Cleaned up the off topic stuff. Thread bans will be handed out if it persists.
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Iām very curious what ideas Unity has for helping developers build up their communities. Community building tools? Best practices guide? An entire game community platform? Could be interesting what, if anything, comes out of this.
Building communities, and getting people even aware of your game, is a common topic for indie devs, and not something a more code focused individual is necessarily very good at. Iāve noticed different personality types gravitate to becoming a code monkey than those who gravitate towards community building. Could be useful stuff.
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Frankly, I donāt want a Unity developed community building platform because if thereās one thing Unity does not seem to understand at a corporate level, itās community building. I wouldnāt trust a company that has left its user base with things such as:
- completely replacing the forum software in such a way that made them useless as both archival resources and communication tools
- leaving community hubs like Unity Answers to totally languish
- deleting the Feedback section entirely without any sort of archive
- just completely awful communication historically
- replacing the job forums with Unity Connect, a service so awful to use that this decision had to be undone
And this doesnāt even begin to address the other issue of Unity stretching itself incredibly thin, offering passable at best versions of services that other companies already offer. This horizontal integration stuff is an absolute disaster and, were I to want to use community services, I would simply hire a community manager instead.
Because thatās their job.
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Actually, I agree.
We had unity connect. So a unity-made community building tool will be another unity connect.
So it would be best if unity didnāt work on this kind of tool and made something else instead.
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I only assume Unity wants some data for marketing purposes, and selling these somehow to higher tier customers, like if they know what they talking about.
That is why, I am also very sceptical about purpose of such survey.
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On the other hand, Unity buys more crap than the average fertilizer company
Ehh, Unity has seemed to have done good so far with building the community on this forum.
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You mean the same forums I covered in the first point?
Plus itās not like Unity has ever really directed anyone to the forums aside from blog posts linking to very specific threads. Hosting a forum on a high traffic site is some of the lowest tier community stuff you can even do. Thatās like saying Autodesk does good community building with their forums, when the simple reality of it is that they donāt really do anything either.
The way I see it, Unity is learning, and they just announced in this thread that they are willing and want to learn about it. I donāt see the problem with that.
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Iām talking about the forum weāre using right now. We both find value in being here for some reason. The discussion is good, the information is helpful, the members generally well behaved. The community Unity has built up is arguably the best in the games industry. They canāt be screwing up everything.
Community building doesnāt necessarily mean heavy handed directing of the community either. The right choice may be to provide the tools and the space, and let the community run with it. If it isnāt working, make a change, if it is working, leave it be. If you make a mistake, like the forum software swap, try to correct it.
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I have had dramatically better experiences on non-Unity dev forums, such as various subreddits and tigsource. Tigsource is a great example because theyāre yet another bunch of people who do active community management. Iāll break it down. Hereās what you see when you land on the tigsource forums:
The first think you see is the community landing subform, Townhall. This is basically the tigsource equivalent to General Discussion. Next up, you have the WIP subforum. These are two simple things that dramatically change the way a community works. Iāll bring up the Unity forums next:
The first thing weāve got are Announcements. This isā¦ bad? And kinda ridiculous? Announcements should be a subforum of General Discussion (as should Meta-Forum Discussions, if Iām being real) because thereās not a lot of reason for an announcements forum to have top priority in the listings.
Next is Getting Started. I think this is actually a great place for that! In fact, I think a better place for it would be the first listing. The second listing should be General Discussion, because thatās going to be the general community landing. Immediately you present two things in doing this: you have created an immediate spot, first on the list, for new people to post inquiries; with General Discussion being the next one, youāve fostered a sense that there is a community, instead of burying it all the way at the ass-end of nowhere.
Back to tigsource. Notice how high up their WIP forum is compared to Unityās? If you want to foster a sense of community, another great thing to do is make it so that interaction with other members isnāt buried entirely. This is a game engine, yeah? We should probably have a higher priority showing what people are working on. Also, instead of tags, Asset Store WIP threads should get their own forum, or maybe a subforum of the Asset Store forum. Or, since a not insignificant amount of WIP assets are also on the asset store, maybe have a WIP tag in the Asset Store forum. Thereās a dramatic difference between āgame developer community looking at each otherās gamesā and "game developer community looking at each otherās tools."
Back to Unity. Letās take a look at the next offender, Teaching and Certification. I single this out as a big offender because of this:
If I scroll down so that only the labels at the top of the Community Learning forum are on display, I can only see three unpinned threads (you may be able to see four, I have my tab bar at the bottom of the screen and it changes the real estate a bit). This is kinda messed up! Thatās not a forum, thatās an LCD billboard. This is like the General Discussion issue from a couple years back where there were over a dozen pinned threads here. Some of these things shouldnāt be pinned at all and some of them should probably be archived somewhere. I donāt think anyone would lose any sleep if there was an Archived Threads (threads, not forums) forum for this sort of thing.
Okay, back to tigsource again. We can ignore Audio and Art because those two things are far more general than Unity as a forum should be. Theyāre not about technical implementations, theyāre about the creative aspect. Itās important to note that tigsource is a generalist forum when it comes to gamedev, after all. Playtesting and Design could probably be merged into a Design forum and a Playtesting subforum. Right now the closest thing to playtesting is Feedback Friday in the Game Design forum, and that has to be directly run by community members.
If Game Design wasnāt totally buried, this may be less of an issue, but another couple things that might be nice is if there was any sort of Unity presence there and if there was a clear delineation between game design and game architecture. I swear, every time I go there I see something like how to paint a texture or what kind of architecture to use and these are more vague technical questions. Questions about vague technical things that donāt fall into Scripting, etc. should probably go somewhere like General Discussion or Getting Started.
And speaking of the Scripting forum, why is it halfway down the forum listings? Itās the most common way people will be engaging with Unity on a technical level outside of the Editor itself. This shit? This is all part of community building and management. Layout is more important than you can imagine because there is no justifiable reason for the forums to provide the level of friction they do when it comes to actual community interaction, and only slightly more justifiable reason for places like the Game Design forums and other less technical forums to have such a lacking presence from Unity.
Yeah, Iām not done. Back to tigsource because I want to talk about another one of their forums thatās great for community: Jams & Events. Now, should Unity be hosting game jams? Yeah, actually, that might be a pretty good thing! When I was an active member on gamedev.net a million billion years ago, before engines like Unity were even a thing, game jams were seasonal events, often having things like prizes people would actually want. New GPUs sometimes, software licenses, various books back when books were a thing, gift certificates, that sort of thing.
And you know what? Those jam threads were usually some of the most active on the forums because loads of people were getting involved. They usually lasted two weeks to a month, ran four times a year max, and brought out everyone. On top of that, another way to build a sense of community would be to allow people on the forums to promote their own jams, just like they do there. On top of that, tigsource also allows for user event posts, which can range from offline meetups to just, well, other forms of social stuff and general light competition.
What Unity does is not just take an exceptionally passive role with the community and it doesnāt work. If it did work, weād see things like a lot more community growth instead of stuff like āuser registers, makes two posts, leaves.ā These forums are treated as a means to an end by Unity, which is one of many reasons I donāt really think they have any business in ābuilding up safe and healthy game communities.ā
Damn, sure would be weird if I literally never said the thing youāre implying here.
Yes, I need something to do while my projects import and/or build or while Iām on the toilet.
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To play devilās advocate, General Discussion is often a location for lazy support thread posts, which are more appropriate in a one of the support forums dedicated to the topic. Placing General Discussion below them probably helps some threads end up in the correct forum. That may have been intentional.
I misunderstood the below line as implying Unity should be more active in running the forum and community, rather than standoffish. My apologies.
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The forum is pretty much dead outside of general though 
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I donāt know, cause Editor and Scripting are pretty busy forums. 
Thereās always something going on in scripting, yeah. Hell, most of the time when Iāve had to post threads there, Iāve gotten answers in likeā¦ a couple hours, tops? I canāt remember the last time I had a thread go more than half a day without a response
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This is simply not true. I marked read all the topics two days ago, I think I didnāt have a single one without bold this morning (I read a couple since then). Maybe there are some subforums which are dead, but not those which I visit frequently, thatās for sure.
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Just reading a post without integrating with it is kinda dead right? the bold text only indicates you have read it.
But yeah itās sub forum related general is alive and some others too. Physics is dead atleast if you have bigger problems than moving a rigid body lighting too.
Shader sub forum is hit or miss but the times there is a hit this guys hanging there do have valuable input.