Does Unity "Support" Exist?

While working on a game in Unity 5 we encountered an issue that other people in the forums were having.

We reached out to Unity support and they directed us to create a thread to be answered by the community even though the existing threads and issues had gone a month without resolution.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/problems-with-instantiating-baked-prefabs.324514/

We reached out after a few weeks without responses but we just get:
"we usually rely on the community users to answers technical questions"

now one of the issues has been marked as "resolved: by design" but no response as to what this means or any sort of work around.
http://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/prefabs-dont-store-ligthtmap-information-correctly
Over a month after starting this process, and over 2 months for the other issues the only response I get from support is

"Hello
We rely on the community to answer. Someone will get to it in good time"

This is our first time turning to Unity support and the experience has been disheartening.
When working on a project with deadlines, how does this function as "support"?
Has anyone else faced with this kind of problem with Unity before?

 

I have a problem where all of my texture assets show black in the editor selection windows. I opened a support ticket and their "solution" was to reimport all my assets. Of course they just turn black again after a while, but I guess I'm just supposed to keep reimporting everything.

 

"By design" means that it intentionally works the way it does. It could be that what you're doing is out of scope or counter to the system's intended design. (From a glimpse, baking is intended for use on static assets, which I'd have thought rules out prefabs by nature. As an aside, I'd investigate baking in your modelling package depending on the intention of the bake.)

For what it's worth, Unity does have a paid premium support service if that's what you need. Depending on the nature of your project that may or may not be a worthwhile course of action.

 

I'm also sorry to hear you didn't have any luck, our support channel is typically for account, license & payment issues, due to the sheer number of our users, providing technical support to everyone is a little more complicated. Additionally, directing you to use the community site for technical issues is so that we can gather problems and solutions in the public to help others, however it's unfortunate and annoying it didn't work for you.

It looks like your post on the forums had gotten buried in newer posts, in future feel free to respond to your own thread to bump it back to the top of the list for better visibility. Did you contact support again after not getting any help through the community? They should be able to inform you of the notes that @Tautvydas Zilys provided above, these are not visible to the public, not sure why that is but I will investigate as it would have helped you and others a lot faster.

 

I've noticed that sometimes "By Design" really means "By Design Flaw". It really seems odd that they would intentionally break something that was working in 4.6.

 

Well they are using a completely different lighting system in 5.0 than they were in 4.6. That might have something to do with it.

 

Yes, of course. That is likely why the bug/design flaw exists.

 

Because of time differences (we're in Taiwan) I'm just getting most of these messages and I must say I really appreciate all the help. Aurore, I completely understand. I know Unity must be overwhelmed with the amount of questions that pop up so the community really is a great resource (just look at AngryPenguin's history) however, even just being given the comment from Tautvydas would have been much clearer than receiving the same "someone will get to it" response for a month.
Joachim, thank you so much for your answer though, it's enlightening to understand the changes that have been made that are resulting in the problem that we've been facing and to have a work-around.

We are still facing some issues after implementing the scripts where the lighting is coming out very bright in the camera preview (see photos), but having made some progress after all this time is a real boost of confidence to our dev team.

 

This is an awful thing to hear. By the time someone contacts unity support, they've probably already posted to the forums/questions/searched google. Basically you're saying "If the community can't help you, you're on your own!"

 

It is indeed a pretty lame truth, but it's a truth none the less. There's just no practical way that they can have someone personally answer every question someone has.

 

Indeed, I think the resolutions should be more visible on the issue tracker.

 

lol 3 different admins came by to say something. Nice!

 

Well, here u have Joaquim Ante chiming in...

I also am unsatisfied with Support. I have even contacted in the past with my area account manager for licensing questions and get redirected to support@unity3d.com. 4 of 5 emails sent were unanswered.

With time I have found out that Community support (and from asset developers themselves) is the way. Even Unity's people dive in the forum like angels for random help.

As a Pro user, I'd like to have at least a quota of support requests (like 2 priority answers per month).

 

I have the same issue :/

 

Ask yourself how much the cost of maintaining the necessary workforce to handle those support requests would increase the cost of Unity Pro and then ask yourself how it would be any different from paying per request as @superpig suggested.

 

Do you have the support case numbers for the cases that were never answered?

Account Managers can't help with any kind of technical questions I'm afraid.

 

I wouldn't mind to have that at lease as an option. Call it Premium Support Option. Soon I will release my product and I will like to have strong, priority support, to any of my issues, especially having into account that multiplatform products have a wider issue surface.

I understand not every bug can be fixed. Not even have a look at, due to the massive queue. But in this case I'd like to have the Premium Support option I referred before. I'm also an Apple Registered Developer and I have access to 2 support cases (which I took once and got some feedback/contact with a support engineer at least).

I also requested to support@unity3d.com some changes to my subscription plan and never got a reply. I'm about 3 months to release, so I'm not insisting since I don't want any problem due to toggling the subscription from PRO to personal and back to PRO again in such timeframe, but I have paid since January unneccesarily (and I asked to switch to free plan). Anyway, as I say, don't touch my license.

 

How about open-sourcing the documentation then?

 

Plagiarism may occur unless information is deemed proven by official Unity devs.

 

This still requires that all lightmaps be baked in the same scene right? For instance, I couldn't use separate test scenes where I bake individual prefab sets for use in many scenes.

 

All emails to support@unity3d.com get replies. These can take up to 5 days. In 6 years at Unity I have never come across any support emails which haven't been responded to (apart from spam). If people want to PM me the case number that has gone unanswered I'll look into it. (Case numbers are something like 00123456, so that's a 6 digit number with some leading zeros.)

As others have said, with millions of Unity sessions a month, it's just not possible to provide free technical support. It really is the case that community members are able to respond more quickly. Many of us at Unity look over the forums every day, and we poke and prod support, QA and developers to chip in. (Which is why you'll have seen our CTO helping out on this thread.) I'm working on a solution to get a lot of the technical help we give paying support customers made public, into something we're calling a knowledge base, but might have a different name when it goes live. Obviously customers who pay for support and ship us their projects aren't going to want us to just share up their questions and our answers. So some work is going to be needed to convert a support case into an issue and solution. I am growing my team to perform this work - we want all Unity users to find fixes for the problems they encounter.

 

I can back this up from personal experience, though most of it was well over a year ago now.

Most of my requests have been license related - changing PCs at the office and such. They've all had responses inside 24 hours.

On two separate occasions (I think) I've started support conversations about how I was using new features and how to approach certain challenges and both times got solid, ongoing discussion about the issue I was having. They took a few days to get started, but once started they were really helpful and the support staff asked questions of the appropriate engineering staff on my behalf. This was despite the project in question being a hobby one I was doing with a free account, so I was pretty impressed.

 

Then those people need to check their privilege..heh. They paid money for getting their issue resolved promptly..not to keep it hidden like some trade secret advantageous to them and detrimental to other in their industry.

 

How do you know what they paid money for? If the support contract says that issues will remain confidential (which... I'd kind of expect, since they could indirectly reveal trade secrets and such) then they are indeed paying for them to remain confidential.

 

You ever phoned your bank to ask them to justify some fee they charged you? You okay for your bank to put your bank account number, balance, fee charged and explanation onto a public site with an explanation for why the fee was charged? Guess not... but would be totally happy for a general description of the fee, and the causes it will be charged to be easy to find online.

 

Yeah, obviously. Some customers have explicitly named support engineers who are the only people able to see their game code. Some customers have dedicated support machines in our offices, which is where all their issues are dealt with, and with restricted access by members of my team. If you are working on a game linked directly to some new movie, and that game has to ship on a specific date 6 months from now, you're going to want to spend as much money as it takes getting support issues dealt with in complete privacy and with great urgency. Jawa makes patch releases available every week. Many of the bugs that are fixed in patch releases are directly related to problems enterprise support customers have. So it's certainly the case that an indy developer benefits from a bug that a multi-national game company has reported, and my support team and the QA team and the sustained engineering team have all worked on.

 

To both the above relies. I am talking about if Unity tech fixed a bug that affects others. To use your bank analogy.. The bank is shut down and the automatic teller won't spit cash. Doesn't everybody who has a bank account have a right to know? IOW bugfixes are not industry trade secrets. Cash cows maybe.

 

Hmm... This thread was about support not existing.

We have a completely different QA team who try to validate bug reports and escalate them into development. Bug reports that are validated and don't have privacy issues end up on the issue tracker, so customers do have a right to know about many bugs. And, I am sure this has been said many times, but the more detailed a bug report can be, the more likely it is that QA can replicate the issue. There is no SLA for bug reports. There is an SLA for paid support cases that happen to describe bugs.

To compare with the bank analogy... If Unity stops working and every customer is unable to make progress obviously every single dev in the company would jump onto fixing that. Many Unity games get shipped every week, so the general usability of Unity is extremely positive.

Obviously we all understand that a particular team might have a particular problem and want that fixed. That will join a queue of other (relatively minor in terms of number of customers affected) bugs. Some R&D guys might see the bug, be embarrassed about how bad it is and fix it without stopping. Other R&D guys might think the bug is indeed a problem, but compared to new features or other bugs they are working on is relatively minor or work-around-able. We can probably do a much better job of diagnosing and reporting these kinds of decisions. But that is just more engineering work to come up with processes to handle this kind of thing. That will take someone off another task. The KB I mentioned earlier (itself quite a big task) is intended to help document known issues and known solutions. We know that support customers will always come up with new specific issues, so our work is never going to be done.

 

Didn't Graham address exactly that?

He's saying that he'd like to get some system in place where he can do the equivalent for support that doesn't necessarily generate a bug fix (because it might not be that kind of support).

 

No he didn't..and no I am not saying that. I am saying if something gets fixed for a customer then it should be in the next release..regardless if someone paid to have it fixed to begin with...and regardless if it isn't one that affects a majority.

 

We make .p releases each week, and we round up bugs and get them fixed. Typically the Sustained Engineering team will fix errors that customers with support contracts have sent in. We expect customers who's bugs have been fixed to download the latest .p release. So, a customer might have a bug in 4.6, and will get a 4.6.8p17 download with that bug fixed. Typically after a month, all the bugs fixes are rounded up and shipped into 4.6.9f1, which is completely tested and released as the next official release.

 

I've created some new cases in the lighting and script forums to see if this new anomaly can be resolved:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/problems-with-instantiating-baked-prefabs.324514/

 

I've merged your thread with your original one, creating duplicate threads in different forums tends to grab the attention of the moderators who will delete all of them. Keep updates to your problem in the same thread, this will help other users encountering similar problems when searching and us keeping track.

 

Good call, thanks Aurore!

 

The terrain system without the Renderer.How to set up the baking map migration?I find for a long time, can only be set lightmapIndex.

 

Please check out Joachim's response here http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/problems-with-instantiating-baked-prefabs.324514/#post-2194940.

 

I think we really forget that support communities are free. Without the obligation of answering every question just maintaining a site where users have the opportunity to help each other, is a full time job. If I was making something with a deadline I would expect there to be a budget, with a budget I would buy support as absolutely one of the first assets. I try and answer my own unanswered problem posts if I find the solution though. I really dislike it when you do a search and some user takes the time to inform us he/she has found the solution without providing the info! Ek.

 

@Graham Dunnett @Kuba @Joachim_Ante

While this thread it old I reuse it rather than starting a new topic.

I want to publicly object to the choice by Unity to restructure the premium support option. In the past, each question or complaint regarding support has been met with the answer that timely and knowledgeable support is availaible directly from Unity, if you pay for it.

There used to be a starting level suitable for smaller studios, named Indie. It was relatively low cost, and like other options you could buy it for a 3-month period. So a good way for a sole professional or smaller studio to get help during a critical phase and not having to rely on the russian roulette that is forums/answers or normal emails.

However, in their infinite wisdom the entry level support contracts are no more. Nor is it possible to purchase support for shorter time frames. You have to commit to a longer period (x months, where x is a lot more than 3).

How should I interpret that? As currently it reads like "Screw you, small developers!". What are our options? Not many. Cough up the massive extra bunch of cash or once again solely rely on the forums and other public options?

Thanks a lot.

 

You make that sound like it's a bad thing.

 

It is a bad thing.

 

I see a 3 month term for the Small Team option here, is this no longer true?

 

That could change at any moment, you know. It could even get worse!

 

We received info that the 3 month term would be removed starting jan 1.

 

Having to rely solely on the user community for support is a bad thing. If you do not see the problem with this, especially after threads like this one and similar ones, you cannot be developing games as part of a business.
There are times when you need timely, knowledgeable answers. Now it seems we cannot even pay for that "privilege" anymore, unless we are prepared to pay a quite hefty sum for a longer term than we may need or be comfortable with.

 

It cant be relied on, so it's not great in a critical situation.