Afternoon!
Would love to see a new section in that part of the forum, to leave feedback (either positive or negative) about current or former colleagues.
A thread for each username, where everyone can use that lino to show people you are trustworthy, and other recruiters can see who’s good at what.
Would also help receiving offers for the users that have the best reputation.
What do you guys think?
Not bad, like an E-bay rating system for freelancers and services divisions…
Still nothing to stop people changing there usernames constantly, also some people won’t get a chance because they will stick with the high rated safe engineers and artists…
It’s good in some ways, but needs work.
It’s just an initial idea, which I bet the mods and admins can improve 
Seen it implemented in many sites, can PM you some in-depth thought if interested.
As for changing user, here’s an example: if you are looking for an artist and receive 2 applications. One is a fresh new account, 1-5 posts total, no rep, and the other is someone that has been here for a while, even though has no votes, which one would you pick? Being a forum veteran and being helpful is paid off, reputation follows closely after that.
The following is based on my personal views, they are not an official Unity view:
a) Anyone who tried to hire an artist/designer/programmer with only a forum name and list of recommendations is asking for trouble.
b) Any dodgy/fraudulent forum user can create new, fake accounts and give themselves positive feedback.
c) Although Unity is not responsible for the content of this site, if a user thinks they have been wrongly accused, they’ll contact moderators and ask for the offending posts to be deleted. What’s a moderator meant to do?
d) There’s a site called LinkedIn which allows colleagues to rate each other. Seems pointless to duplicate that.
Very valid points, I must admit. Although just wanted to give an idea for this community, but now I perfectly see what you mean…
It also seems like a lot of “problems” that arise from collabs seem to stem back to misunderstandings or expectations not being met that were not well defined. Games are complex and take time. Noobs jumping to projects/starting projects with other noobs are bound to end badly because of unrealistic expectations from the start and not fully comprehending what is going to be involved. Most will fail, and when they do the blaming starts. To me it seems like folks rating each other on stuff like that is just going to get ugly fast.
A forum that is dedicated to advice/tips/discussion about the best practices for freelancers and employers might be useful. A lot of people are probably new to freelancing and hiring freelancers. Posting people’s names is a dead end of accusations and counter-accusations so that should be kept private.
Collaboration is way too complicated and each project needs a lawyer to lay out the details of the contracts. I don’t think lawyers are posting here often.
I’ll get a lot of hate for saying this but I’m going to say it. Make the work section a paid service. For example make job ads cost money, and charge contractors a small fee to apply for each job. Its definitely something I’d use.
Dangerous, as there are no guarantees. I personally post there, and get a barrage of weird proposals. Better that than an empty inbox, because maybe amongst all that weirdness, there might be a nice opportunity that maybe someone not paying for the service wouldn’t have proposed.
There is also Freelancer.com, eLance.com, odesk.com with escrow and ratings systems and I can tell you I gave evidence to eLance of a phisher and they wasted no time in pulling the account unlike godaddy.com, yahoo.com, etc, etc, …
Now it’s true many of the profiles are artificially ‘pumped’ and the costs are amazingly low in some cases to hire some of these companies and workers but you have to realize in many cases the workers aren’t degreed and live in a place with a very low cost of living. However they have been trained and have been given excellent instructions to follow in most cases so I would hire them if I needed to. Noobs without training, experience, or a degree need to compete with that type of enthusiasm and organization and those escrow systems.
I mean pay to use the service. Generally only the more serious people will use a paid service. It sets the bar at a certain level, whilst no guarantee of course it does filter out a lot of the dross.
Also I think it would help establish reasonable rates.
Give me paid over freemium any day.
I played Realm of the Mad God where there was a forum based for seller/buyer ratings, or a thread, or something like that. It was full of ‘vouches’ and whatnot. It was ridiculous. Everyone would be like, “VOUCHED 400 TIMES!” and essentially, it meant nothing. People who had rep would eventually just be doing it to scam someone out of a bigger bank later on, or they would make their own alt accounts to vouch themselves, and so on.
Online dealings are shady. If you have to do it, just assume you’re going to lose your money, and if you don’t… it’s like a complete bonus. Maybe try a pay-as-you-go sort of thing perhaps.
Take heart, from what I’ve seen democratization of game development is coming but maybe sooner from UE4 than Unity. I am a programmer and I can tell you my programming skills are becoming more and more marginalized (at least relative to what I need to do to make a game) while myself teaching myself modeling and art is becoming more and more important.
And whether or not games are involved everything on the internet seems somewhat ill when you juxtapose most advertising in it (and the ‘helpful’ (so not) FB trending and recommended are disguised advertising as well). It makes you wonder about the values of the advertising agency and the organization allowing the advertising to be put in such a place typically and too often it’s not a good value exchange. They could go a long, long way by allowing one to assign a maturity rating when you first visit a site and serve reserved, respectful advertising but they don’t. When it’s the advertising that causes you to abandon sites you know you’ve a problem that you’d allow an advertisers to drive off customers. That’s not what advertising is supposed to do. Internet advertising will drag people’s perception of your work and you down.
Ebay doesn’t care about that. Why? Because people tend to refuse to deal with people who have low or no transactions.
I’ve never even been in the collab or paid forums and look at that number under my name (I clearly need to get a life). I’m pretty well acquainted with the results of online collabs with strangers. No thanks
Ok, apparently the idea didn’t inspire as much as I thought. Thank you all for your input
It’s not a bad idea, its just that it’s too open for abuse.
Nothing to stop people randomly signing up under false accounts and boosting their own repertoire in this forum.