Swords and Shovel Pluralsight - I regreat!

So the other day I decided to buy this course. Well he was promising and the price was ok. First of all let me say how the sections of the course and every lessons inside their site is just a mess. You have to find by yourself your path because is not very clear which one is lesson 1 lesson 2 etc. etc. but that's not the biggest deal. While you trying to follow the tutorial you will have file missing and you can't follow along. And if you have the files some have different names. Well it's actually impossibile to follow along. Plus it's made on a older version of unity so most of what he does with scripts doesn't work at same way today. This means the course is not updated. But the worst thing is the support. I asked help and in the title was pretty clear "Problems with swords and shovel tutorials" and inside the mail they tell me "can you please tell us the title of the class you are attending?". This is just F***ing ridicolous. I delete immediatly my subscription and now I want my money back from them and they told me "you bought trough your unity account so talk with them". That's it. Not even one "we are sorry". This is the kind of company is PluralSight. Be aware of that.

 

That was your first test and you failed.

I'd recommend giving it more persistence. That was the easiest and most user friendly help you'll find anywhere.

If it still proves too meddlesome for you, the only thing easier is to go to a school. But many of those are scams and they cost big time money. So the best thing is to take your time, work through problems slowly, and don't be afraid to bring questions here and the local experts will help you out. Just make sure you are calm and can provide as much detailed information as possible.

It's just like Dark Souls. The hardest part is the beginning.

 

If you learn through tutorials, always follow the tutorial with the same version of Unity. It's the second lesson. The first what @BIGTIMEMASTER said: patience.

 

I've been saying paid courses are a waste of time for a while. Glad to see it confirmed.

 

I have to echo this sentiment, I have never found a course that taught you better than you can teach yourself from the many (and I really do mean many) free resources out there.

Given that most of the best unity tutors have patreon accounts, you can still help fund them if you enjoy the material, just its a lot less "pay up front for unknown usefulness".

 

I definitely agree that patience is important, but I make a point of not blaming my users if they have trouble navigating my stuff.

Considering that it's beginner material, I also wouldn't expect people to know to use a specific version. That's obvious to us because we already know this stuff.

That's actually quite normal. It's a huge amount of effort to update the whole thing to reflect current versions every time something changes, which would stop or slow making new content. Most of the time it doesn't change the principles of what's being taught, so it makes sense to just do bulk overhauls when necessary, and just tell people what specific version to use in between.

That's not just for courses - the same thing applies to large organisations using software as well. Rather than change processes, re-train people and so on for minor changes, it's common to upgrade in big chunks.

 

I think you completely missed the point. If I pay for some material I can find easily fro free online you have to be sure everything is perfect. Otherwise next time instead of buying it I'll simply choose a free one. Must be a difference between something you pay and something you can have for free. Otherwise you have to change business. And I don't know if you notice I said I asked for help and the customer support was really really poor. How can you miss completely the point of a post? Are you from the customer support of Plural Sight?

 

No, he just thinks he's better than everyone else.

 

Honestly dude I too have experienced what @ThisIsSparta has with PluralSight.

Its grossly difficult to find anything on their website. Its a disorganized mess. I used a pluralsight account years ago and I see it hasn't changed if it ThisIsSparta's report is accurate.

@Murgilod I am not sure if you're being sarcastic but I think you ought to refrain from personal attacks!

 

I wouldn't call school a scam. There's nothing wrong with bettering yourself! If it costs tremendous sums of money to go to school perhaps find an alternative (free education online, another country, scholarships, etc.). There are so many ways to fund your education today almost anyone will find something that can help mitigate or eliminate their accumulation of debt.

Your school just has to be accredited. Otherwise it most definitely IS a scam. Make no mistake.

 

Sorry guys, but I've used pretty much every tutorial service -- both free and paid -- and pluralsight is consistently a notch above. No, I don't work for them. I don't know anybody who works for them. It's based purely on my experience.

I try not be be insulting, but if you don't have the patience to learn how to navigate pluralsights very well organized library of videos, you aren't going to succeed anywhere.

Could it be better? Yeah. So what? Send them some suggestions.

Of course I always advocate to exhaust free material before you used paid stuff. But much of the free learning content is scattered and of varying usefulness. Pluralsight has the largest database I have found with pretty consistent quality. It has dozens of ways to search and browse. But yeah, it is not a video game for idiots with big yellow glowing spheres to hand hold you entirely (though it is pretty close to that). Building games is not the same as playing games. It's practically the opposite. You have to spend some time looking around, building a playlist, and thinking about in what order you wsih to learn things. So you do need to turn your brain on.

As far as using legacy versions and whatnot -- that is called paying attention to the details. If you want to program you have to pay attention to the details. If you want to make game art you have to pay attention to the details. If you want to be a good waiter at a restaurant you have to pay attention to the details. The whole first post reads to me as "you didn't make the details obvious enough for me! burn in hell!"

And if you don't like the feeling that gets churned up when people are blaming eachother, don't try to solve problems by throwing a temper tantrum. Help other people by empowering them with what you know. If you think you know better, help. That might look like thihs, "Dear pluralsight support, as a beginner using x and y courses on your site I ran into a couple roadbloacks at such and such points. I think if you made x and y changes it would help peopole like me, and if you can fix these issues I would be happy to recommend your courses to my friends and co-workers. Thanks."

You can argue semantics and discuss what was advertised versus what you got versus what your self-implanted expectations were until the end of time. But if OP cannot exercise patience, cannot pay attention to the details, they aren't going to ever get beyond step one, and everything in the first post is indicative of an impatient person who does not pay close attention to the details. Maybe I'm wrong. You don't have to prove anything to me. If the advice is no good, all you have to do is ignore it.


One more thing about pluralsight.... I used pluralsight almost exclusively for about my first six months of learning various aspects of 3d art and animation. After that, on almost any forum or chat service with other beginning artist, I can find dozens of basic technical questions that I can answer, and more often than not it is people who have been practicing the craft for longer than I have. People who are above reading manuals and following "tutorials for dummies." So no, paid tutorials are not a waste of time. For the complete beginner, I would bet not going with a well compiled database of tutorial content like pluralsight is a recipe for a lot more frustration and wasted time than not. Paid tutorials will only be a waste of time if you expect them to magically insert knowledge into your brain without any effort on your own part. Paying for the tutorials does not mean you'll have a frustration free experience. But I can almost guarantee you will learn more, faster, and more thoroughly than if you wing it on your own. But you still have to do the work.

 

More I read what you say more I think you did not understand the original post. Nevermind.

 

I think he does. You bought something, you felt that the quality wasn't your liking, you wrote a probably jerky email to them (judging the language you have used here...) and then you were wondering why they aren't friendly. So you came here and wrote a jerky post about the whole thing.

Instead of what @BIGTIMEMASTER wrote:

Look, I understand you are entitled, because you paid for it, and you have all your rights to cancel your payment and go anywhere you want to talk sh.t about anyone. But you chose to come here. We are judging you because you opened with a sh.ty post. EOS

 

i'm sure they'll come around. let it sleep...

 

What about that post is "jerky"?

I agree that @BIGTIMEMASTER's example is a better way to approach people (it's a shame it wasn't applied in the first response ), but you and he and I have the advantage of not having just had this frustrating experience. If I'd had a poor experience with someone's product or service, and contacted them about it, and was immediately asked a question that I had already provided a clear answer to... well, I'd think that was flippin' ridiculous, too!

Look, I'm not familiar with tutorials these days. I haven't needed one in decades. Rather than telling a newbie how much they've failed, how about we point them towards some materials we can recommend?

 

It's a shame you didn't bother asking us for our opinions before buying it. We've had plenty of threads (most of them in Getting Started) where someone purchased the course and encountered some or all of the problems you did and I have been telling people who ask about the course to steer clear of it.

That said this is a perfectly normal limitation for video-based learning resources. It's simply not realistic for them to keep pace with a platform that is changing every few months without being insanely expensive (since you would have to record them fresh every time it happened) and that's assuming you could even do it fast enough to actually keep pace.

 

so what I was doing was this: " how about we point them towards some materials we can recommend?"

IMO, they already found the best place to get started as a beginner. It's not going to get easier than starting out with pluralsight. If there was an easier approach of course I would recommend it. But I really think I have done almost all the tutorials out there. And however dumb the OP might be, I can almost guarantee I was dumber.

 

Basically the main part. Look, I'm Hungarian, we have more swear words than English and German combined. I can swear for minutes continuously without repetition. Still I don't start my conversations with the "F***ing ridicolous" (sic) expression.
But aside of that the whole "experience" is too impatient for me. This guy will never be even an okay software engineer with this attitude. Really? He puts something in the title, the customer support misses it and it becomes f-ing ridiculous?
Well boohoo. Humans make mistakes, it happens, people who do boring job and deal with other people, especially impatient people, like him, make even more. They asked him which course. Wow, what a blasphemy. Really?
(Maybe I'm more patient with supports in general because I did it for two years at one point in my life)

Yeah, I get it, his experience was very far from perfect, of course, I understand the "delete my account" and maybe even a "want my money back", but shouting off the cliff just because of this (okay, coming here and posting like this) is just like f-ing ridiculous (sorry ).

Yeah, sure. Did he ask for it? Not really. He didn't want advice, he wanted just this out of his system, because being patient with each other and with companies who give service for us nowadays is a sign of weakness. (Call me old fashioned)

ps (edit); since I'm a Plus subscriber I have started to watch/listen to the tutorials on the Pluralsight, to see with my own eyes, how bad are they.

ps2 (edit): @ThisIsSparta BTW, if you didn't delete yourself from the Pluralsight just yet, the Unity2018 fundamentals and the Unity C# Scripting fundamentals are pretty okay tutorials for beginners if you want to give it another try. Although I'm half-way through the later right now.

 

I don't know about the programming related tutorials, but some of the 3d centered tutorials on pluralsight do perpetuate some falsehoods that stymie a lot of beginners. It's not flat out wrong.... but its stuff that gives a lot of beginners wrong notions about things.... so yes, it's not perfect, but it is generally good and IMO it's still the best place to go to get from step one to step two.

You can't avoid problems and frustrations. You can't rely on support. Pluralsight isn't a huge company and I doubt they have many people sitting there waiting to answer questions about the unity game dev related videos. They mostly provide tutorials for more serious professions. But, like I said, you can get all the support you need from this forum and of course google searching. Will there be frustration? Absolutely. That's the work though.

 

here is lack of attention to detail. I realize english is *not the first language of everybody, but you just have to pay very close attention. Swords and Shovels isn't the name of one of the video tutorials. It's the name of the package Unity is selling. So you need to tell them which specific video you were watching that is part of the Swords and Shovels package. Like, was it "intro to unity" "intro to blender" "intro to programming" or whatever.

So if the first reaction is to yell and blame others, you're not going to realize when it was just a simple misunderstanding... on your own part. Of course we all get mad and pissy, but knowing that is a normal reaction to doing complicated things on computers, we learn to wait until we've calmed down, then work to solve the problem with patience. Nobody is saying "shame for being frustrated,"only "shame for taking your frustrations out on others."

 

Does that site specifically call videos "classes"? Either way, the issues listed in the OP aren't specific to a video.

 

Nope. There are
- "Path"s -> categorized and apparently manually maintained group of courses
- Courses -> like everywhere else (Udemy), group of modules (or group of single videos)
- Modules -> group of videos (like Sections in Udemy)

The overall UI is similar what you can find on Udemy or other course-ware site. I think they use the Class and the Course interchangeably. I saw Udemy instructors do the same, they sometimes call courses class.

 

in other words, it's got a clear logic to how it is layed out

is it ok that a person can still be confused at first? of course. I was. I never bothered writing to support because I noticed that the discussion forums attached to each module were rarely used and latest replies were years old. Also, I learned, in the time it takes to even get some reply from a person you can usually find the answer yourself via google searching. And even better, you can usually find many answers, not just one persons answer. So a process of virtual peer review ensures you get the best solution. But yes, this does take time and effort. However, it's a very powerful way to learn, because you are filtering for the best stuff, not just taking one possible solution and running with it.

Was I promised some kind of support with my subscription? I dunno. Don't care. In the time it takes to wait for support to get my case I can find my answer and keep moving. It's just about effectiveness.


Just think. If OP's initial post is where they start, where do things go from there? Public discourse has to improve. We don't solve problems by yelling about it, even on the internet. Also, on the personal level, they'll not find success approaching things that way.

 

There's nothing better than good ol' fashioned research into something specific.

I've never in my life paid for a course, it's pointless and pretty much so is college for any computer job. Yeah it might look good on paper and some jobs (few) require them, but from my experience nearly all of them don't require a degree. The reason is simple - practical real world experience coming up with solutions for problems is more better than a piece of paper that indoctrinates you to specific how-to basics and that's pretty much it.

The internet is all you need, research, research, research.

For me it comes to researching very specific things down to the bare mechanics to how something should work.
For example - Teleporting.

Player moves from A to B location.
Google "Unity How To Teleport" and bam - hundreds of thousands of results to study.
Study and find the way that best suits you and tweak the settings to better understand how things work.

Then go to the next problem you need a solution for.

Best of all - it's free and can learn at your own pace.


I swear the Internet is like the most underutilized technology we have today.
I sit at my brothers work waiting for him to get off, but yet people keep showing up after closing hours.
When a simple google search will tell them whether a place is open or not. A mix of common sense and effort can save you time and money. (Not talking about you OP), I was just speaking in general.

 

Sounds like Plural Sight needs to improve their QA on this course.

But...

From your description of your experience with this course it is exactly like a typical game dev experience. Trying to figure something out with poorly laid out or incomplete documentation, 3rd party code or older code that shows errors when you import it, these are just a typical day for the indie game developer. If you're getting frustrated and giving up this quickly, I'm concerned that game dev isn't what you expect it to be.

 

First, this course is not intended at all for beginners, you must definitely have good basic working knowledge of Unity.

I'm actually following the course right now, just watching the videos, taking some notes here and there, like "hmmm interesting, I would have done this another way, never thought of that" and sometimes "oh why the heck does he do this and not that, I'll make sure to ask at some point"

Q&A however, is the real problem. This is why I stumble upon this post. I'm used to follow courses on Udemy where you can actually interact with the community, and ask questions that are usually duely answered within 24-48h Pluralsight is a real letdown in that department unfortunately, and I'm really surprised Unity chose that platform over Udemy (which in my opinion is the #1 platform in terms of learning contents for Unity). My guess would be: because the quality of the courses on Udemy surpasses that of Knights and Shovels, and they don't want the competition.

 

I really wanted to love this course but wow … what a mess ... I managed to make it to the inventory, but could not get any of it work, pick up the sword, nor I could get to see it being in inventory, still have no clue why... followings were mine issues … to be honest It all start really great and quite smooth, Character creation went well , Ai as well even Character stats course but after this point they are trying to prove how modular this asset is and how you could do any part in any order ...Wrong!
one was done in 2017 , other instructor has done in his in older or newer version so it was never compatible... also there are several courses on inventory subject and that is confusing, because it is not clear which one to do first... but hey they do say it can be done in any order , so I tried for couple of weeks to figure out inventory one, but without any results I kept getting errors after errors... later on I figured out the instructor forgot to include a script that was done in another course, well She obviously had it because she had no errors, but she did not tell us about it nor gave us the script … also some spelling typos were still in scripts that she provided, but these were fixed in another course too , means she had good ones but gave us bad ones to import ... Instructor are very lazy they usually go through the finished imported files, so you can never be sure how was most of it set up to start with... I am still not giving up on this one , but hell it is really hard to figure it all out , but wont give up because I really like what this course is trying to teach ...