Check for changes. Is it designed to ruin user experience?

Hi.

Something in my scene caused unity to crash. No big deal, I'll just restart it to find through trial and error what I did wrong. Except there is check for changes and no way to avoid it.

I tried disconnecting from internet. Nothing, so I had to kill unity to restart it, yes, kill it, because that's the only way to close it during check for changes. That's how it is for us professional, we have to deal with a user interface that offers zero option. Apple products look open and free compared to check for changes moronic design.

Anyway, I restart Unity, offline this time, thinking I'll just turn off collaborate so I get to work without being bullied by an egocentric software that don't understand somethings can wait. But no, if you're offline, you can't access the service window where you can turn off collaborate. If you're thinking that this is the stupidest design ever, just wait, because it's actually even worse and vicious that that...

So, I had to resign, get back online and goes through a check for changes just so I could turn off collaborate and get back to work. As planned, Unity crashed again while pinpointing the cause of the bug, I restarted it naively thinking this time, collaborate is off, I'm free and can do my j... and I get check for changes anyway... again... despite my best efforts... It's like a curse except, curses aren't real.

But, let's have an open mind here, maybe Unity crashed before it saved my settings, so I wait for check for changes to be done, again, go to the service window and... well it's off already... Why did it check for changes then? nobody knows...

Now, at that point, I know what caused the crash, and the next time I restarted unity, I didn't have to go through check for changes. It might have registered my settings by but it doesn't change the fact that I spent way more time waiting for check for changes than doing actual work. That's unacceptable.

@Unity, I contacted you last week about the numerous issues I have with collaborate. Most of them are made worse than they are by check for changes forcing itself into the user experience. I asked you to give us a way to cancel/postpone it so we could work. Your answer was that you plan to remove the need for check for changes by collaborate 1.4. We are only on 1.2 and this post is an example of why your users cannot wait.

We need a confirmation window on check for changes and it has to be done now.

And I insist on the now. This is how I make a living, I have important deadline to meet and right now, I'm late because you are preventing me to work on the software you are billing me for. Do you understand what it means?

 

Come back Visual Source Safe all is forgiven!

 

We are in the same position, but have decided to cancel teams as this should not be a paid service in this state.

 

On one hand I like the idea of getting services out there so people can start testing them so you can make the right improvements. On the other hand for something like version control it's really not something you can tolerate having bugs and problems with. There's a thin line between convenience-auto-magic and why-do-I-have-no-control-over-this-thing.

Collab is mostly functional for just backing up your stuff but it's not offering enough to compete with standard VC solutions. If you have to depend on it heavily you might just consider using a different solution.