Sharp decline in Official Responses from Epic throughout the community.

[UnrealEnterprise]

franktech - can you please edit your posts instead of deleting them and creating them over and over again? When you do this, some users like myself will see entire pages filled with posts that just say "This topic by franktech has been deleted by franktech".

Of course, sorry I'd no idea before. Its just that the edit-post-timer is far too short!
Is this a change with the new forums or 'mod/admin view' that was always there?

[ambershee]

franktech - can you please edit your posts instead of deleting them and creating them over and over again? When you do this, some users like myself will see entire pages filled with posts that just say "This topic by franktech has been deleted by franktech".

Quite a few forums threads now look like this:
https://snag.gy/52sMgL.jpg

[UnrealEnterprise]

Regardless, there needs to be a way to ensure that all bug reports are being looked at... Now, for the forums and "Feedback for Epic", if Epic is not going to respond to anything written here, what is the point of this section then?

Well, regarding Answerhub, by now 90% of questions are either regarding things already covered elsewhere, or duplicates of existing questions or just obvious misuse of a feature. Bug Report section is not an exception.

I almost never use AH I don't get the color-coding / find it hard to follow-the-flow through the different sections.
I have to read AH posts very slowly to follow if anyone posted the actual-right-answer and to check 'who' posted...
In an era of big-data etc, why don't Epic include related-links / suggested-links to interconnect the Forums + AH?

Instead I lobbied before for General Forums, AH, Bugs to be regular forum posts with different coded headings.
So [General-Question: Solved / Outstanding] ... [AH: Solved / Outstanding]... [Bugfix: Solved / Outstanding] etc.
As it is you must use outside search engines to find anything, but then you can't filter-out 'unanswered' threads...

I also think that decline of post numbers shares same roots, as reduction of all forum users activity: forum update.

I saw a fall-off on the forums this year even before the forum changes. Anyone have a good stats site to verify?
Doesn't seem like anyone will fill Alex P's shoes either... Was he uber-social or have priorities changed @Epic...

Why care? Because a trail-off in quality-posts / lack-of-improvement-in-the-docs makes Unreal harder to use!
Having active forums brings interest too in Landscape-Architect, Eden, Runtime-Terrain and Large-Worlds etc....

Overall, hope this isn't a time that will be looked back on as a slow-death-of-the-forums (or like how UDK went)!

[ambershee]

Well, regarding Answerhub, by now 90% of questions are either regarding things already covered elsewhere, or duplicates of existing questions or just obvious misuse of a feature. Bug Report section is not an exception. I don't think that the section gets less attention than it deserves, though there were occasional cases, where efforts to review the bug report were incomparably lower, than efforts, invested into reporting one, but overall, I don't see major issues with that.


Not sure if it is viable, even if a sole person is dedicated full time to this. There gotta be some filter to make sure only the relevant posts are reviewed. I'd say here that one thing, that is not used properly on answerhub, is voting system. Sadly, number of votes on the question are not indicative of relevance and quality of a bug report.

My opinion has been for some time, that Answerhub just isn't suitable for this kind of application; it's design encourages duplicate questions and buries existing answers - and with a large and mostly inexperienced userbase, you get an awful lot of questions filling up the front pages that have already been answered ad-infinatum, or are so vague as to be reasonably unanswerable. The genuinely difficult questions get pushed down and never answered, which in turn filters out the more experienced users who tend to have those questions.

I suspect the decline in forum users is unrelated to Answerhub and vice-versa.

[Deathrey]

Well, regarding Answerhub, by now 90% of questions are either regarding things already covered elsewhere, or duplicates of existing questions or just obvious misuse of a feature. Bug Report section is not an exception. I don't think that the section gets less attention than it deserves, though there were occasional cases, where efforts to review the bug report were incomparably lower, than efforts, invested into reporting one, but overall, I don't see major issues with that.

Regardless, there needs to be a way to ensure that all bug reports are being looked at. Even if it's like, "Yo, I can't do anything without Repro Steps, but I'll keep an eye on this"

Not sure if it is viable, even if a sole person is dedicated full time to this. There gotta be some filter to make sure only the relevant posts are reviewed. I'd say here that one thing, that is not used properly on answerhub, is voting system. Sadly, number of votes on the question are not indicative of relevance and quality of a bug report.

Now, for the forums and "Feedback for Epic", if Epic is not going to respond to anything written here, what is the point of this section then?

For some reason, I don't have any doubts, that overriding majority of threads are looked at, just no responses are given. I'd guess a simple logic, that no response is better than wrong response applies.

I also think that decline of post numbers shares same roots, as reduction of all forum users activity: forum update.

[VictorBurgos]

On that note. I would gladly pay for official support. Even at a monthly fee. Something like a Priority Support. Between non-UDN and UDN.

[VictorBurgos]

I'm pretty sure Epic Games' employees are obligated by contract to answer only issues reported in UDN network... this forum right here is merely casual convenience where all non-paying companies/users can exchange experiences.
When some staff reply to a topic in here is pretty much out of their own personal will, not because they have to reply anything in here or any other channels besides the paid support network for paid engine licensees.

* the fact some few people in near past were very aggressive towards Epic Games' staff on these casual communication channels also didn't help to keep them around either *

I can agree with you on some points. But, the Bug Report section on Answerhub is very important as it's the only way for non-UDN devs to post Bug Reports. And a lot of issues that UDN folks have, can be prevented before becoming a problem for them. That seems like a win-win in my book.

[BrUnO XaVIeR]

It's different; very different.
We all know gamers in teenage years can be irrational and overly aggressive for no reason, I know I was a raging teenager not long ago; game developers should not take things personal tho.

In many occasions for example, people criticize my work: I try to learn from what they are providing as feedback even if insults attached, I just filter out the "attacks" and move on... But I've worked with people who would take personal any critique to their code or art, acting like children and then distributing gratuitous verbal attacks in exchange (people above their 30s already and doing that).
That also happened here in the forums a few times, and time after time, even the most helpful engine staff faded away from the forums whilst before they'd participate daily sharing a lot of knowledge.

[S-ed]

were very aggressive towards Epic Games' staff

Roam through Paragon and Fortnite forums...you may lose faith in humanity.

[BrUnO XaVIeR]

I'm pretty sure Epic Games' employees are obligated by contract to answer only issues reported in UDN network... this forum right here is merely casual convenience where all non-paying companies/users can exchange experiences.
When some staff reply to a topic in here is pretty much out of their own personal will, not because they have to reply anything in here or any other channels besides the paid support network for paid engine licensees.

* the fact some few people in near past were very aggressive towards Epic Games' staff on these casual communication channels also didn't help to keep them around either *

[S-ed]

What if...

*meanwhile at Epic

[VictorBurgos]

So, this is definitely 100% my opinion. I have no facts sadly to base this upon, just a gut feeling and just looking at the overall responses that I see (or don't) over at Answerhub.

Obviously if you all have a way to look at the overall number of Bug Reports that have been reported and comparing that to how many official responses there were, I bet you'd see something similar.

I have a Facebook post/poll going on as well as a Twitter tweet. There's been a lot discussion about this over on the Unreal Slackers discord chat as well lately. The community is awesome, and luckily we have a lot of intelligent folks out there that can help (I have helped many myself), but there are some things that the community can't do, and Epic needs to step up their game. Especially when it come to logging Bug Reports (even more so when they have reproducible steps)

IF the lack of communication (i.e. blatantly ignoring posts) is indeed that reproducible steps are not up to standards for Epic, then perhaps creating a template for Bug Reporting is in order.

Regardless, there needs to be a way to ensure that all bug reports are being looked at. Even if it's like, "Yo, I can't do anything without Repro Steps, but I'll keep an eye on this"

Now, for the forums and "Feedback for Epic", if Epic is not going to respond to anything written here, what is the point of this section then?

Thank you for your time!





11/02/2017 Summary:

Not much has changed in regards to the forums activity, although we did receive some valuable feedback from an Epic engineer (DanielW) down below, which is much appreciated. I have noticed a slight increase in Answerhub presence. A few new faces (new contractors?). Hopefully we will see more of an increased presence throughout the community as time goes on. We're hitting MegaJam, so after the holidays, we'll see if we're back to square one or not.

If you have issues with Documentation, use my thread on there or just start your own thread under Documentation Feedback please. Thanks!

P.S. Give the community monthly #ue4jam again