Bring back e-mail to communicate directly with Unity team

Hi to everyone,

I think my title is clear enough. I checked the internet and found that in the past, direct communication WAS possible. Bear in mind that I do not know what e-mail address was used but I'm certainly not referring to bugs@unity3d.com. Does anyone know what the e-mail address was? I am confident that the suggestion to bring it back would benefit everyone. I hope more people support this by liking this.

 

For non-technical issues, you can submit a request to Unity Customer Service:

https://support.unity.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042006231-How-can-I-contact-Unity-

For technical issues, you can either submit a bug report, or ask for help in this forum.

 

I really do not support this, the userbase is way too big now to have a direct email. There would be 1000s of emails daily and there would be such a massive backlog and waiting time that it would cease to be useful.

They do not need more of their time taken up by random user requests and filtering through lots of nonsense emails.

 

It wouldn't be any different with any other method, though. A lot of users - a lot of requests.

Not providing a contact email, however, does not exactly create a positive impression.

 

Yes, but that was a completely different era for both game development and Unity. Today there are simply too many active users to make an email address available for direct technical support even if every developer were willing to only use it after exhausting every other available option.

Which of course would never happen. It would be abused by people who had problems that are easily solved with a basic search or in an all too often case just by looking at the first page of threads in the subsection, and that's not even counting people who couldn't see the "Learning" link at the top of nearly every page when asking specifically for learning resources.

 

Today is easier to send email, than search forum, or create new forum account, to ask questions.
I can only imagine, these all "new" user keep sending emails, instead.
That despite rather questionable quality of many post / threads this days.

 

Thank you. I have bookmarked this website.

 

How do you know these? Are you a Unity staff? Or are all these your opinions?

 

What positive impression are you expecting?

 

We got nearly 2021. Yet following post is from 2016.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-game-programmers-use-Unity?share=1
But you can judge by shear volume of registered developers in millions from then to now.
Getting only fraction % of that number, still gives you huge number of potentially active developers, which may be interested e-mailing.

 

1 - Even if Unity team changes e-mail to the website, everyone can still send feedback to them. This isn't impossible.

2 - Your link only shows the theory possibility of how many unimportant e-mails can be sent. I don't want to sound discourteous or unfriendly but whilst this helps me understand the problem better, it certainly does not answer my question.

Perhaps I wasn't very clear when I elaborated myself to ask for support. Let me rephrase it again : I'm asking if the Unity team actually mentioned directly / indirectly that they have difficulty handling the volume of e-mails that they received. The only information I have now is that the e-mail has just been replaced by the website which I can use. If you and others don't know, just say you do not know. That's all I wish to know. In conclusion, even if no one knows, I can continue by sending feedback using the website I was given.

 

You can still directly email Unity and Unity engineers... you just have to pay for the privilege. ($0,000 - $00,000 per year)

https://unity.com/success-plans

"Working with us gives you direct access to the engineers who help build Unity and know the source code inside out."

No, you are being very clear... you're just failing to understand the self-evident fact that if Unity allowed anyone and everyone to email them directly they would be inundated with useless requests/questions from people too lazy to do a simple google search.

You're asking for evidence that water is wet.

Unity do provide a way for you to contact them directly but, as you can imagine, unless you are a large studio with a fair amount of money to burn then they don't really care.

You can't expect free access to Unity engineers who are potentially on $100k or more per year. Their time is valuable and if you want to take up their time you need to pay for it.

 

An informed opinion thanks to having been a member of this community for eight years, a Unity developer for about ten years, and a programmer for twenty-five years. Email addresses work to a point but once you step beyond that point it's no longer a viable way to provide support for a community.

Speaking of which this situation isn't restricted to Unity. We've been focused solely on them because this is a Unity community but the competition handles communication in the exact same manner.

Unreal provides a support page that points you towards their forum, answers, and documentation while mentioning that you can get direct support but that it is a "premium".

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/support

CryTek provides mailing addresses and email addresses but makes it clear that these are not technical support but simply for basic inquiries for organizations looking to learn about the company and their services and not asking for support.

https://www.crytek.com/contact

Amazon Lumberyard is basically identical to Unreal Engine minus the premium support option.

https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/support/

If providing direct email support were a truly beneficial option one of these companies would have done it.

 

Your email inquiries would be ignored even more than they are on the forums. Instead of categories, moderators, and other users potentially answering questions your questions would fall into a singular inbox along with hundreds of NullReferenceException questions, keto supplement spam, and who knows else what kind of random crap weird people come up with.

 

I'm just wondering how to communicate directly with your team WITHOUT using this forum. The simple issue is sometimes people / individuals just want some privacy. If I want to ask you something, I don't always feel it's necessary for virtually everyone to see what I'm asking. So now that I've gotten your attention, my question is: If I were to send you feedback, do you reply the feedback personally to the e-mail or in the forum? I see that I need to insert my e-mail so I expect that a personal reply would be given but I'm wondering if it might be inserted in the forum so others are aware of what is approved or can / cannot be done. You can consider this my first question as I have not used the feedback channel yet.

 

Just get Unity Premium Support, then you can have discussions with Unity staff directly:
https://unity3d.com/learn/premium-support

I used this in the past, but never felt it's worth the money though.

 

Consider this...

Imagine you run a business. You have a website with a community forum, social media presence, and multiple channels in order to start a discussion or make an enquiry (customer service tickets).

All of this is free to access and you specifically employ people to manage this stuff because you have a customer base of 10,000 +

Along comes someone who doesn't want to use the forum (for whatever reason) and isn't happy with any of the other options you provide either (and presumably doesn't want to pay for premium/enterprise support).

They want your day-to-day business email address so they can directly ask you questions, submit feedback, or just ask how you are doing. They want to be able to directly email contact@your-company.com and have Bob from your QA team, or Jimmy from the UI design team reply.

But you want Bob and Jimmy to do the job you pay them for... not answer questions all day. Now imagine it's a question neither can answer.

Well, now you need JimBob from the Engineering team to get involved... but he is not sure what the resolution is so needs to involve Sarah (one of the members of the Compiler team).

These people are probably being paid a collective sum of $200,000 or more and they're all spending precious work time trying to answer questions from anyone who feels like reaching out.

I hope you now see how unreasonable your request is from the perspective of a business.

Even if you have enterprise support it's not like you get unfettered access to engineers. There is usually a triage/escalation process because these people's time is extremely valuable.

You don't want the team responsible for working on core ECS architecture answering emails as 1st support (even if it's about ECS).

 

Simply put, you can't. Without paying for some sort of premium support.

Look, having an email address is nice for convenience, I get it. But with an email address you'd still go through the usual tiers of tech support, where your request would only be escalated to a higher level if that is absolutely necesarry.

Asking for a direct line to the developers is asking too much.

 

OK, I understand your point. So can you or anyone tell me this then: Who should be giving feedback to the website I was given earlier? I mean https://support.unity.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042006231-How-can-I-contact-Unity-. Would that mean only some high level developers as in someone with premium support OR someone who perhaps want to subscribe to premium then? I'm just wondering - I'm not trying to argue further and insist on using it. As Ryiah stated - the situation has changed as too many people are available. In the meantime, I will decide when to post my request for help. I cannot give any estimated timeframe as I'm currently working on issues not related to Unity. With this situation, I might not even need to visit this forum for awhile. I expect to open a new thread for help at least a few weeks from now if I finish working on my current issues or need a short rest. Other than this, I might only be back in a few months time. So please continue with other threads.

 

Whatever I want to post are general questions for my own improvement. They aren't urgent. As my recent reply stated, I'll be back maybe next year. I will perhaps quote your codename if I can find you.

 

If you have more questions for improvement etc, I recommend you first complete https://learn.unity.com/course/create-with-code

Most people never complete that 36hr course, yet it answers most questions people have in the first 2 years of development. Please give that a go, also if you wanted to ask unity things you could join the live sessions that they do, where you will be able to directly interact with unity engineers.

You can also reach out to the evangelists, they are always willing to help in some way or point you to what will help

 

Which means the posts you want to make to them are likely going to waste their time. Direct communication exists to solve problems. If you want to improve as a developer create a post on the forums like everyone else and ask for recommendations. You won't be mocked if that's what you're worried about.

My recommendation? Watch Unite videos. These are talks made largely by Unity staff that are directed towards people wanting to learn more about the game engine. Just as an example below is a talk that focuses most of its time on optimizing Unity's UI which is grossly unoptimized under the hood.

Plus, and this is one of the more important reasons for a public facing forum, a response tailored to your situation doesn't mean it won't benefit anyone else. I learned Unity development at a time when we had very few learning resources. Almost everything I know is thanks to these forums and the docs.

 

What do you mean? For any inquiry you raise a ticket and they get back to you. Eventually.

You're overthinking it. It is a public forum, and you can ask questions here wherever you want. You'll receive responses from other people using unity most of hte time, and occasionally a developer may wander in. For example, discussing mecanim might draw attention of mecanim developers, and so on. Just ask wherever you want.

However, unity team aren't people you want to talk to ...

if you're asking question "for your own improvement". As you'll be pretty much asking them to tutor you. That's completely wrong level.
Unity team would be people that spent years on the engine, and in many cases - on one subsystem of the engine. They're folks you want to contact if you run into a highly specific problem in some of the subsystems. And not for general improvement advice.

For general improvement advice, use the forums and read the documentation.

 

I have no comments but I did get lots of comprehensive tutorials from other websites and they did a good job. I don't want to put too much comments and risk turning this into some kind of argument. Your sentence "Most people never complete that 36hr course, yet it answers most questions people have in the first 2 years of development." already give me the impression that you consider me and most people the lazy type who would send questions without searching. I assure you I'm not the lazy type. That's all I'm going to say.

 

ok thank you. Perhaps your reply saved me from looking stupid. As the other reply stated, if others post in forum, why can't I use this. I'll post my question soon. Hope someone knows.

 

It's not about other mocking me or anything. I've checked lots of threads in Unity forums in the past - the general help, and there are cases where NO ONE knows anything. So I'm hoping that sending unity team the feedback will get something more - some kind of guarantee. It's just my hope & opinion - of course I can't prove this. I won't know if I'm right or wrong - until this thread seems to say they won't bother.

 

Stop making assumptions. I was sending that link because most people never complete it, not because I think you are lazy.

So, did you do the full tutorial or not?

 

@Unity-Student0 you really overthink things. To be honest, up to now, it seems you really look for any possible excuse, to avoid asking questions on the forum.

Do tutorial, read docs, or search for topics that you are interested / curious about.
And of course practice. A lot.

If can not find the answers, simply ask on the forum. People are keen to answer question, if these are structured in decent manner. You got both Unity engineers and developers of wide range of skills and professions. You are getting potentially much more, than just over email.
Sometimes you get extensive responses with many details. Other times you get references, or just keywords. These are still good, to keep going and searching things. Or you get pointers, to where questions have been answered.

But if you avoid asking, you will essentially makes yourself into turtle speed, or even put into halt, while stuck with a problem.

 

I've started. I did check the learn unity section earlier but all were short and disconnected. This will probably be the longest in history. A big thank you. I hope this solves my problem.

 

If it does not, come back to the forums posting asking about the specific problem you are having in the relevant section. You will get great answers and thats how most of us solved our problems while learning the engine. I run my own company using unity now and I still use the forums for resolving issues

Good luck and enjoy!

 

Yes. Thank you for the link. However since you run your own company, it would be useful if you could share if you asked the unity team any complex questions. That's all I'm going to say. I should be back in at least 1-2 months if not earlier because it would take me time to check if any of the tutorials can be applied to the difficulty I already posted in the help section.

 

I'm not overthinking. I'm just wonder WHAT is the next action of the person when s/he finds out that no one in the forum can help / know the answer. Perhaps you haven't experienced this before that's why you don't believe. In my case, I just move on to other different tutorials because what I'm doing just does not require an urgent solution so I'm lucky in this aspect.

 

I have had questions before that no one has been able to answer and have just done what I assume other people did in that situation and either hacked around them, or just dumped that feature entirely.

There is no guarantee that even anyone at Unity could help you (depending on your problem), and you might find yourself in this situation anyway even if you had a direct line of communication.

 

I can assure you, I have some question that are left unanswered. But mostly, because are very specific for a problem that I am dealing with.
I either wait for an answer a bit longer, bum the problem, ask question differently, or I dig much deeper for a solution. And of course lot of brainstorming.

You see, you are at very early stage of your dev journey with Unity. But that is good thing, because there are tons of resources, which most are in reach of your hand. Tons of questions asked and answered already. You just need to improve search skills and you will find answers to most of your own. You are not unique in that sense. Everyone been there.

I remember when I was starting my own journey, I was trying "hide" even small code snippets, worrying someone may "steal it". Not to mention, it was very crap and no one else would want to use it anyway. But that was unnecessarily hindering a way, to ask questions. I can only assume, many have / had similar experience.

Another good thing is, you are finding tutorials for your questions you are seeking. You just need to be make sure, you use same Unity version and packages, as per tutorials. In my case, I wont find tutorials anymore to most of my problems, as they are too specialized. Saying that, there are tons of resources of various kind, which I can use as a reference point.


However, there is a major flow with per e-mail, or even per PM discussions. You hide problem from the world. That means, another person may be asking very same, or similar question. And repeating process many times over. Wery taxing for any dev team, specially when questions are very basics. Most people probably don't even participate in the forum, as they can find answers they need, just by searching.

Now, if you respect dev team time, you will understand, that asking question on the forum will benefit not only yourself, but anyone else in future. Further more, you are able to find questions of your interest as well. Sharing common knowledge. Otherwise, no one would be here on the forum. Information would be most likely scattered all over the internet.

Another good thing about asking publicly is, that multiple people can share thoughts. Meaning, you may have more than one solution on the table. From simple, to complex. From classic to modern and novel, to ridiculous. And any of them may be valid.

 

Yes I understand your point perfectly and I will not be posting questions to them personally. I can agree with what you are saying but I'm saying what could have happened if I was stubborn. I won't be (a stubborn person.)

 

What you say may or may not be true. But here's what I have to say : Based on my experience, the bug report team has always been respectful and friendly. I can confidently say that if I decide to be stubborn and send a message directly to the Unity team, the team will know how to sort the information out, which team to send to and how to improve. For your record, the bug team - as in Unity QA team, has given me useful explanations which even the Unity tutorials do not provide. So don't assume negative things just because you had bad experience. My experience was good and I'm sure that if feedback is given from my stubborn nature to send directly, even out of normal practice, they will pay attention. However, out of respect for the busy team, I won't do that unless it's some high level difficulty which no one can solve. That's all I have to say.

Did you try sending your problem as a bug report? Was it a bug or perhaps an old unity version where the feature was not available? Maybe you can try again with new versions if you feel hardworking.

 

I'm not assuming anything negative, I can't work out what you mean here. Core engineers from a large software company aren't going to personally teach me to use some feature of Unity, I would think that would be par for the course.

I send bug reports all the time. My reports are actual, reproducible bugs though. QA are generally pretty good at getting back.

 

Let me state myself clearly: I have sent both bug reports and reports telling them something in some unity version was badly designed. They have always replied in a friendly and respectful way to both cases. What I'm saying is instead of sending a direct message to the unity team using the feedback page, I can always try writing a simple app, send it to them as bug / bad design and they will reply. Although the unity team didn't teach you anything useful, they DID teach me lots of useful things. However, since the training materials does exist, I have no reason to send the team anything or to argue with you that I just sent them a bug report as it's not relevant for the moment.

If you can't solve your problem, I just suggest you open a new thread with new request features and test your luck to see if anyone else supports it.