. To this day, many months after the release I am still blown away by the engine every time I get to work in it. Now here is my gripe, I have made purchases that date back to December of last year. Modular building set to be specific. It was released with an error, the publisher found out and quickly pushed an update to the marketplace team. This was 12/28/2014.

Ok the marketplace team is very busy it is understood that they have to manage new incoming content, do the quality assurance and all that jazz, while still trying to have the time to work on existing pack updates, my concern comes to how the prioritization is being handled. A pack that cannot be used because of the bug should have a pretty decent priority I would think. Anything built with the models in this pack are under scaled and when the update is released the modular building pieces will be different sizes so any past work is still a waste of time.

My main gripe comes from the standpoint of i have been quietly and patiently waiting along with several others for this update since December while Manufacture k4 got a update pushed out within 2 days time according to this post
Top-Down Graveyard Collision - Marketplace - Epic Developer Community Forums which does not seem fair to jacob-3d or myself who have been waiting for months.

The second pack i purchased was urban city. The collision is set to automatic and you cant even walk down the center of the streets in the demo scene It was a easy fix but I mention it because a update has also been provided so I hope this doesn’t take several months. And if it does I know it is not intentional.

Anyways I just wanted to provide my feedback on this topic, and for now I will be waiting on purchases until things iron out a bit, or i see positive reviews in the forums.

2

I am glad I found this post. Granted, I was looking for it.

I’ve been waiting on the 4.7 release to purchase UE4, but in the meantime I’ve been looking around, especially at assets for sale and such. Modular building set is one of the first I intend to purchase.

However, when I went looking through the modular building set thread (earlier this week) I was alarmed that the author had submitted a correction (a crucial correction) months ago, and the marketplace team still hasn’t updated it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past few days, the engine is obviously being worked on and updated with awesome stuff fast, but failing to upload a file for two months is a big bad warning sign.

I am not one to throw this around lightly: unless there is some horrible technical glitch that takes two months to fix in order to upload this specific file, somebody needs to be fired.

3

Thanks for taking the time to write all of this up for us, X.E.R.T. Providing a great experience in the Marketplace for developers is definitely close to our hearts, and we know we still have plenty of room to improve. We’re continually moving closer to where we want to be, and hearing this definitely helps us understand where you all are getting hung up / blocked and aids us in that journey. I’ll look into the specific instances mentioned here and see what we can do!

Thanks again.

4

Hey, I also bought the modular building set, although the meshes where high quality, the pivot points on the meshes are not nicely aligned so that one could create entire cities quickly, it is rather arduous trying to use those pieces and it was a big disappointment, I went to the authors website and it appears he was originally making and testing these pieces in the cry engine, of course there is nothing wrong with that, but the pieces haven’t been fixed to align nicely at say, snapping at grid size 50, and you’ll have to actually turn off snapping and move the pieces around in some difficult manner and eye ball them in, it’s a slow process.

Some sort of standard should be worked out with regards to modular meshes and it should be part of the QA that they will snap at a reasonable grid scale, such as 50 for large pieces and 10 for the smaller ones.

5

No problem thanks for looking into the update

6

Have you tried Rama’s vertex snap editor plug in. Thing works magic on modular alignment. THANK YOU RAMA!

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Rama's_Vertex_Snap_Editor_Plugin#Plugin_Download

7

Grid snap, independent of any plugins, should be a requirement for marketplace environments. I’m staying far away from buying environment pieces given all the information that has come out recently, and the high amount of ports from other engines.

Maintenance of existing items should ALWAYS take priority over evaluating new submissions or anything else.

Ports of existing products should be placed under extra scrutiny for logical pivot placement, tight collision, lightmap uvs, etc.

I’m very curious as to what currently goes into evaluating content that is submitted. I’ve seen screenshots of collision that makes level pieces clearly unusable. The Futuristic Weapons Pack has pivots on the triggers rather than the handles.

Should it not be made mandatory that screen shots of collision and pivots are available for mesh assets?

8

Well collision, in my opinion, is not a must have as I usually remove them in favor of a single blocking volume. Collision on instanced objects can add up in a hurry so a building containing hundreds of collision meshes could just as easily be covered by one.

Snaps and pivots though should be a feature that does not require a plug-in work around. Being a 3ds Max user plug-ins use is something to be avoided and more so if bound to the object but as to being able to snap, more important align, UE4 really does need more work in this area.

Back to the original post I agree when an update is made available it needs to be a priority as I did purchase the asset only to discover the scale was off and not of any mind to make use of the asset until the update is available.

In my experience anything that is not of scale as to intended use is a nightmare waiting to happen and no matter how good “it” is there is no way such content will be used in our project in this condition.

10

I contacted the marketplace team about this just the other day and was told that it takes about a days work to update a content pack that has been released already. I know Epic was experiencing problems with receiving emails not too long ago, that may have been the cause of delay in the update of that package rather than negligence. Given what happened with MK4’s package and what the marketplace curator told me, it shouldn’t be long at all.

11

First of all, thank you X.E.R.T. and everyone for speaking up about this also. I think Epic is finally listening! I received an email from them tonight that the update is running on their internal servers and should be out tomorrow! Good news finally.

Hi ,
Thank you for purchasing the pack and supporting my work. I’m sorry that you were unhappy with the pivot place and speed of building construction. I will say that I thoroughly read through the Marketplace Submission Guidelines and they are ensuring content control when it comes to grid snapping. #contentReq
They require that assets can snap together on a 10cm snapping grid and I have very thoroughly checked every asset to ensure propper grid snapping and ease of placement in the Unreal Engine. What I might mention that pertains to your comments on speed, while creating the building set I focused more heavily on modularity and the ability to create the most amount of unique buildings and structures with the pack and with the assets. In doing so, this creates more assets that need to be overlayed and snapped together to create initial blockouts of the buildings. My hope was that people would take these highly modular pieces and create groups of assets with them that they could very quickly and easily construct the buildings with. If I had put more assets into each static mesh, while it would make the process quicker, it would also increase on memory as well as decrease the amount of unique structures that a person could create. I understand that everyone is looking for something different from each pack that they purchase, so I have tried my best to make as many people happy as I could, but I understand that each person creates content in their own way and it may not work for everyone. Thank you again for purchasing the pack and I hope that the new features may provide some form of compensation for the initial scale issues that both myself and EPIC had missed. Let us hope now that they will do as they say and release the update tomorrow! Yeah!! Finally haha

12

No worries Jacob, Thank you market place team!

14

All valid points and I would just like to add that I feel there is a great need to also include a Version History expandable section between the Technical Details and Contact and Support headers on any given UE4 Marketplace product and would behave similar to such marketplaces as the **Apple App Store.

**I feel this will also be useful from a compatibility standpoint where a UE4 Marketplace product might not just update compatibility but also take advantage of features introduced in newer builds of **Unreal Engine 4 **which the customer should be made aware of directly on the store page and not on some forum thread.

Furthermore,
I would like to voice my support for a standard 4-5 star ranking system with or without written reviews for the time being.

15

I would much rather have written reviews than have a number of stars. I want to know what exactly is wrong with something, not just if somebody liked it or not. Perhaps when approving something, Epic could give the asset pack away to 2 or 3 randomly drawn users who then write reviews for the product page.

16

I believe a star system would be enough for now, as we always have the forums to fall back on for more in-depth feedback :wink:

Not a bad idea but perhaps only offer the privilege for users who have earned a forums badge/pin e.g. Moderator, Spotlight Member, Game Jam Finalist, Engine Contributor, etc. for actively contributing to the UE4 Developer Community and not to those who have only just created an account.

With that said,
You would have a much higher response rate for written reviews with badge holders over those without, due to the average badge holder having accumulated at least 50 posts and for the most part well thought out and decent length posts at that.

Not to mention by doing this you will hopefully combat people being too lenient with their reviews due to getting something for FREE over paying for it :slight_smile:

17

Hi guys! Content Curator here. First, I apologize for the issues with these packs you’ve been having, and this is something we take very seriously. As said in the other thread, GDC preparation has taken more time than expected away from the Marketplace, and I’ve been working nonstop to go through our huge submissions queue while trying to improve and speed up the system at the same time. Unfortunately, some things have been falling behind, and the bulk of the positive changes that have been made are behind the scenes. On the bright side, we’re now bringing more people on to help sort this out and we’ve been blasting through the queue faster and faster, and we’re nearly caught up. I’ll be doing a blog post this week going into more detail on what’s happening behind the scenes and what’s coming up, but I’ll go into the relevant parts of the thread here.

Updating content that’s on the Marketplace is incredibly important. Why buy if you’re not sure if it’s going to be supported and fully tested? We want the Marketplace to be a place to go to buy content that you know will work, and will be quickly updated as needed. To that end, today I put the finishing touches on something I’ve spent the last couple weeks setting up: A high priority, fast turnaround sellers-only support email address where product updates, questions, and support for items live on the Marketplace will take top priority. It’s a completely separate queue from the normal submissions queue that guarantees a rapid response.

I’ve streamlined it so that the content creators selling assets on the Marketplace will get rapid responses and support to push their updates live so that much-needed updates are no longer delayed. To be honest, the requests for update got lost in the queue, and that’s no longer going to be a problem. I’ve instructed the team here that content updates from sellers sent to that support email will be processed before anything else, and I have special alerts set up on my phone to notify me whenever anything urgent comes in so I can address it and plan it ASAP. I want the community to be able to trust us to take care of this, and this is the first of many steps we’re taking to make that happen. This information is going out to all current Marketplace sellers tomorrow.

But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. Our internal QA process needs to be improved so that we can have enough time to properly find and test these issues, and prevent as many of them as possible before going live. They need a little bit more time to cook, but the entire process also needs to be faster. I’ve gotten the time from submission to voting to going live down to 7 days or less for assets that receive votes quickly, and I want to speed that up across the board. Speaking of board, we need to manage the perception of assets taking a long time to get published after being posted to the public Trello board for voting.

We’re still developing and discussing ideas on how to do better at that, but one of the first ideas I’ve had is to rework the public Trello board to show where assets actually are in the pipeline, instead of hanging out as a Finalist or being In Processing for a long time. That sucks! Assets that get moved to “In Processing” have a much longer journey with far more blockers than may be obvious – signing legal documents, getting proper bank information, requesting changes to the packs and presentation materials, and more besides – and right now it’s not as helpful as it could be. Really, I’d like people to be able to go to the public Trello and know they can get a reasonable idea of when they can get your hands on this awesome Blueprint or that killer animation set that they’ve been waiting on.

I’ll have more on this soon as the ideas come together, but I want you all to know that we care very much about this and want the Marketplace to be as awesome as possible. And for my part, I’m always trying to do a better job of being responsive and available. With more people coming on board this is going to get easier, and in the blog post I’m doing this week I’ll be able to open up and show you all more. Stay tuned for that.

Thanks!

18

I agree with Blackrang. As a content provider, it is beneficial to know why a user rated the way they did. Having written feedback will be integral in applying changes in future releases as well as current. If Epic were to introduce a star rating system, I personally would want them to mandate a written review to go along with it to explain why they gave it the rating they did. Was it good? Could there have been some areas to improve on? This all goes to ensuring we content providers can give you the best experience we possibly can. I also think it should be limited to only those who have purchased the respective content, rather than just anyone with an account.

I’m very glad to hear this! Good to see you guys are taking this seriously and are improving in areas where you can help speed along the process for submissions that seem to be stuck in limbo. And a separate queue for updates is fantastic. Keep up the good work, looking forward to hearing more in your blog post.

20

Thank you , we appreciate you and your efforts.

21

Please keep feedback coming - it is always appreciated!

Thanks for raising the issue so it got the priority it deserved. In an ideal world we would have had internal safeguards to catch this without escalation.

22

Since manufactura is probably going to be my main competitor when it comes to caves…
I feel rather odd saying this…

But yea… his Unity version of his work is also rather broken.
(and some of it still is)

that out of the way, me and had a long marketplace-related talk a few days ago.
I know its not perfect, but I suggested that I am sure that there would be some of us community people who would love to help out and check out content before it hits the marketplace to make sure this stuff doesnt happen again.

Just an idea.

Also, is awesome!

:slight_smile:

23

When are you going to bring user ratings into the app?

They are on the site version of the marketplace.