I’d like to see forums where by you can only post if you are a legit user of unity Pro.
Kind of like putting in your activation serial to be able to access the forum and shows you are a legal owner of the product.
Good Idea? Bad Idea?
HiggyB mentioned that the idea has been batted around. The forum could be viewed by anyone. But posts would be just from paying customer. (Including those that paid for Indie)
Since there’s already a category for pretty much everything, I’m not sure what the forum would be full of. Maybe things that just focus on the Pro features? Like Profiler questions? But what about paying Indie customers?
I think we’re all here so we could help each other out. Pro or non-Pro.
I’m not against the idea of a Pro forum. I’m just not sure what its purpose would be.
I’d much rather see a Pro section of the website where the Unity guys give paying customers little goodies before everyone else gets them. Maybe some free shaders and such.
Nothing says FU like a pro only section after the indie fiasco. :roll:
Indie fiasco?
:lol:
Oh, the drama.
This sounds to me to be fair. Also, my proposal (in the wish list forum) here: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=35896
Kinda agree, there would then be a whole bunch of spam posts on the indie forums about “WTF is with the pro only”. I can see the flame wars now. And there would be barely any help for all those newbs. It would be better if indie users that help a lot and give good things can also post.
I understand the reluctance of segregating the forums between “paid” and “free” users, except for these two arguments:
a. Why should paying customers only receive the same level of support as non-paying customers?
b. Since UT’s income depends solely on the sales of Pro, then Pro customers are in essence now paying for the free support that free customers receive.
As a paying customer, I feel we should get a higher level of support (ie. more UT employee assistance, access to more tools) than those who haven’t paid a cent for the product.
I only own Indie personally, but it seems entirely reasonable to have a higher level of support for people who own Pro. Certainly, when 3.0 is released and if it has free and pro versions, it would be wholly reasonable to have pro-only sections of the forums which the support staff review more carefully.
That last part of the idea is lame. I paid for Indie, but you can’t pay for it anymore. Why should I get better support than someone who would be willing and able to pay the old price for Indie? Should that person just make a donation to UT for support rights?
Anyway, I’m for the idea of better support for more money. I think that the way that should work is something like, if you pay more money, you get to create threads in a certain forum, and it’s the job of higher-level UT employees to spend some time looking over those forums often, responding as much and helpfully as possible. One of the things that really attracted me to Unity in the first place was the awesome way that the big names at UT were always around here. Doesn’t happen anymore, and it makes me sad. 
However, I voted No! on this thread, because Unity iPhone Basic is still an expensive product to me, and I own a license for it, and the wording of this thread title doesn’t suggest to me the idea that I proposed. (I think anyone should be able to post in the forum, but only big spenders could start threads.)
What extra tools are you talking about? The ones that come with Pro vs. Free like
Render to texture
Full Screen post
Real time shadows
Profiler
External version control (My personal favorite)
C++/Objective C plugins support
Script access to asset pipeline
No splash screen (A close personal second)
etc…
As for support, this is a forum, knowledge from the community and the company. I would prefer to have everyone’s comments, even some of the dumber members of the community (Not saying that there are any dumb members, but hey.) And, maybe I haven’t looked hard enough, but from my lurking I haven’t been bombarded with threads complaining about UT not answering questions in a timely manner.
I am not trying to be negative, but past UT building my games for me, I feel that this is a pretty good support system.
@coreyb - I understand what you’re saying, and I can see both sides of this argument, but the fact of the matter is that the -only- type of support available to Unity developers is this forum, and so my point is that if I’ve paid $1,500 for a product, shouldn’t I get something more (in the area of support) than someone who hasn’t paid anything? After all, doesn’t UT owe their paying customers some level of support?
I think you haven’t looked hard enough. 
Actually, UT staff very rarely answer questions. I’d venture to guess that 80% or more of the threads on the forums have been answered by users, and probably paying users at that. This wasn’t the case 2 or 3 years ago, where just about every thread had some input from someone at UT.
What I’m saying is that the user base has grown exponentially and is likely to continue to do so. UT has limited resources that they can use to assist customers, so they have to prioritize who gets what support. I feel that as a paying customer I should get a higher level of that support than someone who hasn’t paid. As for indies, perhaps offer the same level of support for $X per year, and those who have paid $200 for Indy already, grandfather them into that support for the first year.
I’m just making a suggestion, not a demand. I agree that users helping users is a great way for a community to grow. The blenderartists.org forum that supports Blender is a great example IMHO. But that’s open source and everyone that participates in that forum is at the same level when it comes to what the software cost them. But for a commercial product, I feel it should be different.
Alternatively, perhaps the ‘pro’ user is actually someone who’s had more than 100 (or whatever) posts 
While this seems good for customers, I think it would undermine Unity Tech’s purpose for making Unity free.
Not really…there’s support@unity3d.com, plus submitting bug reports sometimes ends up in a dialog with UT employees.
–Eric
Although I’ve heard that if you email support@unity3d.com with a question about something like particle effects or rigidbody properties (or something along those lines), you are told to use the forum to get your question answered.
Well, that seems reasonable…there’s probably no sense using resources to answer the simpler questions, which can usually be answered by reading the docs anyway.
–Eric
I’ve voted for no.
Unity’s strength is the single community actually. Half the things that exist wouldn’t exist with a Pro user only board.
Also there is actually a thing that makes this completely impossible and thats the Pro Trial, during which time the trialing parties would have to have access to the board too …
What though could make sense is a “Pro User” wiki / resource area, but that would require that pro users get an account etc, doubt the effort really works out as the Unify Community wiki works well too.
WTF?
I mean, I paid for Unity, when there was something to pay for, but now thay UT makes it free you want to cut me off from forums? That clearly goes against UT’s “every customer is the same” policy (dunno if that has changed).
I am all for a forum section where people can discuss the features of pro (like how to make shadows and such) but I dont really see a point in restricting usage of it. Since why would indie users care for a such forum?
What about those who paid for Indie?
This forum is far to noisy and crowdy to be really effective. It might help implementing a better Forumsoftware and better servers, because in the current incarnation almost everything sucks:
- Search only each 20secs - WTF
- haveing type AND etc. that’s NOT state of the art
- the board is so SLOOOOOOWWWW !!!
- far to less user configurable
etc …
i could live with the current status - if only unity would implement an up-to-date board software
(see cgsociety for example…)
How about requiring forum users to have completed at least two tutorials, and be familiar with the docs? There could be a test upon signup, which would ask some basic questions that all unity users would be required to know before they can post anything, for at least some of the categories (excluding things like gossip and collaboration). You’d still be able to read everything without this, of course. That should cut down significantly on the RTFM questions, of which there seem to be a lot lately. (I used to read 100% of the forum, now it’s more like 5%.)
–Eric