Hi,
this is just to express my disappointment with the support you guys are giving.
I have seen many times many (many many) questions (including my own) never answered.
Some questions may be dumb, but come on, at lest let us know we’re dumb!
Many small studios like us don’t have enough money to sign a contract to get premium support, but at least give us some good forum support.
In the TI industry it’s kind of standard to take care of the customer using forums, but they answer all the questions even if the answer is “please search the forums”. I don’t know if you guys agree, but providing great support is the key to have a engaged developer community. If you have your developers engaged, we can endure many bugs we could find, because we would know Unity will take care of us.
Right know I’m not certain about this. I got several issues (overlapping navmeshagents, corrupted lightmaps, bumped shaders not receiving shadows using directional lightmaps, image effects not working, etc.) and to be honest i don’t know if Unity cares about me or not, which makes me want to go back to my previous engines and ask for a refund.
I know Unity is great to develop, but not having good support (even if that support is for slaping me in the face) makes Unity a not so great option. This is what i feel to day after 4-5 months of developing in Unity and over 20 years working in various IT fields. Of course i could be wrong and this could be due Unity just releasing 3.5, but anyway, i guess it’s a valid point anyway.
Thanks for reading.
You would have loved it here in 2005-2006!
@Jessy - yeah, but there were about 20 of us then 
@battleb - with 750k registered users these days that sort of support isn’t as easy anymore. I do know that support still tries as hard as possible to keep up with the support queue. And if some of your questions are indeed FAQs I’m surprised we don’t at least auto-reply with links to the Unity Forum, Unity Answers, Google etc… I know we used to do that (I’m not that involved in support these days besides this forum).
Thats indeed the problem. The masses. It is clear that you and other Unity members cannot answer to all 750k users here in the forum personally. Thats too much users and too few Unity staff members. So there must be another way of communication. Documentation and help is very important.
Unity answers seems to evolve into a wrong direction, and was of no big help for me in the past. Sometimes i found my needed answer. But most of the times i was afterwards more confused than before reading the thread. I guess this one would need more moderation.
The videos and example files that you can download are still the same than from Unity 2.6. The issue of outdated or too slim documentation was risen more than once. Suggestions were given to have discussions at the documentation level, means a way to add comments, which would help to decrease forum questions. Suggestions were given to improve the bug reporting, i still have bugs open from 2.6, no clue if they were ever fixed. And so on. And nothing seems to happen. At least nothing really visible to the public. Seems that you put all your energy into improving the engine instead. Which is imho the wrong direction. Better a “weaker” engine, and this engine as best documented as possible.
There is of course the community to help out. And it is a good and working community here, given the fact how big Unity has grown, and how much questions gets asked. But the community can just help up to a given point. And some questions falls off the table when you just rely on the community. The only workaround for that one is either to search for the answer at another places like Youtube. Or to bump the question until it gets answered.
tja… that is what i say’d before the switch to Windows…
Now Unity is so big… there have to care about other things…
i also remember the good old times… around Unity3d 1.5 - 1.8 iOS…
there where so many lovely and helpful user here…
but time is changing and Unity3d is now Universal …OSX Win
personally i really prefer the OSX…
all become true what i say’'d before they went Universal… like with Support Development Time of New Features…all because of Windows…
Now it’s the same like all other Big Player… Support… not too much… because there have enough other things to do…and enough Money…
The other Problem is the fixing of Bug’s… takes now also much longer than before…
and don’t forget the implementing of all the Announcements and New Features takes also much much longer now because of Win…
i don’t know where it goes to but it scares me a lot …
i love Unity3D still but if there where a smaller OSX only Tool i would switch directly…
Some friends of me are thinking to build there own Tool like Unity 1.x.x OSX only with fast bug fix and a solid Substructure…
time will tell … if there is no competition with others all become to slow down like now here …
it feels like there is a BIG Company that takes over Unity3d this Year… than it is definitive time to start a new GameDevTool !
P.S. The Masses are not the Problem !!!
There are not so many Questions more than before !!!
There are nooo People from Unity3D that would like to answer the Questions… no payed Forum Admins or without interest…
Normally there should be a Admin for each Forum and answer the Questions… but here there is one Admin to care of it all…
Support cost Money… that is why there is so less help here… normally other Users help Users here but that is a no go for a Company that ask Money for a Software !
If you Pay for a Software you should get direct Support by the Company !!! That is Normal
I do miss the old days when Unity staff played a more active roll in this forum.
These days, most questions are answered by end users or Eric, our “Volunteer Moderator”. I really hope that doesn’t mean Eric isn’t getting compensated in some way, as he deserves it.
I do think Unity should hire more moderators to answer user questions, police the forums, and improve the FAQs.
I understand your point and i think having 750k users (not all using the forums i must asume) is a greater reason to provide excellent support, normally you’ll have about 10-20% unhappy users (even if your product is great), not providing good support will raise that number.
Please don’t get me wrong, i truly believe this is in the best interest of all: Having good support will help me make better games, will help Unity to sell more and have great reputation and in the end everyone wins.
I know it cost money, but i wonder how all the other mayor IT players can manage to provide great support (using email or forums), one could think Unity is in the same monetary position as they are (of coure i’m just guessing).
Well, i’m not posting this as a therapeutic relieve, i really want to know what is Unity doing to improve support, i believe we deserve it, i really want to keep using the great tool, i can understand and bare with bugs, but without support i can’t really use it professionally.
Thanks again.
I don’t think Unity should waste any of their precious resources by be responsible for telling users they are asking dumb questions, thats really not their job at all.
And I really don’t agree that all other major IT players (vague definition) always offer excellent email forum support. Especially when its a complicated application or has a very large number of users. And be careful when talking about ‘professional’ since there are several professional tools that I use where I would have to pay quite a lot of money to get proper professional support, and where users understand that this is normal.
Now I am not trying to say that Unity is perfect, and there have been times where their response (or lack of response) has caused me some concern. In recent times I’ve noticed this with the Asset Store, although I am sure there are other examples where Unity could do better.
So yes, there are times when more timely, clear and detailed communication from Unity would probably be worthwhile for the company, increasing peoples confidence in their product and their organisation. Some of this should not be hard or expensive. The main issue is how to separate this stuff, from peoples wider expectations about support, which as you can probably tell I do not think should be Unity’s responsibility, especially as so many people use the free version or are beginners trying to do things that are beyond their current level of understanding.
There is a balance to be struck somewhere. I certainly don’t think Unitys support and communication is so bad that it costs them a silly number of customers, and in business there is no point trying to please every one of your most demanding customers, because some people are never happy and, although you won’t find many businesses admit to this, some customers are not worth having. But on the other hand there have clearly been, at the very least, some ‘growing pains’ for Unity, and looking ahead to the longer term then if I were Unity I would be looking at trying to make a few changes that improve the balance of all this stuff and make sure that satisfaction and confidence levels do not fall below a certain level or cause big problems down the road.
One communication failure example that springs to mind is that when 3.5 final came out, I didn’t see a list of what had been fixed between that version and the previous public preview. Maybe this changed now, but it seems like an example of a failure that really didn’t need to happen. I don’t know how Unity the company is arranged internally, but I would be happier if there was someone with a highly visible public profile who was seen to be driving this stuff forwards all the time, including looking at a better way of reporting and fixing bugs, evolving the culture of the organisation, and communicating with the masses a lot.
Thanks, but I don’t work for UT and don’t get paid. It’s very rare for moderators on forums to be paid anything, unless they work for the company and it’s part of their job.
–Eric
I feel like I am in the same boat, I am using Unity professionally, someone is paying me to build them something with this software. Im trying, but I keep hitting some tuff hurtles, where I do need some support. I post questions, and i have to say, I have been helped by other users, but sometimes I just can’t get any response. Desperately struggling with these problems is costing my company time (and therefore money). For example, alot of the samples posted by Unity are very old, and simply do not work in the current Unity versions (I don’t care about there age, just that they work). Now i cant say, we can afford the support contract that something like Unreal or Crysis would charge us. That is one of the reasons we chose this engine, because it is a remarkably good deal. But we need support, i would not mind in the least paying an extra $500 per seat if i could just get some more support from Unity staff. I would even go so far as paying for some dedicated support every so often, I dont see a way to do that anymore (there doesn’t seem to be a way to even sign up for premium support anymore). I like this engine, I want to use it.
Just wondered if you’ve actually paid for it? do you have any sort of license you’ve paid for where you think it’s clever to demand things? I have paid for 2 pro licenses and I don’t think I am entitled to any special support from them unless I purchase special support.
You’ll find it’s the same for cryengine, blitz, flash, UDK as well as any other programming language. Not sure what you were expecting in this area of the industry?
I think you’re just expecting something that will not ever materialise for free. You can purchase cutting edge support from unity though if you need it, but you really should not need that unless you are actually working with unity’s engine source code.
The best thing you should do, is hang out on the IRC channel and find a mentor who will be patient enough to answer your questions. There’s some decent folk on the forums too - patience is a virtue.
I don’t want to come across attacking you because everyone is entitled to their own opinion but my opinion is you are misguided to take on paid work for something you are clearly not experienced in.
Have you considered hiring one of the more popular programmers for hire just to teach you? they’re not here just to code. People like NFS3000 would be able to help I think, for $500 quite considerably.
Yes i have indeed paid for it. How much, it’s not the case nor your business.
The scenario is quite different for udk and cryengine, so i don’t think it’s comparable. But for flash? i own a license and the support is excellent. The case is clear: They won’t teach me flash, but when i do have a question that seems to be related to a bug or a misbehaving feature, they answer properly.
I’m not asking for Unity to teach me Unity, for that the forum is an excelent resource.
And BTW i find your post most of the time quite defensive (or even offensive) when the only thing i want is to start a discussion.
If i purchase a license for many industry standard products i indeed get a support contract linked to it (i do know what i’m talking about, i’ve being working in IT for many years). I fact i know the support departments for many companies since i used to be related to them.
Even for Microsoft products like visual studio you get a fantastic support (yes using forums as well).
And i’m being careful when i say it’s difficult to do professional development with no support, whoever think otherwise is not considering all aspects of development (you’ll get stuck eventually).
I agree, but this is not a matter of patience, nothing guarantees you’ll get your answer at all.
If you do the math, according to some post in this thread (i don’t know if this is accurate), you have 2 mods for 700k users. if they combined can answer 1000 questions a day, and each user post a single question… your turn to get your answer is in the next 2 years. So the problem seems to be lack of resources for the Job.
Please we don’t need a flame war on the matter, this is supposed to be constructive.
Regards
Well I think a clear problem with this discussion is that the term support is being used so broadly. There are really two different things that we should try to separate:
There is the support that Unity should provide like any other software producer. This is stuff such as reporting of bugs, tracking the progress of fixing the bugs. And stuff such as listening to user feedback on features and how they should be improved.
Then there is support of users who need help learning how to do things with Unity. Its only Unity’s job to do this to the extent that they should provide enough documentation and training that people can use or want to buy their software. There is more Unity could do on this front, sure, but its not exactly unusual to find software makers that don’t direct enough resources towards this kind of thing enough to please absolutely everyone. Usually this is when 3rd parties can step in and offer their own training stuff. If this has only been done to a certain extent then its either because the people with the knowledge to do so are busy on other things, or don’t feel like such efforts will be rewarded enough financially.
And of course a key problem is that the lines between these two things can get blurred very easily, and with many peoples problems and questions it is not clear to them which scenario applies on any particular occasion. The task of sorting the two into distinct piles is in itself potentially massive, and its a never-ending mission that probably wears on those who could or should be responsible.
A grand vision to ‘democratise’ game development is bound to have its downsides, and one of the reasons I would cut Unity some slack on this front is that they have done so much to further this cause, Im not sure I expect them to do much more than they have already done. They have made some attempts to encourage a wider ecosystem that allow others to provide for the community via things like the asset store, but when they decided to go for the ‘give the basic version away for free’ approach there were bound to be some downsides which they were not able to magically solve themselves. Given the choice, I prefer the way they chose, rather than going for an approach that restricted the potential size of their user base in a way that are far more instant and definite than putting some people off due to support issues.
At the same time it is completely understandable and reasonable that people want to have a lot of confidence in the tools they are using. Confidence and trust are always an important thing, its the real value of things like currencies and trading platforms like ebay, and of many forms of human cooperation. Sometimes its hard to earn and sometimes its easy to lose, and the examples where it all goes wrong always stand out more than when things are ok.
Personally what I rely on as a developer to keep my confidence levels up, is my own willingness to compromise and change course. I know I will get stuck sometimes, and not always be able to find an existing answer or someone willing to provide a new one. So I practice troubleshooting and the art of being able to work around a problem if tacking it head-on is not getting results quickly enough. This is not much comfort if you run into a problem that seems like a Unity bug and theres no clear sign of a solution, or you have to rework half your code or assets or certain ideas just become a complete no-no, but its enough to get me by during frustrating moments, and enough to make me resist the path which tends to leads to a terrible sense of being let down by others.
Well yes and no. There are multiple different models that end up providing lots of resources for support. You might sell a product to institutions in quite high volumes, which generates enough cash reason to spend plenty of effort supporting the customer. You might sell a cheap product in huge mass-market quantities which also generates enough cash to setup a dedicated support team. You might charge a huge premium for your product to the extent that most of what the customer is paying for is the support service around the product more than the product itself. Or you may sell different kinds of support separately.
Off the top of my head those are the cases where a fairly high level of support can be considered a bit of a no-brainer. Well in some ways Unity falls somewhat awkwardly between the gaps. Clearly they have to provide some support, but because its also a pretty hard product to support, Im not surprised if they have not balanced this stuff in a way that delights everybody.
I don’t think we should really throw around numbers too much because we won’t know the realities as well as Unity themselves. But certainly the ‘1000 questions a day’ you mention seems quite far wide of the mark. Just try answering a few questions on the forum yourself and see how much each question can turn into quite the time-consuming adventure.
I’m not intending to start a flame war, but pointing out that it is unrealistic of you to expect what you’re asking for. In 25 years, I’ve not seen what you’re asking for yet in the programming scene. What I have seen, are people willing to go out on a limb to help others. Relying on unity to solve your problems isn’t going to happen unless you pay for it. You can argue you want a constructive discussion until the cows come home, but unfortunately (for you and me) it isn’t going to happen. This, I can 100% guarantee you.
I am not looking for a an argument, just want to stop you wasting your time trying to get somewhere with this angle. The solution to my mind is a good paid support channel, but I know unity staff well enough that they’re already worked to the full as it is. Sorry if I came across as attacking you.
If I sound offensive it is probably the limited medium of text 
I think if anything you could be onto something with paid support “from unity staff” but for that to happen they will need to employ more people - their current staff from what I can see are all tied up.
If I found a bug in Microsoft Word, I might report it to Microsoft, but I wouldn’t expect a personal response, nor a prompt fix. I’d try to use the software’s own bug-reporting feature, if any, rather than post to a web forum. When you use built-in bug reporting features, they’re able to send much more information about the problem, and if it’s done right, the developers can much more easily reproduce the bug. But I still wouldn’t expect a swift resolution. If I’m ultimately unhappy with the stability of the product, the best I can do is ask for a refund, but I’d expect to be turned down. So my only real option would be to find a different word processor and use that.
If I just couldn’t figure out how to do something I wanted to do, I’d read the documentation, search the web, ask a friend, and finally post in forums if I still couldn’t find the answer. I wouldn’t expect a personal response from a Microsoft employee, though given the huge size of their user base I know they do have some provision for this. I know that there are third party companies out there who provide paid support - and training - for products like Microsoft Word, and I’m sure a lot of people benefit from their services. Personally I don’t have enough problems to need them though, so for me it’s not worth the money.
If I was using Word quite comfortably, but couldn’t figure out how to get the idea in my head to blossom into a literary classic, I’d only have myself to blame. I’d either make do with my best effort, or pay a proper writer to write the story for me. This would have absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft.
I’m sorry, but you can’t compare Microsoft Word to a professional game engine.
If bugs or undocumented features prevent you from releasing your game using an engine you’ve invested a considerable amount of time and money into, you will lose money at best, go bankrupt at worst.
You have a problem with Word, you can finish your “literary classic” in notepad. Or on a typewriter.
When I started using Unity, many of the staff had a more active role in these forums. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I chose Unity (support for multiple languages and ability to port to almost everything being the others). Perhaps it was unrealistic to expect that hands on approach to continue as the company grew, but I could certainly understand why someone might be disappointed, at least if they’ve been around since before Unity became free.