Unity forum satisfaction

Yeah I am not a big poster either, I usually try to stay out but I have always thought the support for pro was a weak spot so I jumped in. Anyway, I agree that a priority cue could make most people happy. As for splitting the forum, I see both sides. On the one hand there are a lot of intelligent, civil free users out there and it would be nice to not restrict them. On the other hand you have the "Go crybaby to cryengine" posters that make the forums painful to read through sometimes.

 

All good stuff there but I don't think you really addressed mine (and a few devs) issues with the current system and that is occasionally a question comes up that can only be addressed by a Unity engineer. I say engineer just as to not confuse between developers who use Unity and developers who make Unity.

These are very occasional and as such do not warrant paid support, its simply not financially viable to pay $1500 for three months of support to answer one-off questions. However the answers provided could and would benefit the Unity community as a whole, this should be obvious since if only a Unity engineer can answer it, then without doing so no-one in the community can answer it in the future.

Now its important to note that i'm not saying that Unity engineers don't already do this, just from what i've heard and seen the frequency of thier responses has fallen off quite dramatically as Unity has grown. I'm also very aware that engineers spending more of their time on the forums, means less time for new features or fixing bugs.

Its also clear to me from this discussion that I can approach some of the moderators here and that they will do there best to get an engineer to answer a tricky problem posted on the forum. Indeed I think in many ways this would address my main concern, but i'm unsure how long that could be supported - i.e. if everyone started sending requests to the moderators to pass on questions it would grind to a halt.

So I feel any solution needs to address this issue as well as the others that have been mentioned, such as a beginners forum and as you say improvements to documentations and i'd add in 'learning' materials to that too, which Unity seem to be investing in heavily.

I wonder if another solution to the issue I've come across is some means of 'flagging' a post in the forum that it requires the need of a Unity engineer to answer? Obviously such a feature could be abused, but perhaps that might be able to become self-regulated. It would certainly save developers time, writing and sending emails to Aurore and possibly be more efficient for Unity to deal with too?

That way Azurore would check the flagged posts and could moderate them as to whether they really need input from an engineer. This provides an initial two-way communication method without actually needing long email conversations between both parties. It would certainly go a long way to give the impression that developers can be 'closer' to the engineers should an issue arise.

 

I'll say that pro support def needs to step its game up. I stopped asking many questions on here, because many times i dont get the help i need when i need it. (usually i get no help at all). Also, I'm not sure why people are so worried about an implied "insult" of n00b users via a beginner forum when a few already shown they have no problems flat out insulting others in this very thread! So, yes, I'm also for a beginner forum. Basically, I get tired of some REALLY basic questions, and inexperienced opinions flooding all the sub forums.

I like the idea of a pro only forum, but I dont want a pro only forum. I basically would like a place where i can either ask questions or join discussions with other experienced programmers/devs...and experienced programmers/devs only!

Also, i think we should combine unity answers and the forums some how. I hate the unity answers layout, but i like the voting system.

 

I'm not so sure about that as they serve very different purposes. Answers should be clean and efficient, with posters supply succinent questions and the answers being direct, whilst the forums are more for discussing a problem to find a solution. I'm also wary of adding in pointless rating or voting systems as they simply end up being 'gamed' and rarely indicate the quality or experience of a poster. Usually you'll quickly identify who are the knowledge and helpful users in a forum, you don't need ratings or scores for that.

However I do sort of like the MVP type of approach as it might encourage more helpful responses and more questions being answered, but again this system can easily be 'gamed'.


I'm also interested in exactly how people see a beginners/advance forum would work. Are these top level forums with sub-forums such as support, scripting, shaderlab inside or are we talking about just a few of the existing sub-forums getting split into beginner/advanced, or would it be two new sub-forums - beginners/advanced replacing say just scripting?

 

I agree with all of them, and I would add:

- Expand and/or enhance the Unity documentation adding more practical examples and explanations for every concept, component or function.

 

Spot on, this is my main issue with investing into and being dependant upon Unity in a proffesional capacity. There are infrequently going to be issues which are simply impossible to resolve for yourself (or by the community) since the solution requires knowledge of the Unity engine that hasn't been documented and which cant be gained yourself since Unity is a "black box" which you cant look inside of.

Premium support simply doesn't seem to be a viable solution to these issues. For the price of the lowest level of premium support, and being prepared to pay a healthy rate for support staff, I would expect to need at least 10 man hours of support staff time a month for premium support to become a reasonable expense. This is a very fair proposition for a studio who are much more likely to require this, but for an indivudual or very small group you just dont have needs on this scale so the money spent would be mostly wasted. (Edit: Perhaps Unity adding an premium support license strictly for individuals at a reduced cost could resolve this).

It was mentioned however that a one-off consultancy service you can pay for when needed is available so perhaps this is the solution to this problem. I haven't really been able to find any information on this however so its hard to say how reasonable the pricing would be and how much the service could be relied upon. If I find myself making the decision for real whether I feel secure enough to become invested in Unity proffesionaly I'll be emailing the support staff to find out more about this service first. Perhaps if anyone already knows the specifics of this service they could share that information with us.

With regards to improving support on the forums I have potentialy another solution instead of trying to split the forum based on skill level or license level which a lot of people seem to have issues with. When I look through the scripting forum an issue I see is that only a small amount of the questions asked actualy seem to be Unity specific and beyond a basic level. Instead the scripting forum is mostly filled with general programming language, maths, and game programming questions that really have nothing to do with Unity specifically, or Unity questions which could easily be resolved by reading the documentation. Perhaps something which would help is more granularity in the scripting forum. For example it could be split into beginner, general, and Unity specific sections. The Unity support staff could then focus mostly on the Unity specific subforum where their attention would be most useful (being sure to kick beginner style questions out of here to the beginner subsection, perhaps with links to the relevant pages of the documention that would solve their issues if they could be bothered to read it) and the community can handle answering questions in the other sections.




[EDIT] It appears that the consultancy service might not actualy be an alternative to premium support for infrequent issues. Reading the premium support description again I found this which makes it sound like the consultancy service is only available to premium support customers:

 

One time fee of $1500?

When did Unity, all the addon licenses, and all the upgrades become free for life?

So far I have paid far more than $1500.


I can go right now and contact Luxology, or Pixologic, or NewTek, and I'd get the enhanced support right away. Those tools were far cheaper than unity. But if needed answers to a problem asap, or ran into an issue, I'd get the help right away, without competing with others for forum attention.



I also like how many compare Unreal's, Crytek's, etc etc, price tag as some sort of barrier for support, and that you can only get premium support if you shell out 6 figures. Imagine if Unreal did what Unity does ... I doubt many of the paying UE customers (who provide the backbone of financial support of the company) would be really pleased to be lumped in with all the UDK users. Thats whats going on here. The Pro and other purchased licensee's (and the massive amount of asset store sales), are what had kept Unity financially afloat, without them, bye bye pay checks for the developers. So its better for Unity to listen to the purchasers more than the free users, because in the end, money talks. Or they can ignore and go down like GarageGames/Torque.

 

Stop arguing semantics. You know full well what I mean and how payments apply to software licenses.

 

The free users will still get the same support they currently have on here. So far I've spent more than $4500 on Unity not including asset store purchases. I think that kind of commitment should result in a similar kind of priority support when I run into a problem with the engine or get stuck on something. We really need somewhere where paying customers can ask questions to the community with the knowledge that there will be some Unity engineers making sure none of our questions go unanswered.

Why do you have a problem with this? If I buy a car and there is a problem with it or I don't know how to work something, I contact the dealer and they help me, that's all I'm asking for here!

 

Why don't you go crybaby somewhere else, like I said? Unity is VERY cheap for a game engine. Appreciate what they've done. They try to be nice by giving us this amazing software for so cheap, and you complain about the support? You can get help if you PM one of the moderators, or one of the people that work for Unity. Quit crying.

 

Unity should just offer a limited number of premium support tickets with pro, I believe that would be fair and it is common practice.

 

No they won't. Your very concept involves giving Pro users support priority, which would mean diminished support for everyone else. Also, if you buy a car and you need car support you pay a mechanic. Your car analogy makes no sense at all, like all car analogies.

 

Apple give 2 support tickets per yearly subscription for each developer licence.

 

Isn't this the wrong approach to this kind of problem?

The issue we have is with the large volume of thread makers who clearly don't explore alternative options, don't read posting guidelines and so on. Creating more / better guidelines will not help. Also, IRC is not a convenient way to seek help with an issue, you have to hope someone there will not only be capable of helping but be actively sitting around watching the chat, otherwise you have to keep asking in the hope that someone will eventually show up who can help. I don't really think IRC is the right tool for the task at hand (my personal opinion, but I think it's a widely shared one).

But what's really at the heart of the problem, here?

Seems to me a discussion forum, as they're normally used, breaks down as a means of communication when the volume of new threads spills over a certain critical mass. Notmally you'd just create additional classifications / forums, but in this particular case the classification is highly subjective thus even if we do split the topic it's not really going to reduce the noise ratio and it also places a burden on the tiny minority of forum mods to filter the content into the correct sum-forums.

So, why not just simply invert this idea and let everyone do their own filtering to suit their means?

Mod the Forum software to allow the following in high-traffic areas:

1) Thread makers tag their thread as novice/journeyman/master (less disparaging terms than beginner/advanced) when they create it. By default, threads will be marked be novice unless the poster changes it. This is still subjective, but it's not a hard classification/split of content.

2) Allow anyone else to rate a thread from 1 to 5 or flag it as resolved (quest completed!). I presume (hopefully not erroneously) that members would down-rate beginner questions marked as advanced, and up-rate relevant and well posted questions they discover even if they can't provide an answer themselves.

3) Allow anyone to filter the forum index based on this meta info. By default the forum shows everything, just as it does now. Also implement a filter to show only threads with zero replies, or to filter out threads that have been marked as resolved (not the other ways around!).

4) Use the ratings to weight the forum search results, with a very heavy weight on threads marked as resolved.

You could also add options for the OP to re-classify a journeyman thread as novice which could clear all the previous ratings - maybe put a min of 5 ratings before re-classify is allowed to stop constant up/down classifying of threads to game the system, or only allow a thread to be classified downwards.

I realise this is sounding a bit like Unity Answers, but clearly Answers isn't a solution to the issue people are having with the forums right now (or this thread would never have been created). Likewise, IRC, PMing mods etc seem more like band-aid solutions. The ideal solution, whatever it is, should be something that enhances the forum itself to increase the frequency and ease of advanced community members discovering and interacting directly to help each other out.

 

Last I looked we were not living in a Communist world, Just why shouldn't paid Pro customers get more support than free users? Why shouldn't paid users get higher priority?

 

Exactly, we're not living in a communist world. Unity doesn't discriminate.

 

QFT

I'd add:
Do my coding for me
Question is clear enough but they want the entire solution in a particular language/script in complete running form. I'm more than willing to help, but once I point you down the right path you had better show some initiative (and not do something like insist I translate a working example to js for them.. I can pound out the cs quick so I don't mind writing something pretty much complete in cs if I have the time, but I'm not getting paid to do your work).

"Oh no don't steal my idea" ambiguous question
Deliberately ambiguous because they are afraid someone is going to steal their "great" game idea. If the problem is code related then provide a code snippet. Anonymize it if you must but it's really doubtful it's needed. For some reason noobs seem the most paranoid with this. It sounds like something readily fixable and is pretty clear, but they are leaving just a little to much info out to be absolutely clear what's going on.

TL;DR code snippet
Yeah, actually seeing the code is helpful but not some huge copypasta mess of barely formatted code. Strip it down to the bare gist of the issue.

Question better solved elsewhere
Some of the questions are just basic coding questions that are more appropriately solved on something like stackexchange or some other forum as they aren't unique to Unity. Of course Unity's unique "javascript" language/syntax throws a bit of a curve ball.

-----

Overall the signal to noise ratio is poor. The solution should target getting well thought out questions (a la KyleStaves post) to float to the top. Questions that are not only well thought out and well written but also show initiative on the author's behalf.

Is a separate forum going do do that? No, I doubt it.

Some kind of moderation might help or even forcing some sort of basic template for questions. At a previous employer we found that useful for getting better bug reports out of the sales guys. That and pushing back poor reports, "Sorry, won't do anything on this unless you provide more info." There was backlash at first, but eventually they sucked it up and started doing better bug reports (or didn't report at all). I mean, "The save button didn't do what I expected." doesn't mean anything. Which save button? What was the expected behavior? What actually happened?

Some kind of vote or flag to push a forum post or answer question back to the originator might work. One forum I used to frequent had a system where if enough people clicked the "you should have used the search button" button it would automatically push it somewhere else (I think the "you should have used the search button" sub forum). That's a little heavy handed and doesn't solve the issue of legitimate questions that just aren't clear enough. There are the few questions I wish had a nice big "you should have googled that" button.

It's a matter of either pruning or preventing noise. Yes a pro only forum might have less noise, but the rest of the forum is still going to be noisy (if not noisier).

 

Because they didn't pay for the extra service, they paid for a software license.

 

Man, I'm getting older cuz I have gotten a lot more patient. So instead of stooping to name calling, I'll ask you, why are you so hostile?

Pro users probably have more than $1500 tied up in Unity. This comes in forms different packages (IOS, Android Flash, etc), more than 1 lisc seat (for those of us who aren't a one man show), buying other tools to use with unity etc. So, why should we pro users have to deal with the same support of a person who hasn't paid for anything? In most cases, a pro user is probably using the pro version of unity for some kind of income (main income or supplemental) so, most often than not, there’s MONEY ON THE LINE! Of course we want better support than a hobbyist! They probably aren’t using unity to pay bills…there’s no rush for that person.

Besides, the support we would receive would still benefit free users as well, by having the answers available via the forums or better docs. I really don’t see why free users are getting so upset, like we are taking something from you (yet you call us cry babies). Obviously, the current system doesn’t work for many. If the current support system works for you and other free users, then that’s great, you can still use the forums as they are. However, people who use unity to pay bills would like a lil more support since this is all a big magic box that we don’t have source code access to understand what unity is doing or to fix some problems ourselves.

Even if you disagree, stop the name calling, you are making free users look like the stereotypical teenage user...no, I changed my mind, keep up your name calling. You provide much stronger evidence for us to segregate the forums.

 

Because, once more, this solves nothing that a proper skill level system couldn't solve in a vastly more effective way.

 

Judging skill level is subjective! Knowing who is pro or not is fact. No arguing as to the rights the person has to post in a pro forum, no upsetting anyone because someone has deemed their question low skill or them to be of low skill. Non pro users can still read the pro section, and post replies, they just can't originate a thread.

 

Pro license != equal skill and moderators can move threads to the other skill sections! Boom. Done.

 

To be blunt for $1,500 I feel like I am on my own. The only questions I get answered are from asset developers that I purchased assets from, which is awesome. The bottom line is for $1,500 this is pretty god awful support. You post to support forums expecting SOME kind of response, but all that happens is I bump my post 4-5x and a community member ends up responding. I realize "Premium Support" is a separate purchase, but surely "No Support" shouldn't be an option when you sink that kind of cash. Anyway that's just my 2 cents..

I do support as well as I am a professional web developer so I understand not everyone can be helped and I understand that not everything falls under Unity support, but my problem is I see no guidelines as to what does fall under Unity support so I've no idea what to expect.

 

You peeps seem to be missing the point. The $1500 isn't for support; its for Unity Pro. There's a difference.

When you shell out money for other software, are you also expecting someone to be on call to hold your hand and teach you how to use it?

 

Got to chime in here. Whenever you buy a product, even a can of beans, you can and will get support from the manufacturer. This is true of all new products or services you pay for. If you buy a dishwasher for $1500, and it does not work, you can usually phone a toll-free line, wait for a while and get a response. By contrast, when it is old, you can still get support with a premium line call. But support very much is there for everything you will buy. When a customer has a problem with one of my apps, I support them.

Unity's support is generally about getting more written materials out, and helping users help other users. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's baseline, so I would propose the following

A paid subscription forum answered only by unity staff. This forum costs an ongoing fee of whatever it costs to support the staff efforts. Each post is put in a queue, and then answered by unity staff themselves. You can only ask one question per ticket. Classic support you see from business software the world over.

A free beginners only area with the provision that good answers can have some karma or upvote, to encourage old hands to teach the new I don't see a problem with a beginners forum. Just state clearly "The place to go for newcomers to unity and programming". Or similar.

I don't agree with a paid forum for pro users; I do suggest a ticket based system you can pay a subscription for, where all questions and answers are also visible to other subscribers. This means they get the support they want from the source, but it doesn't drain unity's resources. If people want to pay for that level of care, they should be entitled to do so.

 

I know that, but I wouldn't sell something to a client for even $50 without providing some basic support. $500 a month is the cheapest support Unity offers and that's absurd for just wanting a few questions answered.

There should be a Pro only forum. This forum only Pro users can post to. Anyone is welcome to read them however. Unity would then prioritize those posts over others as after all I've paid them as have many others. As is Pro users posts get drowned in a sea of Free users, which in my opinion is a problem.

 

What does this pro forum solve?

 

Avoids paying customers posts from drowning in a sea of free users posts. Also helps support prioritize those who are paying customers.

 

Okay.

What's the name of this thread?

 

None of this discussion really matters any more though, at 9 pages it's all becoming increasingly pointless. No Unity mods/devs will be reading this far in, we've effectively sabotaged our chance to enact a meaningful change by arguing back and forth on the same issue (pro only forum) with slightly different phrasing in each post.

I hope next time this issues comes up and the mods/devs are posting and listening that the rest of the community will try to work with them to find a solution everyone can be happy. Alas, every time this comes up we seem to get little more than page after page of the exact same argument (this has been going around in circles for years already).

 

I don't understand your point. What are you asking? Name of a post that didn't get answered or the one we're in now?

If the general opinion is Pro only forums and it's repeated multiple times. Doesn't that mean that's what the community wants? It seams like a no brainer.. lol

 

This thread. The name of this thread, on the forums.

 

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/33860-forums-for-legal-owners-of-Unity-Pro-only
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/34234-A-forum-for-Licensed-Unity-Indie-users-only
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/103239-pro-users-forum-section

No, not only is it not what the majority of the community wants, Unity themselves have stated multiple times that they will not do this. So that is clearly not the solution, yet people seem hell-bent on continually bashing their head against that wall and in the process making so much noise about it that all other alternative ideas are drowned out.

In a twisted and ironic way they're effectively doing the exact same thing they're complaining about happening to their own posts.

 

Once again, there is a ton of support. There's the irc, the forums, the support email, unity docs, unity answers, etc.

 

Yep. Seen this before. In fact a company I worked at ran a specific forum for paying users that was manned by support staff. Support staff would also add info to wikis and documentation if they had reoccurring customer issues. If need be stuff was escalated to a dev (which was all too often.. hard to get any coding done with, "Hey.. any idea why this would happen?" multiple times per day).

Again on the signal noise ratio.. more/better documentation and more official Unity tutorials and demo projects. The existing ones are great, but not quite simple enough for people just getting their feet wet in coding. I sent a 16 year old I know to check out Schpooter as a easier intro to Unity. He has some coding experience and it was nice and small (so easy to wrap his head around). More tools like that would reduce the noise (or at least give more options for, "go take a look at this").

 

Believe it or not the Unity moderators are pretty good on this. I remember a forum topic with 100+ pages and the mods were still actively reading and responding to it... actually, this was the one: Link

 

It will prevent free users to post in.
No free users = less noise.
Less noise = more visibility.
More visibility = Greater chance to get an answer.

I wouldn't expect every question in this forum to be well formatted. But at least i think there will be no "Help meeeee" posts.
I also wouldn't expect every question to be answered by unity engineers. But at least some of them can get an answer and by doing that the feeling we had previous Windows and free user edition can be restored.

P.S. Marigold have you ever thought that UT might at some point remove the free version? After all promotions cant last forever.

 

What does this solve that skill level based formatting system doesn't? Also Unity Free isn't a promotion. It's a change to the original pricing tier of Unity indie.

 

Exactly and you don't need to tell me that, i was one of the Indie users. And this might revert. There are some people called accountants, that have a sole purpose in life: to crunch numbers. And if they tell UT that sustaining the free version is too much of a burden, then guess what: the most logical move is to resurrect the Indie version again.

As I see this, your goal as a free user is to keep the pro license users happy, because if they get upset, they have the option to go somewhere else and buy another engine, while you as a free user don't have that option.

So Marigold, will you reconsider your position and support our plea for a pro user forum? Please, pretty please.

 

AHAHAHA OH WOW THAT'S A GOOD O-

Wait.

Wait, you're being serious, aren't you?

Oh dear.

Well, it seems you didn't think your own argument through all the way because it leaves out a lot of pretty key details about Unity in general. First, yeah, they have accountants. And those same accountants probably realised the pretty obvious fact of "an increased userbase that would come from Unity Indie being free would lead to a pretty dramatic spike in Unity Pro sales" which is likely why Unity Indie went free in the first place. That's total speculation but it seems like a pretty logical conclusion considering this is pretty much what drives all freemium products.

Second, exactly what would they be migrating to? Like, I'm pretty curious what other products there are out there that are going to be price competitive with Unity with the same options for hardware targeting and the same benefits (such as a functional asset store and heavy documentation) that Unity has. Believe me, I've looked and the options really aren't there unless you have a pretty specific outline for your project. Maybe they'll go to UDK? Who knows. I know I wouldn't trade Unity for UDK with the utter disaster that is the current UDK interface.

Finally, and this is the big one because as soon as this is brought up all the Pro-forum advocates either dance around it or roll out the same pretty much debunked arguments, but what does a Pro forum solve that a skill-level based tagging system not solve? If you have advanced questions (as this is the most common example) that are getting lost in the shuffle of more novice questions, what does a Pro only forum offer over "advanced", "intermediate", and "novice" tags? Because I've yet to get an answer to this that isn't "well some people might think their questions are advanced but they really aren't!" which is a trivial thing to solve.

Really, you're making Pro users sound like fickle children in your example.

 

How is this trivial exactly? You keep saying this over and over without any actual explanation. The moderation involved to sort the forums this way sounds like a nightmare.

 

All that takes is a retagging or moving a thread, which is really what falls into the standard moderation duty of any forum moderator. I've seen these sorts of things implemented before and the worst that happens is a brief period of adjustment before things normalise.

 

Yup, but you didn't consider the volume of work.

 

No moderator reads 100% of the threads on a forum. Also, anyone skilled enough to properly sort technical questions into novice/intermediate/advanced across all aspects of Unity would be wasting their talents on this job.

 

The volume of work is less than one would think because it's a remarkably self-regulating system that benefits everyone instead of just the Pro users that apparently I'm supposed to be offering drinks and tiny sausages on toothpicks to in my spare time.

They don't have to read every thread. Most things can be pretty easily discerned from topic alone if they're problematic. Something labeled "ADVANCED" with a topic title "HOW DO I TEXTURE CUBES" would merit a bit of investigation. Not everything needs to be examined with a fine toothed comb.

 

Are you volunteering? ;-)

Can I get an example or two of forums that have sections split this way. Would honestly like to see how they're set up while thinking on any possible solutions for this.

 

@Marigold: Which part of "In a pro forum, only pro users can post thus their post are more visible thus the chance to actually get an answer is higher" is so hard to understand for you?

A tag based system will not work since anyone can tag it in any way. So, even a novice Unity user can tag the question as being "Advanced".

In a PRO forum, only questions related to PRO license feature would be allowed. Someone without a PRO license is most likely unable to answer those questions.

@Antenna tree: I'm willing to moderate... I'm on the forums at least 10x per day...

As for some forum examples:
Gamedev.net forum
http://forums.aigamedev.com/ They have a private premium subsection (I'm premium on their site, so you might actually not see it).
Experts Exchange They use a point system like the Answers page, yet are also using a forum hierarchy.

 

I hereby volunteer to offer my restrained hand at moderating unity forums to your rules and conditions. But it will cost upgrading my set of unity licenses to unity 4 as a goodwill gesture. Then you get another round of hippo support. It's a sincere offer and I think the cost of upgrading indeed offsets the dedication involved so if you need a hand, pass the info on, Ethan ;-)