Unity, Thank You for Listening to us

Yah man that would work

Interview: So how'd you like our awesome forum software?
-Actually I don't
Interview: What don't you like about it?
-Everything

lol jk

 

Although the multiple-solutions thing is a good feature, I'd have ranked the MS answers forum near the bottom in terms of usability, too. Every time I end up there I just shake my head. It has been a cluttered mess for at least a decade. I think only Lithium and the misery that is Google Groups are worse...

I think somebody wrote that Lithium is owned by Adobe? *shudder* ... that explains a lot. It's probably where the Macromedia team ended up after Director finally died a well-deserved death.

 

If they did they were wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_Technologies

 

Wow, paying people to refer others? Is this just out to current employees or anyone? If it is for anyone, they must havea really high turnover rate to feel they have to do something like this. It is not as if there are not a ton of IT folks out there looking for jobs.

 

Wow, even their Wikipedia entry is so bogged down with marketing-buzzwords it's difficult to read.

 

Looks like dragging images to the reply area at the bottom of a thread isn't working. I had to go to the separate full-page reply editor to drag-drop an image attachment.

 

Yep and that description does not remind me of Unity at all. Unity is a tool, not a game and not a social media event.

 

http://www.lithium.com/why-lithium/customer-success/?ga-link=nav

I'm seeing a bias toward intensely casual / non technical users. No wonder it failed hard here. Seems geared toward people with little knowledge at all technically.

Unity's forum strength is that it enables users to create solutions and run their own businesses (asset store, work for hire, etc) in an organised manner. Lithium's (from user POV) seems to be biased toward being a pop star and being data mined.

I don't mind the data mining aspect, business is business and Unity wants to know more about us. But I do mind a retarded fisher price environment that actively gets in the way of technical discussion.

 

Is that why marketing picked it up?

 

I don't know the rationale behind using it other than it would've allowed Unity to know more about the community. As I understand it, Aurore used to spend time gathering users opinions and problems manually back when she was cm, so the new cm team wanted to automate or improve on this.

I don't know if thats 100% correct though @aliceingameland will know more.

 

Actually, my guess is that they didn't think at all about the community the forums were serving but instead were entranced by the fancy words. This is not because they are bad people, but just because they did not listen to the input from the technical teams.

Marketing people are hired to market the product so it is understandable that they would follow the hype. I am sure in school they were taught that what is considered fad and cool at the time is what works.

Unfortunately, they forgot that we are not "fad". We are technical people running businesses.

 

Would it not have been better to learn about the community a bit before they chose forum software?

 

Her post on the first page seemed to suggest that is what they wanted.

 

Marketing's take-away should be to realize how lucky they are to be dealing with a userbase that actually cares about this stuff. I mean we've been discussing it -- possible motives and solutions, as well as the problems -- for days on end. You aren't going to see that level of engagement and interest from your customers in most places.

There, see? Free metrics or "business intelligence" or whatever your perferred buzzword is.

 

But why? I get collecting information and that is fine. What would they use it for?

It is not like Unity is going to change anything about the engine based on this data. We come here for the engine.

The only thing I can see is they are collecting data to sell or to use to make the forums better. Well..they collected a LOT of data last week. Mainly, they discovered we don't want or need the shiny stuff.

Will they use that data? If not, then I am afraid I don't believe this is for our benefit but marketing hype that is meaningless....or means something else.

 

Marketing departments... more than ANYBODY.... should realize the BS behind marketing

In general I think the proper attitude for tech teams to have about new products like Lithium is essentially "Change is Bad"... unless of course "Change is Good". Now determining if change is good requires some proper research and testing neither of which seemed to have been done in this case.

 

I think I know where this is going.

 

lol... "badges" or "flair"?

 

Gee thanks. I just spent the last 30 minutes watching Office Space clips. Reminds me of why are started selling on the Asset Store.

 

When you are having notable asset authors like @Partel-Lang express relief the forums are back to normal, you probably don't want to make the same mistakes.

Heck, even Unity's competitors still use vBulletin. I've been looking at lithium based forums on the web since all this and have yet to find one which actually fosters proper discussion. Maybe that's because they're not for proper discussion, but for customers finding trivial solutions.

Last I checked, game dev isn't trivial.

In any case eric's benchmarks of lithium vs xenforo shows that they aren't even remotely the same performance, so perhaps we'd see mobile struggling a bit with lithium, more so once all the fancy features would've been added.

For the ongoing costs of lithium you could probably hire several web devs.

 

I obviously don't presume to tell Unity how to spend their money, but hopefully, that fresh bit of news about their latest fundraising round means they can afford to devote some proper resources to support Sara and Alice and the developer community here. (Awesome news, btw!)

 

Seems like a lot of people want VR and AR to be the be all and end all, but I'm not actually seeing it. 3D TV was meant to revolutionise and so forth. I know VR is fun. AR is fun. It's an addition, not a replacement in my view though. Another angle. Everything is heavy handed these days. It's all about big changes and these big changes, they just don't stick if history teaches us anything.

There's a reason people still have cars with steering wheels, and a reason we still wear standard clothing. These things just work, and work super well, cost very little and so on.

 

Couldn't have phrased it better! I hope we aren't collecting battle-cries for the "second uprising" already. Let's hope history doesn't repeat itself.

 

Yeah although I'm not sure why we're actually thinking Unity for reversing a mistake. The psychology is wrong there. Unity needs to be thanking the community for giving a damn enough to ask for change. That's an incredibly valuable position for a company to be in, I hope it learns to appreciate just how valuable a thriving community is. I'm sure on some level it was a vague notion. But Unity pretty much lives or dies on it's community because a community is required to use Unity. It does not work very well without the endless discussions and solutions people provide each other.

Unity is too big, too diverse as a product to survive on a manual alone.

Check out any software in the same field with a dead community. Oh surprise! the product dies too. I'm not trying to be an ass here, but it needs to be clearly understood without any margin for error.

 

Absolutely! I posted in the new forums how we found Unity through it's community. It is the reason we chose to come here from GarageGames, which also had a nice community but not nearly so large. The community begat the asset store in many ways. Without it, no one would buy assets and no one would sell them....if there are fewer buyers.

The community also helps people use the engine and cuts down on support from the staff. I only asked for help from staff once, on the forums, and because of a problem getting Unity to work with Windows 10. Otherwise, I ask the community.

 

Here are some other engine boards for your information, some possibly doing lithium inspired stuff. Ugh.


This lithium inspired wasteland doesn't seem to be able to focus on problem solving.



This one seems to favour style over substance with a Q/A format that doesn't foster discussion.



This forum looks usable and has good use of information. Vbulletin. Can't beat the classics tbh.



Ugh. Could be way better. I can't see users staying a second longer than they have to.

Conclusion: forums for engines should focus on data and discussion, tailored to the engine. It is not an afterthought.

 

Man those suck. I feel like Unity's community has to be te best one out there by a long shot. Most of these other ones barely even exist.

VB ain't bad though. I've used it before. It's no Xenforo, but it's WAY more useable than Lithium. Even Proboards is more usable than Lithium.

Though, the way they formatted that VB has a lot of blank space, just like the Lithium board did. Not as much mind you, but more than I'm comfortable with. But feature wise it's far superior.

 

Would not be surprised to see unity's competitors take a hard look at this thread and realise there's more to having a cheap and powerful engine. I am available for consulting jobs

 

Somehow I doubt it.

I feel like if they really think what they have now is sufficient, they lack common sense anyway, and probably don't use forums.

 

I like vBulletin. We used it with a community of 100k for a game I worked on years ago. I helped moderate sometimes and the moderation system was easy to use. Very enjoyable forum and nothing technical got in the way of the discussions.

At least one of those is obviously Lithium...looks almost identical to the ones Unity attempted to use. And yeah..ugh. Looky at the awards! I guess Lumberyard needs to give out rewards to entice people to participate.

 

I suddenly feel the urge to make a game about gamified forums about game engines.

 

I don't imagine it would be very fun to play

 

Maybe! You could shoot down trolls, try to create the fanciest CSS style, win shiny badges, give likes to all your friends, and solve problems which get you bonus points!

 

I'm just saying if it was based on a true story it would be pretty frustrating, the controls wouldn't be intuitive, and the graphics would hurt your eyes.

 

Lithium is already the Dark Souls of text adventures.

 

That last post made me think of something.

When we first moved over to the Lithium forums, I realized I had lost all my likes. It kind of bothered me that all the goodwill I had built over the years was gone.

But the thought of having to do that all over again was overwhelming to me. I realized that all those likes were from posts I wanted to make, not ones that I made just to get the likes. In fact, it was Adam Goodrich who pointed out to me that I had that many likes! I had no idea and never paid much attention. After that, it was a funny joke with my Unity friends.

However...I can't imagine being motivated to post by badges and awards or even by having my name on the front page.

What motivates me is the fact by being visible on the forums, I have made lots of new friends. I have even found some old friends! I have helped people and been helped by people. I have been contacted and asked my opinion about things...which is the biggest reward of all.

Being "liked" just because people enjoy your posts, or think you have something good to say, or think you are funny, or helpful or they want to encourage you...doesn't that mean a lot more than some virtual badge?

 

I liked your post (Pavlov reaction), then immediately unliked it because I actually like Dark Souls. Unlike Lithium.

 

I wasn't here for the start of the project, which began while Aurore was still on the team so I wasn't party to all of these early discussions. However, it's true that we need a better way to collect community feedback and track issues that are discussed here -- currently, we do this manually, as you've said.

Part of the community team's role is to collect feedback and identify problems our community are experiencing and relay that to the relevant teams. They use this input to help inform decisions they make on our products and services. So, yes, the data we collect here will impact the engine.

I know I've said this repeatedly now, but I'll say it again -- all the feedback you've left on the various threads about the new forums are/have been collected. It has taken many, many man hours to manually collate all of this into documents we can then work from. We wouldn't have bothered to collect it if we weren't going to use it.

 

Well thats not true, Dark Souls is actually good

Lithium is less like Dark Souls and more like those old NES games by LJN that were just hard because they were incredibly bad.

 

Man, how does a company make enough money to afford those offices selling forum software?!

Holy f***ing s**t. Are you kidding me?

I had to see the amazing best buy forums that generate $5m annually... its just like a random forum. It could be vbulleton or anything else. I have no clue how they estimate that it generates $5m annual.

XenForo should come on these forums. Given the importance that the Unity forums actually have in meaningful traffic and ongoing product support, if they used the same estimation techniques I'm sure they could claim like half of Unity's market value.

Since Unity raised a billion in funding, they could say "XenForo helped generate $1,500,000,000 in funding" and...who knows, they might even have a point.

 

I can see how specific posts or the number of posts on a specific issue with the engine may help and why it is helpful to collect that information.

However, not sure why Lithium is needed to do that. I would imagine there would be outside analytics that would not disrupt the flow of discussion on the forum.

Either way, I am sure that the Unity folks already use the information they find on the support forum and elsewhere. I have seen them post and ask for information.

 

Usually I don't like Karma/Rep style systems on forums, but I find that this "like" system (despite how facebook-esque and therefore repulsive it is) is actually quite useful. It's just a simple way of acknowledging someone without actually having to make a post.

It's like if your postcount was your paycheck, your likes are your tips.

 

Yeah, except I don't have to wear high heels and a low cut top to get them.

I was a waitress in college..I remember well.

 

You just haven't found the rhythm for Lithium posting!

What I meant was that Lithium is like Dark Souls because only a few like it, and everybody struggles to make any sense of it. Don't tell me the story in any Dark Souls game is easy to find

 

Yeah, I think that's exactly it: the way Lithium markets itself heavily as a money generating service. The Why Lithium page makes absolutely no sense to me (Be 3D), all I see is a Buzzword Bingo and office stock photos, but I guess that serves to bring in the people with fat wallets.

 

I think it was a classic case of someone getting overly fascinated with buzzwords or a new tech.
Those kinds of things happen. Basically one day you discover the next big thing get utterly fascinated by it and attempt to use it everywhere, even when it isn't necessary. It happens with new technologies, methodologies, etc.
So, it is usually a good idea to wait till fascination wears off and your mind returns into state where it can think straight.

P.S. Can someone pm me info about slack forum mentioned earlier?

 

Well, thats not true.

First off, Dark Souls has a huge fanbase.

Second, Dark Souls isn't hard because it lacks features. It's hard because of spesific design decisions that make the game challenging but fair. (With the exception of the 4 Kings...F*** the 4 Kings) Thats something master level game designers do. You never feel like you lose because of something cheap. If you die, it's because of a mistake you made as a player.

When you play something like Bigfoot for NES, you aren't losing because you aren't good at the game, you are losing because the game isn't well designed and doesn't make it obvious how to play the game at all.

This is how Lithium feels. It's not that I'm bad at posting on forums and don't know how to quick reply, it's quick reply thats broken. It's not that I'm bad at quoting, it's that the quoting system itself is ridiculously primitive and unintuitive.

Nothing I'm doing is the problem, it's the software's fault for being built badly.

 

Dwarfed by even just one of the Call of Duty sequels' sales.

The inventory management has always been well behind the times. Don't lie to yourself!

I have no idea what that is, but I can tell you I fell into the void a lot because of frame rate issues on consoles. ON CONSOLES!

So no, Dark Souls may be great (I've bought each from 1 to 3 times), but it's not perfection in every aspect

 

So if I get what you're saying - you'd be better equipped to handle situations where there are a ton of related threads about an issue that's not on the QA's radar until someone blows a fuse. Like the fullscreen/GUI situation last year.