Am I a Unity Expert?!

When I updated to 2017.1, I was prompted with a survey asking me my experience level with Unity. I chose Intermediate, because I consider myself a perpetual student. There's tons I don't know (or haven't attempted) like complex procedural mesh generation, effective implementation of multithreading, and shaders (God, the shaders...).

However, the 'helpful' emails I get from Unity now are about basic things like today's example: how to parent objects in the hierarchy.



So maybe I know more than I thought I did! I think I'm promoting myself to expert.

On a serious note, does anyone know how I can change the preferences for marketing/tips emails to receive content more appropriate to my skill level? I would still like to get them, just... not the total beginner ones.

 

I think if you publish something at 1.0 you've done more than the majority and qualify as an expert.

 

Some of the other questions had nowhere near enough alternative answers either - what if I'm a part-time Unity developer, or Unity stuff is a minor part of my main business? Need more granular choices, or multiple choice!

I just switch off the mailing lists. They're never what I'm looking for. I've received 800+ messages through July so far, over 600 of them being from various stores I've used, and I don't shop THAT many places. It's crazy how spammy they are. Unity Tech. e-mails just drown in the ocean of offers and news.

 

Agreed. I didn't want to switch them off, as my hope is that there will be useful emails at some point. But I guess if I haven't gotten anything to this point, why assume there will be...

Related, any idea which category these "helpful tip" emails fall under?

 

None of them, as far as I can tell. Even though I unsubscribed from all of them I still periodically get Baby's First Unity Project emails.

 

I have to admit, this made me laugh out loud.

 

I laughed too. I've only been at this a few months now and after the first few sent out the emails were stuff I already knew.

 

yeah i had to make a new Unity account a while back and started getting emails from it, and i got the Baby's first Unity Project emails as well. Kinda funny since i been using it in a professional capacity since 4.2

 

In the context of Unity, check out the Learn section and see where you line up with what they're calling things. There, "Intermediate" is stuff like inheritance, polymorphism, namespaces and delegates. If nothing listed under "intermediate" seems new or challenging to you, then you're already above that by their own terminology.

 

It makes me slightly sad to think that knowing basic language features puts you above an intermediate level in UT's eyes. But then again the whole Learn site is targeted at novices as far as I can tell, so maybe we should consider that a sub category of novice (beginning novice, intermediate novice, etc)

 

Well, I certainly wouldn't call someone an expert programmer just because they understand the contents of those tutorials, but it could well be enough to make them an expert specifically in the context of a scripting language in a game engine, which is really all Unity cares about.

 

I also have started receiving these introductory emails. Here's an email I received today:

A key area of the Unity interface is the Hierarchy Window, which is tied to the Scene View. When you click on a GameObject in the Hierarchy Window, it becomes active in the Scene View!

Really? This is something that someone would figure out the 1st day of using the editor.

 

Oof, thankfully I haven't gotten anything that bad, but today I DID just get "Mini Project - Making a 2D catch Game", which is something I could knock out in a couple hours if I cared to.

 

Unfortunately the certification system also seems to reflect this. Currently a Unity certified developer just has to know what's in the Learn section.

 

I don't get any of those emails (not complaining).
I do however get the blog updates sent to my email which I think is very informative and useful.

 

That's not one of the checkboxes, is it? I'd actually like to see those!

 

I also have started getting these super beginner targeted emails, which I'm (a little) disappointed about. Surely Unity has metrics on its users, how long they've been a registered user and how often they've logged in... simple check against that would indicate maybe not send the beginner welcome emails.

 

I have never once marked an e-mail from Unity as spam. But, it seems that Yahoo has automatically started flagging these e-mails as spam. The last e-mail I received went to the spam folder and also has images that Yahoo has blocked.
Yahoo email has also blocked the Unity logo in the email. Interesting.

 

A lot of email service providers do this based on other users reporting emails from a particular domain as well. So if enough Yahoo email users are marking their "Year 5: The Inspector Panel" emails, Yahoo can (and seemingly, has) mark future, similar emails as spam.

Source: I worked for a marketing agency that was constantly getting flagged for spamming because the person sending the emails created new lists each time, ignoring unsubscribe requests, and my boss's answer was to purchase more domains we could email from.

 

Sorry Schneider - no, I subscribed via blogtrotter. Someone on here pointed me to this and I get Unity blog and several other updates via email. - kickin it Old School!

 

To unsubscribe from these beginner/onboarding emails, click the "unsubscribe from these emails" link at the bottom of one of them. You can't change/update your experience level at this time, but the team working on this is aware of feedback and it sounds like they're working on improvements.

 

My advice is never call yourself a computer expert. Otherwise you'll just get people trying to make you fix their computers.

 

I get asked to do this - and I rarely do anything with hardware.
Just performing work ON a computer is enough for people to think you are a computer 'expert'!