I’ve been working with Unity for the last 2-3 years and from time to time I have questions that seem to be in the category “someone must have had this issue before” but which finally don’t get any answer solving the issue on hand.
Personally, the most recent questions are about batching and Unity Editor GUI. A bit longer ago it was about Mecanim and asset bundles, performance, editor bugs, etc. NONE of the questions have been answered in a satisfactory way. For some, Unity stated to have found the problem, but they haven’t yet deployed (performance problems with HUGE amounts of objects, Mecanim and asset bundles).
I can understand that the forum can not answer all the questions, but not so long ago, there were qualified Unity company members who actually handled those questions and gave qualified answers. But even those seem to have disappeared and forum members try more or less help each others the best way they can. Since most of the users seem to target the mobile market, their knowledge about issues that may arise if only the PC/Mac market is targeted, is sparse.
Unity, in the last year and a half, seem to have turned from a community friendly company to a money making machine, producing a new Unity version now and then containing half-finished features which take another 6 months to a year to get fixed and made usable (if they get fixed). There is no open communication about the bugs in Unity, no communication when the next patch will be delivered, no clear communication what is currently being fixed and what will be the content of the next release.
I’d like to push Unity to review some of their politics in order to improve the communication with their community so that we all KNOW what is coming up, what is going to be fixed, etc. And I would like to push them to a stronger commitment to the community by providing actual help and supervision in the forums.
So, I suggest that the first step is to see what is your impression of the current state of the forum and the satisfaction you get from it.
One of the things we try to do is comb through the forums and forward problems onto devs for them to answer, while they may not have time to read the forums as much as those dedicated to monitoring the community site, they do get round to answering. That said we recognise that more of this could happen, so if anyone has a problem and googling, YouTubing, posting on here or Answers really has not solved the issue then don’t be afraid to PM me the thread and I can throw it at someone relevant. But with the community growing it is more likely that threads can get buried and Unity’s voice does not appear to be as loud as it used to be.
We always have and still are doing everything to listen to the community and take your views into account when making development/business decisions. I know it may be frustrating that you don’t get feedback on what we are doing exactly, even though we have confirmed that we are listening to you. But the fact is, due to the nature of development and not wanting to disappoint everyone when we don’t deliver fix “X” at time “B”, we cannot always confirm fixes/features and release dates in advance. The development team have been working hard to improve development schedules and release fixes a lot faster.
Things can be improved on the interaction front and not just from the familiar usernames, we can’t always see everything though, so again, adding on to our combing of the forums for issues, if anyone has a problem and searching, YouTubing, tweeting, carrier pigeon, posting on here or Answers really has not solved the issue then you can PM me.
I feel your pain Metron, I too have had no luck getting any questions answered around here. All but one of my issues received zero replies (except from myself). I dont think its really the fault of the Unity moderators however. Without wanting to sound insulting to anyone, the real problem is that the forums are continually over-saturated with noobs posting the same old basic questions and who aren’t themselves able to contribute towards answering more advanced queries and issues. The massive noob traffic results in questions from more experienced users getting buried before other experienced users can see them.
This problem only seems to get worse with time since Unity attracts more and more noobs all the time, the majority of whom dont end up becoming experienced users before giving up. On the opposite end, experienced users get more disillusioned with the forums since they rarely get back a fraction of what they put in and hence stop visiting as often or at all. As a result the forum population seems to get more and more skewed towards the noob end of the spectrum, ie: people who ask a lot of questions but aren’t able to answer them.
In my opinion this is happening because there is no barrier to entry for Unity and so everyone thinks to give it a go if they’re genuinely serious about learning and sticking it through or not, and these people tend to give up just as easily. If Unity went back to charging a couple hundred pounds or so for the basic edition of Unity I think you’d also see an increase in the quality of the community and support. Alternatively providing a private forum for pro users might also help solve the problem.
I’m with you Metron. I’ve lost count of the amount of problems I’ve had that I can’t get a decent answer either here or on Answers. I don’t consider myself a noob anymore as I’ve been using Unity full time for 2 years now with 3 commercial games on 2 platforms now so feel I mostly know what I’m doing, BUT
occasionally I get stumped by something that holds me right up and there seems nowhere to get the answer. I’ve taken to emailing support now, but the last answer I got from them was basically “you can’t do that without writing a native plugin” Which was great but took too long to get that reply, meanwhile I wasted days trying to get Unity to do something that it almost seemed like it could, but Unity hadn’t implemented the full feature set of something.
I agree with Nullstar, there are so many noobs on here (no offence I was one) that serious developers with a problem get missed. I think we need some kind of VIP place to ask questions with some guarantee of decent answers that fix the problem. I’m a Pro user and feel very un supported on here for the money I spent. Why can’t buying Pro get you VIP access? surely that would help out?
That’s been asked for basically for the last 4 years, and it usually causes an uproar. Pro users feel piled in with the rest, and feel like they are getting shafted for not getting enhanced support when they really need it. While non-Pro owners feel like they will be left out of some special information if there is a Pro only section.
The only way a Pro Section would work is if it was viewable by all (to allow non-Pro users see all the information), reply-able by all (to allow non-Pro users to take part in discussions), all comments and replies to be self-moderated by the OP (to prevent thread hijacking by non-Pro and Pro owners alike), and to limit starting threads to only Pro licensees.
I don’t care. If I could buy a license giving the fact that I my income is much lower than the income in Germany, UK, US, Canada, Australia and so on, I really don’t care about free users who can buy it but wont because they spend the money elsewhere.
I would like to see that UT values the paying customers over the crowd of free users with this public recognition of their status. But then again, if they create the section of PRO users then, there is no excuse not to get more involved in replying to customers. That means dedicated staff to read and answer.
Being a Free user does not necessarily make you a noob, additionally this would be the same as us charging for use of the community site which is something we would never do. Maybe something less hostile like a beginner forum should be discussed.
I’ve wanted to make a “beginner’s section” for years, but it has always seemed a slippery slope… finding your thread moved to the beginner/noob section could be seen as an insult.
But this stuff has been discussed to death before and is only one of the topics raised by the OP.
Why do you consider a PRO forum being a hostile approach towards free users of Unity? The fact that they cannot post in there should be perceived as a reality of life. And also as a incentive/reward when they are going to buy unity.
Of course all free users aren’t noobs, but the point is that pro users are far more likely to be dedicated and serious developers who gain experience. Therefore a pro-only area will contain a much healthier and helpful community. At the end of the day any development software can only ever be as good as the support available since all the advanced features in the world are meaningless if you cant use them. Dont paying customers deserve to get the most out of what they’ve purchased?
PS - dont think this is a bias opinion, I am myself a free user. Knowing I could get support when I needed it however would go a long way to convincing me to go pro when the need arises as opposed to considering alternatives to Unity for fear of getting stuck during development and not being able to progress any further or loosing large amounts of time due to the current support situation.
Also you’d still always have the standard free forums as they exist today, only the pro section would be read only for non-pro users, so you’re not forcing anyone to pay for the community site. You’d just be providing additional support for pro customers, in the same way Unity provides additional features for pro customers.
Then they needed a reality check. Basic questions are basic, and they need to be in the right section. I answer noob questions when I know the answer, and moving them to a different sub-forum wouldn’t change that. Most people don’t answer questions to earn any street cred or anything. They do it because they want to help others.
In addition, people will have a clue about what level of answer the person is looking for, when it’s usually unclear now. Sometimes people ask what appears to be a basic question, but they actually have a very complex situation. Being in the advanced forum would be a clue not to give them the basic answer, saving the answerer a lot of time.
Separating the questions into basic and advanced can only help that process, not hurt it.
I agree. I am Pro, but it wouldn’t have bothered me that there was a place people can only post topics if they have Pro, especially if everyone can reply. It would be irritating if I could read but not reply, though.
The problem is who decides what is basic and what is advanced? For example, if it was up to me 50-75% of what is in Support/Scripting right now would be pushed to a beginner section. And probably a lot of those people would feel insulted that their question just got bumped to the Unity kiddie corner.
I doubt this would be the case. Once these questions are shoved off into a corner it would most likely be that more advanced users would ignore the section completely and the beginners would be left with the blind leading the blind.
If everyone could reply then it would defeat the purpose though as the signal to noise ratio would quickly return to where it is now. And I don’t like the idea of the OP being able to moderate his own thread or admins like myself having to keep the First Class section of the forum cleaner for our Pro users either
It’s very difficult to create a Pro section that cuts down on the noise but doesn’t feel like it’s keeping people out… and that’s why we’ve never done it.
Division of the forum, is it really the solution? Then how do you judge where to put your question?
With another contributor we started a few months ago a website to summarize some of the recurrent questions from Unity Answers. It happens to be that we have a lot of hit per day but the two of us are busy and the website is barely updated when we find the time.
We hoped some others would join in to contribute but in vain.
Unity is somehow victim of its success. Being accessible and free, you get all kind of people with few or no knowledge and obviously they will ask for help on question that have been answered many times because they are just not yet able to understand the answer when they see it.
Now dividing the Answers in subsection, there is already two websites (Answers and Forum) and see already how many questions on the Answers are told to be asked on the forum and in the meanwhile the forum is filled with technical questions.
And even on the forum, one question can get redirected for being asked on the wrong section.
Adding more section will not do anything good in my opinion.
The only solution would be to have some 24/7 professional Unity contributors. But I doubt the investors will agree on paying for such a team.
Not in my experience. Aside from Aras I can’t remember a single time a dev has answered one of my more unanswered tech questions.
Eventually I just email support. (which does answer).
