Overall quality of Unity today?

Am I the only one who thinks that the overall quality and user experience of Unity is becoming worse and worse compared to the 2.x and 3.x times just a few years ago?

I am really tired of wasting full days because something got broken with some update. It would not be that bad if they would improve the engine, but they add more and more (for me) useless features instead of finalizing their product to something of really professional quality. The user experience reminds me of that of a cheap low quality china gadget today.

Today for the first time in more than 8 years I really thought about ditching Unity, not because of other products but because of Unity itself. For a moment the freedom and the overhead of doing it from the scratch started to sound better than the convenience of Unity. The positive emotional bonus they've once had is gone.

 

Posts like that pop up from time to time, and occasionally devolve into flamewars which gets nuked.
I had very negative experience with 5.2.x versions myself (switched project away to UE4 because of them).

Writing your own engine today is close to suicide, though, despite the problems.

If you're not happy with state of unity it makes sense to study few competing products and evaluate their strong/weak points. Then, for each project, decide which engine will be the best fit.

 

I mean, if you're being honest, that's kind of a BS statement, right?

Sure, there's new bugs being introduced all the time, but I refuse to believe this is causing more work and headaches than writing your own engine from scratch would be.

 

This is the crux of your problem. Back in the 2 and 3.x days there were less Unity users, and as such a more narrow focus on what features were necessary. There are tons more users today, and the needs of those users vary greatly. This leads to those features needed by the others being worked on or completed, and you feel left out because they don't have any affect on you.

I'm not saying Unity is perfect, no company is, but no body knows what features you want more than you do. Not only that, only you (or other users who need X feature) will prioritize that above all else, so making your own engine sounds better, because you can focus on what you need, but in practice it can be a huge pain.

 

It's very compartmentalized, if you don't need certain features then don't use them. It's not like they're jumping out and punching you in the face while you're trying to work.

 

What's wrong with ditching an engine if it no longer satisfies your needs? I know you haven't stated anything along these lines but I feel like some of these threads are approaching Unity as if it is the only engine worth considering.

 

No. That's exactly what I've thought. And it is not more or less bullshit than what UT did 11 years ago. It's not rocket science. I need to support only 2 platforms (Mac & iOS) and I don't really use any features of Unity that weren't already available 6 years ago.

 

Thinking about merging this topic since everyone's done the whole lets moan at unity for 5x thing a lot.

But in the spirit of the thread (which I don't think is lock worthy but merge worthy, as feedback is feedback) I think that logically there must be less bugs over time. Yes it got worse, but that's because 5 is so different to 4 and a lot of work needed doing. I understand it even if I'm not happy with it.

Ditching Unity? I evaluated UE4 and it's a fine engine but I don't think the grass is greener, so my choices would be based on if it's right for a project, not based on if it's got more or less bugs (it is also riddled with bugs or issues, seemingly every major engine is). Difference is you KNOW Unity's bugs but you don't know UE4's bugs. Or stingray. Not that anyone talks about poor little stingray.

 

The problem with writing your own engine is not that it is "difficult", but that it is very time consuming. Starting from scratch means you'll be hitting problems that are already fixed in competing products, so you need a real good reason to justify that kind of decision. You'll also need quality programming team.

There are few edge cases where you could get away with rolling your own game engine. Typically those cases involve either 2d or very simple games. Building something on top of, say, Qt framework would work too, but that'll be very different compared to working with unity.

 

Given you only have 2 platforms, if it's 2D then by all means, roll your own engine, especially if you're old school and don't really use Unity's editor.

 

It has nothing to do with Unity 5. The wrong course started already with things like the surface shaders. I don't think the grass is greener in other game engines, actually I think they are all worse.

Who said engine? I'm working since 7 years almost 24/7 on the same game now and it is still not finished – I have time till I die.

 

Could you elaborate more specifically on a few points you have raised?; to help us to understand exactly what you have issues with:

- How has the user experience gotten worse since 2.x and 3.x?
- How has the overall quality gotten worse since 2.x and 3.x?
- What would you deem as a 'useless feature'?
- What similarities, would you say, that Unity has with low quality Chinese gadgets?
- What type of content have you created with Unity?
- What type of content do you want to create with Unity?

 

It's an engine, not a spouse. If you don't like it, use what you like, instead. There's no expectation of you to remain committed to it. There's no reason for you to try and 'fix' it. Heavy on the emotions and light on technical specifics, by the way.

(As Voldemort) Do I detect... troll?

 

Work around 8 hours with Unity each day. Works most of the time.

 

Whaaaa? What's wrong with Surface shaders? I mean sure, if you have very specific needs you can/should write your own shaders, but in general I thought surface shaders were quite... uh... convenient. no?

 

Aren't specific needs the main reason why you want to write a shader? Reasons why I avoid surface shaders:

– mobile performance – it is almost impossible to optimize a surface shader by hand.
– convenience and control (actually it is usually much harder to change something quickly)
– synoptic view (you have the choice between seeing almost nothing or the generated code mess)
– bugs … first time in years that I need a surface shader (not for my own use and not because of its function but just because of the shader type) and what happens? It costs me a full day to find a workaround for the simplest task one could imagine (the hours of frustration about this bug were the final reason why I started this thread): http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/st...ambient-occlusion-based-on-2nd-uv-set.382094/

- How has the user experience gotten worse since 2.x and 3.x? - How has the overall quality gotten worse since 2.x and 3.x?
Clearly the community forums since the invasion of windows and free users – it was just a great place before.
An incredible amount of tiny bugs, some are even hard to reproduce. Really serious bugs should get fixed faster. For example total showstoppers like the current bug in the particle system (.Play() is working only once for some particles).

The manual, do you know that you even have some dead links? Recently someone with the same problem replied to a posting of me about an issues with the manual. I think my original post was several years old.

The public image and the reliability of the company, actually I would say no one outside of it has a real idea what the plan of Unity is. Except making everything free. The company gets larger and it feels more and more like an iron curtain is growing between the users and the company. Have you ever used the autodesk support? This is an example of the worst experience I can imagine: friendly but insubstantial. And it feels like Unity is slowly heading into the same direction.

The pricing. I started with indie and later iphone indie, you’ve made indie free, then you’ve made iOS free, then I’ve got pro, you’ve made pro free, now I shall pay for what? A custom splash screen? I want to pay, because I want to use Unity. But if you ask me to pay $150 a month for a splash screen then you are nuts. That all feels like „we don’t want your stinking tiny money unless you give us a tons of it“ which also translates to „who are you? who cares?“

- What similarities, would you say, that Unity has with low quality Chinese gadgets?
reliability - it does not help if you offer new fancy features without fixing the old ones first. In my opinion bug fixing is ten times more important than new features and an ambitious roadmap. A cheap china phone also offers lots of features. Don't offer new features unless the basic stuff isn't working perfectly.

- What would you deem as a 'useless feature'?

Useless features (for me):
NavMeshes and Path-Finding, Fog (I always write my own fog in shaders), LOD (needs to fit for my specific needs), Surface Shaders (usually totally useless), 2D Physics and anything related to 2D, WebGL. Ads, Cloud Build, Everplay, Analytics, Performance Reporting, MonoDevelop (Is that from Unity? I prefer a text editor)

Unity solution does not fit to my needs even if I would love to use them: Dynamic Batching (on mobile devices in most cases it makes performance worse just because it is turned on), Terrains, Enlighten Real Time Global Illumination (I use my custom system which has less general features but a much better mobile performance and gives me full control). Even the particle system has some general drawbacks for me (I always need an input to offset the global reference coordinates which is not identical to „local“).

- What type of content have you created with Unity?
mobile 3D games and applications.

- What type of content do you want to create with Unity?
I’m working on a serious submarine simulation since 7 years.

- What would be a useful feature?
No one asked that but if I would answer something like: tiny things like garbage free strings (the solution I've used stopped working since IL2CPP) – but features like that are not good for the advertising

 

I agreed until you got to there. Fog works fine, always has. Navmesh is great, many people use it. GI/Enlighten is also a feature many people use. People use 2D, people use the Ads, people use the Cloud, people use Monodevelop. You sound like you mostly need another engine as you've named all of the important features.

 

Navmesh needs some serious improvement. There's no way to specify multiple meshes for differently sized objects, and interface for interacting with it is very awkward. This thing wants to drive actor, when it is often better idea to just know in which direction you need to start going to get to waypoint.

The whole GI/Enlighten is way too slow to be practical. Unless you have monster machine, of course...

 

I look at it like this, unity does a fantastic job of exactly what I need it to do - and that is be a renderer, physics engine, and scripting frontend for me to get down and dirty with.

I assume the responsibility of dealing with bugs and problems if I decide to use more "fancy" stuff that is included, for instance the new UI (although it has been a real lifesaver, very stable) or the networking (rough so far for me...) and if I do not wish to use those particular features because of the glitches or bugs that may exist or be introduced, and instead write my own solution or purchase on the asset store, then that is fine, and I can get around problems that way. That doesn't mean it isn't still a badass renderer and physics engine! I guess what I am saying is if it's broke, don't use it till they fix it, and rely on what you did before that new feature was added.

 

You saw the important part of the text?:

I have no doubt that those features ARE important for some people. And different features are not that important for others.

 

This is also what I want. But bugs are affecting me even if I don't use the fancy stuff. I can't imagine how many bugys might be in the features that I don't use.

 

I guess I have been lucky enough to avoid most deal-breaker bugs, and seem to be able to go all willy nilly with my scripts and don't seem to ever break unity (at least without it being my own fault ). Whenever I hit a wall, I almost always am able to find a fix through either research here on the forums, or through testing different possible solutions on my own. Knocks on wood.

 

Things like releasing Unity versions ( ie. 5.3.1p4 ) that creates completely broken android builds.
even an empty scene crashes now on my phone. weirdly it sometimes run about a 1 second and but always crash now.
Same kind of version was back with the Unity 4, all iOS builds crash on start. Our appstore update was moved 3 weeks bceause of this because we were lucky to get into the review immediately the same day. Then we noticed that it just carshes on 90% devices. Pulled back the review and made a build with older unity 4 , resubmit and then queued for the review 2 weeks.

 

These two are legitimate complaints. I don't know serious games that use the built in navmesh. There are just too many restrictions and certain features that just perform horribly (obstacles).

GI/Enlighten takes serious work to get it looking as good as some other engines have out of the box. I think they just flat made the wrong decision here. The idea behind it probably sounded really good, but in practice it's a real dog and will be many months before it's anywhere close to the competition.

 

yes GI/Enlighten has it's faults but it's getting better with time.

I don't think Enlighten was a bad idea. I'm not using it in my current project I consider making my game fun is more important than GI.

I don't consider any of those features (services) useless. Maybe useless for your current project but not for others.

Navigation and terrain does suck though.

Anyhow I'm sorry to hear you're having this sort of stress on your current project. I know the feeling well.
I hope you find a solution or a work around to your problems.

Good luck

 

Last time I checked Navmesh was useless for procedurally generated content, as are many other things like lightbaking and precomuted realtime GI. Out of the box most image post fx are also far behind the solutions available on the assetstore. But that's fine. I'm using AstarPP, Scion, SSAO Pro and ColorfulFX instead. Those are rocksolid and well supported and compared to what other engines cost this is still a very affordable solution. To me having PBR surface shaders and deferred rendering is really important. Older Unity versions just looked... very old to me. Since I currently use so few of the things that unity offers it is pretty stable for me. In my experience it crashes less often than blender, which I already consider a rather stable program. And when unity crashes so far it has not been a big deal for me because most work is edited and saved in Mono anyway. Except from an issue where I sometimes can't copy/paste code, Mono also works fine for me. I'm sure there are people less lucky than me, but my experience isn't bad at all. I haven't been around for long though, so I didn't get to witness the "good old days" before 5.x.

 

I don't feel that its a negative aspect that more users in the community, using a tool, is bad. At Unity, we aim for our game development tools to be as available and accessible to as many people as possible; hence why we supported Windows and released a free version of the engine. Can you imagine what our feedback would be if we didn't release a Windows version of Unity.

Tiny bugs that are hard to reproduce is a bit strange. Again, any specific examples? Have you bug reported them? Its better that they are on our system than not at all; that way our devs can take a look at them.

Really serious bugs are being fixed faster; we have a Sustained Engineering team who aims to ship a patch release of bug fixes every single week! Again, what would be a serious bug to you that isn't fixed at this current point? Have you bug reported it?

Link them to me here and ill send them to the Docs team.

I disagree. We put on 8~ huge Unite events every year outlining what we are working on and what our plan is (Often Live Streaming the Keynote and uploading the videos of ALL talks after the conference is over). You should check out the videos from Unity Boston from the end of last year! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX2vGYjWbI0QlUHOFHu7D5I3RYfhy5hIp


Adding to that; we have dedicated Evangelists, Field Engineers, Developer Relations, Community Managers etc etc who talk to the community and let them know what we are working on. Yes, Unity is getting larger as we are doing and working on more things but we are still as approachable as we have always been. What would you like to know?

Well, we did offer a refund to those that paid for 5 Pro + Add Ons if they where eligible for Personal; so you had the option to get your money back. Also, if you look at this page: http://unity3d.com/get-unity you can see that Pro gets you much more than just a Custom Splashscreen! And we clearly DO care about all of our users and those that use either Personal or Pro!

I completely agree! We have a Sustained Engineering for fixing various things with the engine and releasing patches for irritating bugs. And myself and other community members have interacted this desire internally to many many people.

Comments in line.

Links to your work? Im also surprised that you work on mobile games but don't find Cloud Build a useful feature; have you tried it out yet?

You've been working on the same project for 7 years? Or different submarine simulations?

Submit it to our Feedback Page!

https://feedback.unity3d.com/

 

If you check out our public roadmap; you can see that we are working on new Nav Mesh workflow and baking API; currently aimed for 5.5 in June. Itll let you do bake nav meshes for procedurally generated content.

https://unity3d.com/unity/roadmap

 

Andy, I think most people are unhappy that things that were working fine before suddenly break with each release.
Can you explain me why this is happening?
Are you rewriting the core features to allow new features to come to light?
If that's the case shouldn't you have 2 branch maintained and supported in parallel?
And I'm not talking internally but publicly. Why not have a super stable build and another experimental release for people who want to use the new features?
Until few months ago we had it with Unity 4 and Unity 5, but now there is only Unity 5.
You shouldn't have a main release which change existing features code deeply without being 100% sure it's at least free of major bugs.
For example in Unity 5.3 there are several bugs that appear only on the mobile builds where object not rotate properly and it's taking some time to fix, meaning there has been a major overhaul in some core part of the code.

Or there is a new "feature" that all android devices declaring to support audio fast path now default to it, breaking sound on devices which not actually support it but declare it.
I have been reading this fast path have been asked for several years, but always stayed unreleased cause it was known to cause issue with some devices.
Now that you finally release it, you don't allow devs to disable it in anyway until a proper solution is found on Unity side and the official statement is that it's the device maker fault to properly follow guidelines.
Would it be to much to expect that new version are at least on par with old one? Inserting a checkbox to disable a feature is a thing of 1' and you can take all the time you want to think of proper solutions to the issue.

 

Awesome! That's good to hear, I'm sure many people will benefit from it. Thanks for working on this!
I wonder though, does it offer anything that would incline someone that already has a working and stable solution to make a switch? E.g. can it do something that systems like AStarPP currently can not do? Something like this without the limitation that this experiment (which isn't even released yet as far as I know) has would be impressive:

 

I think a lot of people would be less interested in conferences and events and more interested in quickly available condensed information without nonsense... and of course, in product that doesn't break.

Current version of unity roadmap looks like "that feature you want will be finished when hell freezes over". Since the NavMesh feature is aimed for 5.5 in june, then I'd expect it to be either never completed or finished somewhere in 2017 or 2018.

And speaking of public image, outside of marketing stuff there's perceived quality of the product. Not sure if the situation changed now, but when you were transitioning to 5.2.x there was definite impression that with each iteration engine becomes worse and programming team keeps breaking stuff.

Also, there was quite a lot of noise aroud beginning of january in general forums. Can't locate the thread now, though... but this one is quite similar: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wh...afts-you-what-do-you-tell-your-client.379919/

 

I give Unity 3.5 Stars out of 5 on quality, 4 out of 5 star on features, and 5 out of 5 stars on customer service.

 

I'd like to chime in here if i may , unity is a great engine , its free to an extent and works great(most of the time) i've found that since the release of unity 5 though that the quality has dropped considerably , now i know that unity is undergoing some serious backend changes but i don't think that paying customers should have to deal with the current state of the engine .

See you could argue well if you dont like it go back to unity 4 ,well unity 4 was rubbish no offense but its graphics were super lame and the thing is people upgraded to unity 5 because of the great new physically based lighting and GI which are needed features to have a semi AAA quality game , and after they purchased unity 5 they were presented with bugs , so unity promised to fix them in the new patch ( 5.1 ) , then they added a whole bunch of features which broke everything and so they promised a fix in the new update , and so the cycle goes on , I say fix all the bugs in the current version make it stable , then start on the adding features again , so pro users can have a stable unity 5 to use without those game stopper bugs in them , I mean you dont even have to fix all the bugs just the basics like the unet errors that spam the console for no reason , particle system( which were fine before ) , water pro spamming errors and many more editor crashes for no reason etc, then once its working and not freezing like now in unity 5.3.1p3 then carry on with all the new features you want .

Just my opinion , these complaints were never around when i was using unity 4 so clearly something is wrong here .

Added:
Note that my experience with unity 5 has been terrible , unet especially was a pain , i feel theres not much freedom in unet , why is it authoritative ? seriously if i want to do things my way , let me do it , why constrain me with your silly authoritative server . Anyway unity 5 has a number of issues performance is one of the crucial ones which has been talked about many times before , unity 5.3 went downhill fast what used to be 30 fps went to 5 fps as soon as i upgraded , funny thing is in the unity release notes they stated that performance got a dramatic boost in this version , i imagine they must have ran that on a beast of a computer or something , GI baking is slower now thanks to the need to have a reflection probe (which is invisible ) always in scene , and which looks like crap thanks to everything looking like metal despite not using metal ?
Yeah i'd say the op is wrong in some but right in alot of things he says , But I'm just a free user so cant really complain cause its free , but i feel for the pro users and get angry that they have to deal with the engine in its current state.

 

This is a "nice to have" feature that makes me happy, if it actually gets finished on time. The 2D additions I expect to be rather puny at first, so I'll stick to other solutions for tile maps until they mature. But I expect them to surpass the 3rd party solutions eventually.

I have a number of issues with the engine, but few if any showstoppers. It's mostly quirks and little annoyances that magically get fixed fairly rapidly. But I want to focus on bitch and moaning about what I consider the greatest flaw: The input system.

The roadmap STILL doesn't have even a vague attempt at a release date, and this has been a terribly weak point for Unity for many years. It has literally turned people away from Unity in the 4.x days. How has this been such a disaster for so many years? It literally looks like the input settings menu for one specific game were left in by accident, due to everybody drooling over mobile development and forgetting about desktops. I'm sick of seeing people ask about advanced input configuration, and instantly seeing a pile-up of asset mongers fobbing their solutions.

Input really needs more serious attention.

 

You seem to forget that Unity 5 braught a lot to the table :
-Enlighten
- PBR
- Nvidia Physix 3
- new 2D tools and physics
- a ROADMAP
- More releases per year

And many other things i don't have listed.
You look like someone that don't need incoming features and that is stocked with simple and old tech, so you seem lost with all new Unity features and coming new ones as you don't need them

I don't say it is not good, but it is like you only need very few features of Unity and not all the new ones that came within last years.

 

It could be any number of reasons. Implementing new features causes potential for new issues to the engine. Similarly, as the user base is millions more than the 2.x/3.x days there are arguably alot more people using Unity in lots of completely various different ways; thus potentially finding more edge cases or issues. But we do have a Sustained Engineering team for releasing regular patch release for any ship-stopper bugs that do get through our QA process.

 

Which is why we do already condense the information down into blog posts, emails, tweets, facebook updates, forum posts, videos etc. Is there anything we are missing that we should add?

Well, all features on the roadmap have estimated release dates; such is the nature of software development. Although, we do try our best to aim to let users know well in advance when they may or may not be landing into a public release!

Yes, the stability of 5.2 first release wasn't.... the best. Same with 5.3 initial release. However, I am hearing alot of positivity about how alot of issues that were blocking various users have been fixed in patches (such as 5.3.1p4)!

 

I've been playing around with an early build of it and its really alot of fun to use! It'll make alot of people who had issues with current NavMesh system much happier.

Oh, they aren't puny! And we have a really active 2D Team aiming to make them even better!

We have a team working on Input; but no specific information on it yet. But you can bet that when things are more 'developed', that we will be blogging/videoing/talking about it and what it can do!

 

I'm a flatlander, so that's encouraging

Whip them harder!

 

Social network-related stuff is just publicity, I'd be more interested in technical information.

Well, for a start, it would be nice to have all video tutorials transcribed into text form. Dealing with video tutorials - when I had to - was very unpleasant, because this kind of information is not indexed by search engine.

I remember reporting multiple bugs and I've never gotten any updates on any of them.

I also remember severe lack of documentation regarding internals of standard-shader related files. (Apparently nobody knows the right way to access reflection probe from custom shader)

Ideally I would want all technical engine-related information available through search engine as 1st hit. Another problem is that someone who reports a bug will get definite impression that nobody ever looks at that bug. That's something you guys would want to fix.

Then there are long-standing issues like this one:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/when-is-mixed-mode-lighting-going-to-be-fixed.332250/

 

Featuring the new Unity 2D game : The quest to find Mr Prefabs

 

This one for example – a real showstopper. Wasn’t fixed until patch 3.2.1p1 came out today – kind of crazy that this is not fixed in todays official 5.3.2 release a few hours before:

• (756971) - Particles: Fixed issue where particle system is stopped and cleared and after that it won't play when simulation space is set to local.
• (756194) - Particles: Fixed: particle system only playing once.

A while ago Unity released a calculated number about how much money developers saved because of the asset store. You should do the same math with bugs.

I try to report bugs, but only when I can always reproduce them and when they can be reported without losing too much time. It does not help to report bugs when they don’t get fixed because they can’t be reproduced.

Ahem … You don’t really think that I have bookmarks of the errors of the Unity docs don’t you?

Apple does the same. Currently the tvOS tech talks in several Cities for example. They have regional partnership managers for developers who actually frequently have meetings with developers etc. But who would call Apple a kind of “open“ company because of this?

The problem is that Unity is too large today. I was lucky and was at that nice tiny user meeting with David Helgason and just 10-15 other people with lots of beer in the Berlin office 2 years ago. But nevertheless Unity was already too large that day. You can’t handle the masses. The reason is the free version. It is obvious that Unity decided that growth at any cost is their business plan. You call it „democratizing an Industry“ but wouldn’t be something like “Imperialsim“ a much better term for it? Grow to collect money, grow to survive, grow to get more control above the sector of the Industry, grow because the competitors also try to. At the end you will be: large …WOOHOO!

Even search engines can’t handle the masses anymore – It makes everything much harder, like searching forums or Q&A for solutions – the information is naturally hidden by all the “n00b spam“ (sorry for that term). During the last years the only really useful forum left (in my opinion) was the shader forums but today this one also almost became unusable. There were less than 2500 forum users when I registered, the forum really was extremely useful in these old days, you can’t compare that to today. There is a reason why something like the Unity tvOS beta was not open to anyone: it would not have been useful.

No, no, I want to pay. You’ve made a great product which has some problems today, but it is still a great product. But your way to monetize Unity seems to be bad for your users (except those who just want it free). Simple logic tells you that this might end bad.

What happened to the pro only forum features which Unity announced and advertised last year?

No and I will not try it. I’ve looked at the advertisings but I’m really not the target audience for such a service.

The same project. I have to do the work of a full team, from historical research and technology of the boat over heavy physics to the usual Unity and artwork stuff while trying to keep the waters of a growing waiting community calm.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/wolves-of-the-atlantic/

Same problem: I think too many people use it today, and it is obvious that most of them have very different needs compared to what I want. Unity today has a community where things like PlayMaker became successful – the workflow of people who want to use such solutions is somewhat different from my mine. And fact that Unity is free means you have lots of opinions of beginners and even children on the feedback pages.

But thanks for supporting arrays in shaders with 5.4! – I still can’t believe this finally happens after all those years. (something I think I really voted for)

 

You can just avoid the forums if you feel that the majority of people are not as professionnal as you, some indies just never get into the forums because they are too buzy making and promoting their game.

 

I'd love to know your reasons for the impression that bringing free users into the fold is overly affecting their ability to develop the engine. Having the same engine, minus two very minor differences, between both Unity Free and Pro users means they aren't having to maintain two different branches of each release.

Assistance for Unity Free users is largely being handled by other members of the community with occasional intervention on behalf of a few staff members. If anything most of the assistance being provided to Unity Free users are actually other Free users like @BoredMormon (only member I'm completely positive is a Unity Free user ).

About the only thing that may serve to slow down development is the quantity of bug reports that are not legitimate bug reports but from some of the threads I am seeing those reports with problems are not solely produced by Free users.

 

Bringing free users in has actually sped up the bug fixing process because it makes them much better at separating the chaff from the wheat. There is no doubt Unity 5.x is much better than 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, or 4.x even when you have the Pro version of those prior versions.

Contrary to what some think, all free users aren't complete programming novices, a large number of them are experienced programmers and with Unity 5 that number has increased.

 

That’s not the point. The quote was about the feedback website. I’ve mentioned beginners because beginners usually more often demand beginner features – hence a flood of beginners affects the feedback artificially. Artificially because they quickly advance or leave the platform because they give up or want to do something different.

The forum is about making games with Unity. It is an interactive resource additional to the manual.

I never said that.

The correct sentence would be: Assistance for Unity free and Unity Pro Users users is largely being handled by other members of the community with occasional intervention on behalf of a few staff members.

When you scroll up you read that I've said the user experience is getting worse. Later, when someone asked why, I've mentioned the forums as one of the different reasons for that. That's all. It was better and now it is worse. Plain simple.

 

Just for the record: I never said bug fixing is affected by free users. And I never said pro users are more “pro“. But it is clear, that a free Unity also attracts people who take the whole thing less serious and more people who just give it a try, come into the forums asking "hey, do I really need to write code?" - naturally the number of those people would be much lower with a price as barrier. Even a Dollar a month would help.

 

I'm definitely free, for now. There is that pesky revenue cap that's approaching fast.

The reverse is also true. Just because someone can pay for pro, doesn't mean they know how to use it. That problem is largely irrelevant now, with free features in 5. But the 4.x it was quite common to see people that expected to be good just because they had spent money.

 

I was one of the people nagging unity for a win version back when the team was tiny and mac

 

While I may not have been around back then I did have a small sample of it from Linux users.