VRChat is implementing Easy Anti-Cheat to prevent the use of modded clients (UPDATE: EAC update is live)

[Cats]

I'm trying to understand why the Devs have decided that they are going with EAC at the cost of their game apparently getting torn to shreds. Legal trouble with malicious mods or some shit?

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No, the whole game is a legal DMCA bomb, they don't care about that stuff (As just one of thousands of examples, you can play ripped maps straight out of FF7Remake, all assets included, and be the characters). They really don't care about the actual legal stuff (movie worlds lol) because it increases player count and funding.

It's a few things:

1. -VRchat devs have already banned all the mod makers before, but they retracted it because the community exploded and they had no grounds for those bans (writing a random dll that may or may not be used with a loader into the game isn't a TOS infraction). They got egg all over their face on that one and it's reasonable to assume they are vindictive over it.
2. -They don't like having most of the feature control be in the hands of the community. The mod makers bring out features exponentially faster, and more of them, and basically shape the core of the game for the power users. The vanilla game is pretty awful for power users. Time and time again they've been made to look incompetent (not trying to be rude, just being honest) by the mod community being lightyears ahead of the official feature list. It took them literal years to allow interactive touching between hair/ears/tails. That's been in the game since late 2018 as a mod.
3. -They legit do see a security risk and while I think it's embellished, their blog post on the negatives has some truth to it, even if it is only <1% of mod users who go get shady clients for soon-to-be nefarious uses, then realize they get their account stolen themselves by the client. Kind of like downloading a "Free theater movies addon" in firefox. Yeah, can't really cry when you get keylogged from that addon.
4. -It's not really a secret that while the staff are friendly to their "customers" it's been reported by many many many people they have a bit of a celebrity/god complex and don't like the mod community, hence the ban exodus a few years back.

The lying and dishonest communication to users about this process is what pisses me off the most. Staff have repeatedly shown they are quite immature at times as both communicators and a company. If they were transparent, talked with the community, and got the regular game "good enough" to be workable for disabled users and power users, this wouldn't be a problem.

Whitelisted mods, a steam workshop, putting in mods that are literally just a couple of lines of code that massively improve the game, anything...

Instead, they sudden shadow dropped this, yeeted it out there and are plugging their ears and running from the lit fuse hoping the tween quest userbase keeps them afloat and peopple who have nowhere else to go to hang with their friends. It's pretty sad. Just like youtube: Horrible update, everyone cries, "where you gonna go nerds?"

 

[Shrike]

On one hand, VRChat changed my life for the better and this sucks ass because I'm already having some friends straight up quit VR entirely meaning I'll never get to see them again, while others are sticking to VRChat regardless and so I'll still see them less because I just don't know how much time I can now in a platform so anti-user.

On the other, I'm a Neos diehard and part of their mentor team who's been helping out friends and some random new people the last few days get into the game and it's lovely to see a platform I love so much see such growth, if a bit overwhelming. Neos is a complicated experience for sure with a hell of a learning curve to get past but once you do it's really amazing in what it offers and I hope people fleeing from VRChat continue to give it a try and stick around!

 

[Lukar]

They put up a new blog post tonight with specific details on their near-term plans for "new" features.

Addressing your Feedback — VRChat

Yesterday afternoon, we announced that we would be reprioritizing, reorganizing, and changing our internal development roadmap to focus on the feedback you've given us. As we promised, we’re sharing a small roadmap of what the next few weeks are going to look like, and when you can expect more upd

hello.vrchat.com

Horizon Adjust is a feature that we developed during a recent internal feature jam that was already on the way. It allows a user to change their "horizon" however they want to orient it, which allows controller movement and menu usage as if the user was standing even if they are lying down.

Visual Adjustments are a set of features that includes a set of color-blindedness filters that can be set, as well as a slider that adjusts the intensity of these filters. Additionally, there is an option to affect only the VRChat UI, or the VRChat UI and the world you're in.

Notably, the method we're using to adjust colors for filtering in the prototype does not work on Quest due to graphical limitations. We will be addressing this with further iterative updates and adjustments.

This feature will also include the ability to turn off Bloom, as well as gamma/brightness and contrast sliders.

Custom Mic Sensitivity will allow users to adjust the "trigger point" at which the user's microphone sends audio to others, helping users with noisy IRL environments.

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We've also identified a number of other features and improvements that are high priority and relatively straightforward to implement – and we're aiming for these as soon as possible. Our internal goal is within the next week or two for these, but that could be sooner or later. It all depends on how our development and testing process goes.

Having a Movable Main Menu is probably one of our most-requested features. The main menu will appear in front of your face no matter how you're standing (or laying), and you can grab it and move it around with your controller. Our upcoming new Main Menu will have this feature at launch, and we are going to integrate a "quick and dirty" implementation for the current main menu to hold users over. Here's a quick video preview of both our new Main Menu and the movement feature:

https://giant.gfycat.com/GrimUntidyFrogmouth.mp4

Personal Mirrors are also another extremely popular item in feedback – a local-only mirror that you can move around, adjust the size of, adjust the rendering settings for, and lock to your avatar optionally:

https://giant.gfycat.com/BitesizedDelectableHoopoe.mp4

We're also aiming to add a calibration mirror that appears in front of you when you calibrate your full-body tracking. The current prototype doesn't show the calibration spheres and resets your Personal Mirror, so we don't have a preview video for that yet.

Adding More Favorites for avatars, worlds, and friends is also in our plans. No exact numbers yet, but we'll be boosting everyone's favorite count.

Haptics on touch is a popular feature request where your controller haptics activate when you come in contact with someone's Avatar Dynamics, increasing immersion when patting someone on the head or touching a tail. We're integrating this as a base Avatar Dynamics feature that you can enable or disable via the Action Menu.

The Particle Limiter is actually already implemented into VRChat, but it's been a "beta" feature hidden in the configuration for a very long time. We're adding an option to turn it on or off into our UI so you don't have to restart to change this setting. Its settings will still be only adjustable via the configuration file for now, as we lack the room in the current menu system to add detailed configuration fields.

We're investigating the best way to implement Local Voice Falloff Adjustment. This is a feature where users can adjust how fast other people's voices fall off with distance. However, this feature has some complications with existing Udon-powered voice adjustment systems that must be resolved. Additionally, Steam Audio is a high-priority existing roadmap item, and our switch to that system may further complicate a falloff adjustment setting. It may be best for us to instead focus efforts on swapping to Steam Audio first. At the moment, we are working with Valve to resolve some integration issues.

These are not all of the changes and features in this near-term roadmap. These are the ones we've identified as being both High Priority and Close to Shipping. There are more features on the way that we're still designing and planning for.

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When we are able to free some resources back from development on these rapid iterations, we will move to release Main Menu 2.0, which is currently in the "optimize and polish" stage. The new UI addresses many of the feature requests we've had in the last few days, and getting it in front of you is a high priority.

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And the cherry on top of it all:

In addition, we will be doing our best to make sure the community is better informed about what is coming down the pipeline in the future.

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My thoughts:

• Credit where credit is due: it's great that they outlined specifically what features they expect to be putting out in the next few weeks, along with video previews of a couple of them. And they're pretty useful features, at that. However, it's still absolutely ludicrous how this was handled. They knew that a large chunk of the community used mods for important features, and it didn't occur to them before the EAC update that they should have shifted priorities to add those features natively to the game in order to ease people's concerns at least somewhat? This is far from being a full list of things people used mods for, but it is at least a start, and this would have gone a long way for them a couple of days ago, even if they still insisted on adding EAC in about 24 hours.
• The way they worded this post makes it sound like while some features were already planned and in the works, many weren't, and only became considered after the backlash this week. Why did they not try to poll people on the features they use mods for the most beforehand and try to plan this out better? They knew that a large chunk of players used mods, and considering the backlash they got last year regarding banning mod creators, they should have known how this was going to go down. (And hell, it sounds like they did have an idea of how people would react, which just makes the way they handled this even more puzzling.) Like, I know they probably just wanted to "rip the Band-Aid off" so-to-speak and get EAC added sooner than later, but fuck... This was still handled so poorly.
• I'm sure they honestly do have plans to keep people better informed going forward. However, given how they've handled this whole thing, I do not trust them at all. They've got a lot to do before they get my trust back. And if they don't their shit together enough by the time ChilloutVR is properly up and running again, then it's going to be harder to get some people back. VRChat is likely to stay the most popular no matter what, that's indisputable, but this has still affected a non-insignificant chunk of their userbase.

I'm still not going back until the rest of my friend group does, and so far, everyone is looking forward to trying out Chillout once the servers are working again.

 

[Rocketjay]

They put up a new blog post tonight with specific details on their near-term plans for "new" features.

Addressing your Feedback — VRChat

Yesterday afternoon, we announced that we would be reprioritizing, reorganizing, and changing our internal development roadmap to focus on the feedback you've given us. As we promised, we’re sharing a small roadmap of what the next few weeks are going to look like, and when you can expect more upd

hello.vrchat.com

And the cherry on top of it all:



My thoughts:

• Credit where credit is due: it's great that they outlined specifically what features they expect to be putting out in the next few weeks, along with video previews of a couple of them. And they're pretty useful features, at that. However, it's still absolutely ludicrous how this was handled. They knew that a large chunk of the community used mods for important features, and it didn't occur to them before the EAC update that they should have shifted priorities to add those features natively to the game in order to ease people's concerns at least somewhat? This is far from being a full list of things people used mods for, but it is at least a start, and this would have gone a long way for them a couple of days ago, even if they still insisted on adding EAC in about 24 hours.
• The way they worded this post makes it sound like while some features were already planned and in the works, many weren't, and only became considered after the backlash this week. Why did they not try to poll people on the features they use mods for the most beforehand and try to plan this out better? They knew that a large chunk of players used mods, and considering the backlash they got last year regarding banning mod creators, they should have known how this was going to go down. (And hell, it sounds like they did have an idea of how people would react, which just makes the way they handled this even more puzzling.) Like, I know they probably just wanted to "rip the Band-Aid off" so-to-speak and get EAC added sooner than later, but fuck... This was still handled so poorly.
• I'm sure they honestly do have plans to keep people better informed going forward. However, given how they've handled this whole thing, I do not trust them at all. They've got a lot to do before they get my trust back. And if they don't their shit together enough by the time ChilloutVR is properly up and running again, then it's going to be harder to get some people back. VRChat is likely to stay the most popular no matter what, that's indisputable, but this has still affected a non-insignificant chunk of their userbase.

I'm still not going back until the rest of my friend group does, and so far, everyone is looking forward to trying out Chillout once the servers are working again.

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Honestly if it takes a week to get some of these features up and running, what exactly were they doing for 5 years?

 

[Lukar]

Honestly if it takes a week to get some of these features up and running, what exactly were they doing for 5 years?

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Exactly! They had years to listen to people if they really didn't want us to be using mods.

 

[Nimby]

This whole shit really stinks. They expect blowback from this announcement, but don't announce any changes to improve the user experience until AFTER people rightfully got upset. Then they reveal some of these QOL features absent from the game, only capable with modded clients, can be reasonably implemented in a week or two. If the development team doesn't want you the mod the game, why did it take so long to implement these changes themselves and could it have hurt to delay the patch rollout until some of them were functionally complete?

And I don't get why whitelisting mods isn't on the table, your userbase cared about the experience you provided enough to make the game better for everyone, and then you basically destroy all the work they have developed in the span of a day and a half. Yes, you can argue relying on mods for simple QOL features and accessibility is bad practice, and you would be right. At this point though, a lot of the upcoming changes seem to be things the community had already figured out. The community is ALWAYS going to find incredible ways of enhancing their experience with any game, things the development team never considered or would be too niche/infeasible.

Everyone in my friend group is taking a break as well (even though I personally can't play VR), playing different community games and such. Their blunder can be turned into a good thing I reckon, just not the way they planned it.

 

[Defect]

Why couldn't they at least wait until they officially added the most requested features before doing this?

 

[JigglesBunny]

For as much as I love VRChat, it's always lacked basic QOL features and technically speaking, it's a hot mess. The fact that they can suddenly throw all of these features in within two weeks time despite having refused to properly maintain the game by updating it with basic QOL additions like these for the last five years smells pretty fucking rotten from where I'm sitting.

Let's call a spade a spade. They were content to let the vanilla game shamble on in a fairly pitiful state for years, only releasing essential updates that kept the game from collapsing in on itself, all whilst raking in the VRChat+ dough. They see an opportunity to come down on the modding community that they've clearly never respected or supported and implement EAC and they take a deserved lashing for it, a lashing so severe that it threatens their mealticket and now they need to actually add the shit that people have been begging them to do for years, shit that they clearly could have added long ago but simply opted not to because they saw no incentive to bother. It's gross. It's really, really fucking gross.

 

[ChoklitCow]

I have not used VR Chat, but I promise this question comes in good faith. What are some common mods that you all use that you are losing out on with this change that negatively impact your experience? I've read through the thread and seen some significant focus on accessibility mods for users of differing abilities, and it appears the dev agrees they need to focus on that (and I think we can all agree why haven't they done something about this long ago).

But what are the other mods you all use that are causing you and your friends to leave/take breaks as folks have mentioned in this thread?

 

[Lukar]

I have not used VR Chat, but I promise this question comes in good faith. What are some common mods that you all use that you are losing out on with this change that negatively impact your experience? I've read through the thread and seen some significant focus on accessibility mods for users of differing abilities, and it appears the dev agrees they need to focus on that (and I think we can all agree why haven't they done something about this long ago).

But what are the other mods you all use that are causing you and your friends to leave/take breaks as folks have mentioned in this thread?

Click to shrink...

A lot of things that, while small on their own, add up to make the game more enjoyable as a whole:

• a clock in the menu (no, really)
• notifications when someone joins your instance
• ability to change your avatar's viewpoint in-game without needing to change it in Unity and reupload the whole thing
• ability to enable closed captions for people who are hard of hearing
• ability to properly use the menu when laying down
• improved mirror resolution
• improved screenshot tool (ability to save as JPEG rather than PNG, auto-rotate screenshots to be the correct orientation, etc.)
• mods that prevent crashes caused by people exploiting avatar shaders
• ability to set limits on avatars based on their features (polygon count, etc.)
• ability to hide portals from blocked users or people you aren't friends with
• ability to enable a prompt when walking through a portal instead of automatically going through it to another world
• ability to search for publicly available avatars to use

And much more.

 

[ChoklitCow]

Thank you. It was hard to visualize the impact without personally having the experience. My mind kept gravitating towards Minecraft and what would happen if they would strip the community of mods, but even with my lack of info that felt somewhat apples to oranges.

 

[Qikz]

Exactly! They had years to listen to people if they really didn't want us to be using mods.

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This is a problem, but I'm just thankful that they're doing it now.

They've also been speaking TO modders. This is a massive step in the right direction and I'm super happy. I feel bad for Tupper too, he's a really nice guy and he's been having to read some awful, awful shit.

Developer Update - 28 July 2022

Hello! Welcome to the latest VRChat Developer Update. Here, we’ll be talking about what we’re working on and what our progress looks like so far. These will be daily for a bit, although we’ll likely swap to a slower schedule eventually. We don’t think posting “worked on the same thing” 3 days...

ask.vrchat.com

 

[chaobreaker]

When I watched that People Makes Games doc on VRChat, I came to the conclusion that the devs behind it had their finger on the pulse of the community. I guess that was wrong?

This all seems like the most boneheaded decision to make in the face of Facebook fumbling their own metaverse.

 

[Shinobido Heart]

Saw this on the VRChat reddit:

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com

 

[Iztok]

A chat client needing anti-cheat.

What a time to be alive.