Who is thinking of stopping there Autodesk subscriptions

[xsisupport]

1- Support. Yeah, I'm not convinced. I've only been using Softimage for a little over 4 years now and frankly, 'support' has been Stephen Blair, Luc-Eric, and the XSI List. Not Autodesk, and even when Stephen worked at Autodesk, I wouldn't say AD was the entity providing the support. "Autodesk" has provided very little by way of meaningful support. To be fair, we haven't tried to use AD as much lately, but that's because the times we did, we got very little out of it besides 'did you try restarting Softimage?', and the List was far more productive. So when I'm told that I have to pay that much money per year for 'support', what the heck does that even mean? I don't care about semantics, I don't care about theoreticals, I care about the actual support. When AD charges me for support, what exactly are they charging me for? In my experience, the support hasn't been that meaningful, but I'd like to hear from folks who've had the opposite experience, because I know my mine is limited.

I'm sorry to hear that we didn't provide good technical support. I assure you that the Softimage guys like me and Manny take it pretty seriously. Did you fill in the customer survey when your case was closed? Management is supposed to follow up on with customers who are dissatisfied (did you ask them to contact you?).

Note: I'm talking about technical support, not the general customer service/licensing/business services group.

You can log support requests in the Subscription Center or call (if you can call the American hotline...the Softimage team is primarily in Montreal).
The support team has to take your support call and provide a first response within 2 to 8 hours, depending on the severity of the issue.
On the forums, no one has to answer. If you contact support, they have to answer.

After that, the support agent has to keep you updated and follow up on the case.
If you're not satisfied with the support, you do have get to fill in a survey and ask for someone to contact you.
Support can't fix bugs. Support makes sure it is repro and gets it logged and can make some noise about it, but after that it moves over to the dev team and product management.

Here's an overviewof what you get with Advanced Support

[t4d]

how many times have sofitmage users Needed and USED support ?
of any type Be it Windows support OR Dell Support or ANY Computer related support ?

personally I would put my hand up for once a year ( counting everything )

if it's good Software well documented and has a good community (which softimage is)
why would you need support ?

Does support

• model a character for me ?
  animate it ?
  create a explosion in ice for me ?
  setup my mental ray settings ?

Please I may join if you can tick next to any of these ?


one last thing Mr xsisupport
how much is "Advanced Support" ABOVE standard $1000 a year Subrciption ?
and do I have to pay for all 7 seats to have "Advanced Support" to get Remote desktop assistance on demand ?

and IF "24x7 telephone support for severity 1 issues" is only open to "Enterprise Priority" How much more this that ?

Tho since this is a world wide product 24/7 support should be a given since we all can not work within the Canadian time Zone.


@ EricTRocks where's my beta invite I pay subscription ?
sorry dude I just can not see your point, $1000 per seat is alot of money, I don't even pay for it, my boss does but I just see the $14000 given to Autodesk for the 2013 - 2014 type updates and feel wrong looking my CEO in the face. AND my artists since they prefer much cooler things like learning Houdini, modo, realflow, Arnold, Playing foosball and Hella cool Christmas parties.

people want real tangible features they can see and use, for the REAL money that is being handed over.

if your happy with the right to use old versions and splash screen with next years date on it. good for you buddy

but I find it extremely hard you can not see that the rest of us are Not Happy with what $1000+ gets you in 2013.

[Hirazi Blue]

@t4d - consider this a friendly moderator warning:
please "tone it down" a little, you're really coming on "too strong" IMHO
(and yes, those are deliberately vague qualifications, I hope you will be able to parse them though)
;)

[EricTRocks]

how many times have sofitmage users Needed and USED support?
of any type Be it Windows support OR Dell Support or ANY Computer related support?

You could start a poll and try to find out. Again I'll say, when we have a great support staff (Stephen) who is active in the community and makes the resources we may not need to call. However that information wouldn't have been put out there and we wouldn't have the support folks so active in the community if they weren't paid. You know with your subscription fees. So think of a good chunk of your subscription going towards building up the resources we have in the community like the support blog and the accessibility of the Softimage support folks.

Does support
model a character for me ?
animate it ?
create a explosion in ice for me ?
setup my mental ray settings ?

No but they can debug issues you're having while doing any of those and also be able to create scripts to automate some tasks if needed.

how much is "Advanced Support" ABOVE standard $1000 a year Subrciption ?

Softimage only has Advanced support...

@ EricTRocks where's my beta invite I pay subscription ?

Uh, you don't get beta invite just because you're on subscription. However they posted the links a few months back. Did you register / sign-up? Might be able to hop on the next beta cycle if so. This was posted and available to all Softimage users, not just ones on subscription.

Playing foosball and Hella cool Christmas parties.

Glad the priorities are in order.

if your happy with the right to use old versions and splash screen with next years date on it. good for you buddy

I am thanks! Those bug fixes sure will help the day to day life.

but I find it extremely hard you can not see that the rest of us are Not Happy with what $1000+ gets you in 2013.

I can but the fact that it's being disguised as a horrible release and the end of days is just not true.

If you're not happy, don't pay for subscription and spend it elsewhere. You're free to do whatever you want.

[xsisupport]

one last thing Mr xsisupport
how much is "Advanced Support" ABOVE standard $1000 a year Subrciption ?
and do I have to pay for all 7 seats to have "Advanced Support" to get Remote desktop assistance on demand ?

and IF "24x7 telephone support for severity 1 issues" is only open to "Enterprise Priority" How much more this that ?

Tho since this is a world wide product 24/7 support should be a given since we all can not work within the Canadian time Zone.

Hi

Advanced support is included in your Softimage subscription.

If you have one seat on Subscription then you can get support.

Enterprise Priority costs a lot more. Think of it as the support program that companies with a 1000 or more seats might buy (that number of seats is just for illustration, to give you a ballpark idea).

Thanks

Stephen Blair
ex-employee at Autodesk and former Softimage guy

[El Burritoh]

1- Support. Yeah, I'm not convinced. I've only been using Softimage for a little over 4 years now and frankly, 'support' has been Stephen Blair, Luc-Eric, and the XSI List. Not Autodesk, and even when Stephen worked at Autodesk, I wouldn't say AD was the entity providing the support. "Autodesk" has provided very little by way of meaningful support. To be fair, we haven't tried to use AD as much lately, but that's because the times we did, we got very little out of it besides 'did you try restarting Softimage?', and the List was far more productive. So when I'm told that I have to pay that much money per year for 'support', what the heck does that even mean? I don't care about semantics, I don't care about theoreticals, I care about the actual support. When AD charges me for support, what exactly are they charging me for? In my experience, the support hasn't been that meaningful, but I'd like to hear from folks who've had the opposite experience, because I know my mine is limited.

I'm sorry to hear that we didn't provide good technical support. I assure you that the Softimage guys like me and Manny take it pretty seriously. Did you fill in the customer survey when your case was closed? Management is supposed to follow up on with customers who are dissatisfied (did you ask them to contact you?).

Note: I'm talking about technical support, not the general customer service/licensing/business services group.

You can log support requests in the Subscription Center or call (if you can call the American hotline...the Softimage team is primarily in Montreal).
The support team has to take your support call and provide a first response within 2 to 8 hours, depending on the severity of the issue.
On the forums, no one has to answer. If you contact support, they have to answer.

After that, the support agent has to keep you updated and follow up on the case.
If you're not satisfied with the support, you do have get to fill in a survey and ask for someone to contact you.
Support can't fix bugs. Support makes sure it is repro and gets it logged and can make some noise about it, but after that it moves over to the dev team and product management.

Here's an overviewof what you get with Advanced Support

Look at this guy! Still providing support! In fact, he's providing support not on the product, but on the support department for a company he doesn't even work at any more! He's a champ!

I don't remember the exact circumstances, but there was one time we inquired with AD support, they got back to us, and after a day or so basically said 'yeah we're not sure what the problem is, but we've logged it and we'll be in touch if something changes.' So we went to the List and within a couple of hours had several people saying 'oh yeah it's a known issue, but you have 2-3 options for getting around it and here they are.' Well surely Support knew about these workarounds? I dunno. I'm willing to give Support the benefit of the doubt, but the end result wouldn't have changed: that day, we got a solution from the community, not from Autodesk. And it wasn't the only day like that. Now to be fair to AD, we're not actively leveraging all the support options we have with them. But that's because in the past, that process hasn't been as fruitful as going to the community. Plus, you yourself, Stephen are active in the community. So the question we inevitably come to is 'why are we paying for support?' This question can be taken in two senses. 1) "Why are we paying for this? We're not using it." and 2) "Why are we paying for this, it hasn't done us much good when we did use it."

So perhaps unwittingly, our experience with AD support and our experience with the List have taught us that the community is where we're likely to get answers. I know that as the guy who used to be AD support, Stephen, you're going to take that a certain way, but it's honestly not meant as a reflection on you at all. As I said, you've personally solved more issues for us than I can count (and I recall some great support you personally gave us when you were at AD!), but again, the fact that you were accessible via the List, along with so many veterans, meant that once again, the 'community' is where we would get most of our answers.

Am I saying that support should be free? No, I'm just saying that it seems overpriced for what you get out of it. Again, that's just from our experience. I know a lot of other studios have much tighter relationships and have had a very different experience.

[El Burritoh]

...I'd argue that most people are really subscribing because of the included upgrades...

I'd argue it's for support (we'll get to that in a minute) and for the upgrades. Upgrades which you have never or will ever have any guarantee of knowing what is being developed and will be delivered in the gold version to 100% certainty. You're paying for upgrades. What that upgrade offers you don't know for certain. You can try to influence that by joining the beta, contacting support and telling them what areas are lacking and giving a thorough run down of what isn't working that should be working in a certain way, and commenting on threads on the forums / mailing list of stuff that's bugged you forever. (<-- Holy run-on sentence batman!). You are never guaranteed a paradigm changing feature. Ever. Period. I do agree there is much improvement and new features that should be put into the software, but there is no way to guarantee it unless your company can afford to be on escalation (forget what the AD name for it is) where you have your own dedicated devs working on features for you.

...but I'd like to hear from folks who've had the opposite experience, because I know my mine is limited.

You're right Stephen has been a rock star and being that he has been so active in the community and built up that amazing Softimage support blog, there isn't much reason to go through "proper" channels. I give that credit to Stephen entirely. But remember, when you're paying for support you're paying for people like Stephen to be accessible and doing what he's doing (or did). I have called support in the past and gotten help especially with licensing. I've had a few occasions where I hit a bug and support were able to repro and it was sent to development and fixed in the next release. Not sure why you got the whole "restart Softimage" b/s. Might want to call up support and complain about that.

But I'll bet it's not as common as all that.

Most of the places that I've worked at were using the previous release in production with the newest one on special cases and for testing only to be rolled out mid-way to never on the project I was on. It's used quite a bit and it's a smart and strategic one. If a new release is riddled with bugs you can't throw it into production right away and need the older versions to fall back on.

A) pay the subscription and get no benefit from the upgrade, or B) let the sub lapse, and face the whole 'hey if you don't pay the sub, you precipitate the demise of Softimage!' argument which we've actually heard from AD folks themselves.

It's being a bit over simplified in that you pay the subscription and get no benefit. See the above where you get support and previous version access. That is worth a good chunk of your subscription fee. Everyone has the choice to be on subscription or not. If you want to have the power to toss the money wherever you want then don't be on subscription and pay the full price for each new version. Though I'm not sure this actually makes any sense business-wise, it is an option. I don't think there is a majority of users / studios that are upset about this release and will be pulling the plug on subscription, unlike a few others here do.

Thanks Eric! I appreciate your feedback and clarifications.

I don't expect studios will be pulling the plug on subscriptions either, although I don't think that's a reflection on their level of satisfaction. I think it's just a case of having very few options. As for using a previous version instead of upgrading, yes, you're totally right about that. I wasn't even thinking along those lines, but I should have been. Although that inspires a follow up question: if I don't upgrade, am I being charged to maintain the status quo? Maybe it's just a matter of perspective? Maybe mine is just off. No doubt it's all relative to specific situations we find ourselves in. I think I should re-qualify my 'pay the sub and get no benefit' comment: Pay it and get far less benefit than you believe you should be getting for the price. Well then of course, if you don't like it, just cancel the sub. But as you rightly said, that makes even less business-sense in most cases. So I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. I HAVE to incur cost on some level, either paying a greater cost down the line when I upgrade out-of-sub, or pay now for the privilege of staying where I am. But in either case, I don't feel I'm getting a particularly good deal. Does that makes sense? Am I just way off? (Maybe I am... I've been known to be...)

I really am curious, I'm not being belligerent.

[xsisupport]

Look at this guy! Still providing support! In fact, he's providing support not on the product, but on the support department for a company he doesn't even work at any more! He's a champ!

I don't remember the exact circumstances, but there was one time we inquired with AD support, they got back to us, and after a day or so basically said 'yeah we're not sure what the problem is, but we've logged it and we'll be in touch if something changes.' So we went to the List and within a couple of hours had several people saying 'oh yeah it's a known issue, but you have 2-3 options for getting around it and here they are.' Well surely Support knew about these workarounds? I dunno. I'm willing to give Support the benefit of the doubt, but the end result wouldn't have changed: that day, we got a solution from the community, not from Autodesk. And it wasn't the only day like that. Now to be fair to AD, we're not actively leveraging all the support options we have with them. But that's because in the past, that process hasn't been as fruitful as going to the community. Plus, you yourself, Stephen are active in the community. So the question we inevitably come to is 'why are we paying for support?' This question can be taken in two senses. 1) "Why are we paying for this? We're not using it." and 2) "Why are we paying for this, it hasn't done us much good when we did use it."

So perhaps unwittingly, our experience with AD support and our experience with the List have taught us that the community is where we're likely to get answers. I know that as the guy who used to be AD support, Stephen, you're going to take that a certain way, but it's honestly not meant as a reflection on you at all. As I said, you've personally solved more issues for us than I can count (and I recall some great support you personally gave us when you were at AD!), but again, the fact that you were accessible via the List, along with so many veterans, meant that once again, the 'community' is where we would get most of our answers.

Am I saying that support should be free? No, I'm just saying that it seems overpriced for what you get out of it. Again, that's just from our experience. I know a lot of other studios have much tighter relationships and have had a very different experience.

Hi

I can't say that support is overpriced, because I don't know what percentage of the Subscription price is allocated for support ;)

Yeah, not everyone needs direct support from Autodesk.

In fact the general Autodesk support model is that support starts with an Autodesk community and then rolls up to the support team if necessary if you are on subs (see forums.autodesk.com). For M&E products, the equivalent is the AREA, but Softimage has the mailing list where you can deal with peers and softimage Devs, QAs, and support staff. Peers can answer questions that we never can...I don't work in production. But you still deal direct with some employees, so that's a benefit.

Again, not everyone needs direct support from a company, but I still spend all day answering questions.

[EricTRocks]

Although that inspires a follow up question: if I don't upgrade, am I being charged to maintain the status quo? Maybe it's just a matter of perspective? Maybe mine is just off. No doubt it's all relative to specific situations we find ourselves in.

Well no, you're paying for the new version and in many cases that new version works just fine and you can roll it into production rather quickly. It's just a safe guard. If you find bugs in the new version you contact support, they repro and report to dev. Dev fixes it and in the SP you're all set and rolling. I think some people take the lazy route and just say, "oh it doesn't work. bummer. Back to using the old version and not upgrading." Not saying you are one of those but what should happen is that the line of communication needs to be constant and repetitive. I mean in official ways not just posting on a community forum that x and y are broken. Things need to be logged correctly for them to get fixed.

You're within you rights to not like a release and feel you should be getting more for your money. Make sure you let AD know that through proper channels.

[Falam]

Hopefully everyone is aware how it all works, easier to figure out then Binary Code

[El Burritoh]

Although that inspires a follow up question: if I don't upgrade, am I being charged to maintain the status quo? Maybe it's just a matter of perspective? Maybe mine is just off. No doubt it's all relative to specific situations we find ourselves in.

Well no, you're paying for the new version and in many cases that new version works just fine and you can roll it into production rather quickly. It's just a safe guard. If you find bugs in the new version you contact support, they repro and report to dev. Dev fixes it and in the SP you're all set and rolling. I think some people take the lazy route and just say, "oh it doesn't work. bummer. Back to using the old version and not upgrading." Not saying you are one of those but what should happen is that the line of communication needs to be constant and repetitive. I mean in official ways not just posting on a community forum that x and y are broken. Things need to be logged correctly for them to get fixed.

You're within you rights to not like a release and feel you should be getting more for your money. Make sure you let AD know that through proper channels.

Thanks Eric, I think that's a perfectly sensible thing to expect: if something seems amiss to you, you need to make it known, and via the right channels.

[talent103]

TO answer the question. Thinking about it. Yes. Will I actually do it No. I may come from a different perspective as I own the Softimage/ Maya Suite. Even though I am not very excited about this years upgrades. I still make money of the programs. It is just another business expense for me as an LLC. It would be foolish for me to stop subscription. Especially with other packages that I don't know as well as XSI. I had some major help with Nhair recently and I had loads of help from manny in the past. So what would make me stop subscription? If things slowed down to the point that I could not pay for it. Things have been slow for me the past cple of months. BTW I am currently looking for my next gig so if anyone needs an XSI guy in NYC here I am. But I am sure the next gig will come my way soon. Fact is subscription has paid for itself every year. Thats just my story though.

[t4d]

I can but the fact that it's being disguised as a horrible release and the end of days is just not true.

If you're not happy, don't pay for subscription and spend it elsewhere. You're free to do whatever you want.

Excellent But I do not think anyone said is was a "disguised or horrible" release,
more it had no Value didn't give real improvement and was not worth the money we perceptive we paid for it.

So If you can pass those feeling that some have here up the chain of Autodesk that would be great

I never want to sound like I am being sharper or personal with anyone who works at Autodesk
I only want to sound sharp at the policies and decisions made by the corporation called Autodesk

[talent103]

Looks like these guys have stopped their subscriptions
sad:(
http://www.stashmedia.tv/?p=16499

[Bullit]

Companies go down. I don't think that is relevant for this case.
Anyway i think the v2014 is better than v2013 and might show some light at end of the tunnel. If true the future will tell. The big list of bug fixes, some actual everyday usable tools(camera seq/ice overides) make it a better release.
.

[Superpositivo]

I agree.
I also think that it's a massive effort to dig deep down a code created in years and carry all the problems created by others.

The amount of fixing could be like to clean a ground to build up securely on it.