18 ms·

VRchat bans mods, embraces EAC

246 points by cowtools 4y ago

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
Exact Audio Copy?
- 4ggr0 4y ago
  Easy Anti-Cheat, https://www.easy.ac https://www.easy.ac
RektBoy 4y ago
Guess what what will happen? Hackers will circumvent EAC. And modders will go extinct. How to kill your game, speedrun %any.
whoomp12342 4y ago
the East Australian Current? Gimme some shell bro!
21Mayflower 4y ago
josephcsible 4y ago
It's another case of where "security" means keeping your computer secure from you. And the password stealer argument is just stupid: by the time EAC kicks in, your password is already stolen.
- sensitivefrost 4y ago
  How so?
  - google234123 4y ago
    They are saying if you download an application (e.g. vrchat.exe) from the internet than it can steal your passwords as soon as you launch it.
    - sensitivefrost 4y ago
      That's not what VRchat's blog post say at all, though. "Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes as well as other information. These users – often without even realizing it! – run the risk of losing their account, or having their computers become part of a larger botnet." People running a backdoor client and getting their passwords stolen? That doesn't sound... wrong?
      - sudosysgen 4y ago
        The wrong part is that somehow EAC will help prevent that. It won't.
        shultays 4y ago
        It would prevent it in a way that you know that the mod you are downloading is not likely to work and you wouldn't download it in the first place.
        sudosysgen 4y ago
        Not really, some mods will still work
        google234123 4y ago
        The chance of some application downloaded for free on the internet will bypass EAC is minuscule
- google234123 4y ago
  This is only partially true. Once the knowledge that unofficial clients won’t work gets out people won’t go looking for them.
  - pteraspidomorph 4y ago
    Unofficial malicious clients will still work, only the safe open source ones won't. Dodgy EAC bypasses seem to be easy to find, and will likely put people who try to use them at real risk.
    - google234123 4y ago
      It's actually really hard to distribute a cheat to a lot of people without it getting flagged.
      - pteraspidomorph 4y ago
        Yeah, let me clarify my argument there. Open source, safe, well-known clients, mods or modding systems can easily be monitored for workarounds and flagged, and become unviable. Malicious actors with second intentions however can keep finding new exploits and releasing small, obscure, harmful software that has way less exposure because the vast majority of people are not interested in harming anyone, they just want their mods to do something minor like displaying screenshots in the loading screen or adding support for eye tracking. They will not seek these out. These will be sold (financial incentive) or used by people with too much time on their hands and an axe to grind.
- gtirloni 4y ago
  You can do whatever you want with your computer, just don't try to connect to their proprietary servers.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    But now you're into the Service-as-a-Software-Substitute problem. I can't usefully use the VRChat client without doing that.
    - gtirloni 4y ago
      I agree but I was replying to your initial point about locking down our computers. I think the downvoters don't get this. I think there's a case to be made that VRChat allowing mods in a safe way is possible, if they wanted to do it. But they clearly don't see value in that. I hope they're proven wrong soon.
Kaze404 4y ago
Wouldn't want people cheating in our highly competitive virtual hangout video game. At least it still works on Linux.
- mjevans 4y ago
  "Cheating", IE sideloading anything useful or improving beyond the base app? Sounds like they want to compete with Second Life for imaginary scarcity.
  - jamesu 4y ago
    I'm aware of several communities which seem to rely heavily on custom mods. Not sure what they are going to do, though on the plus side maybe we will see more innovation in the multiplayer VR marketplace.
  - Kaze404 4y ago
    I agree. I was being facetious.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Possibly part of aggressive anti-NFT movement?
- david_allison 4y ago
  > At least it still works on Linux. But Linux probably no longer works on VRChat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ&t=5052s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ&t=5052s
  - Kaze404 4y ago
    Wow, that's amazing! Thanks for the link. Makes me want to dust off the old Quest 2 and play some VRChat to meet some nerds :)
  - AgentME 4y ago
    This still works. This wasn't a disallowed mod, this was part of a custom world made for VRChat.
dingleberry420 4y ago
> “Modified clients” are a large problem for VRChat in a variety of ways. Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues. Imagine if non-game companies were this open about their servers being exploitable
- yazzku 4y ago
  I don't know why you got downvoted. It's really odd that they don't enforce this stuff server-side.
  - crummy 4y ago
    why do you think no multiplayer video games have tried that?
    - Groxx 4y ago
      Because... they do...? Some things are legitimately much easier to restrict client side e.g. for FPS: you can send other-user data all (or much) of the time and not have to worry about if they're looking in that direction, or if there's line-of-sight through the hole they just shot in a wall. That kind of thing takes a lot of server-side compute, and unless it's perfect it's still a competitive advantage. But when it's not competitive? And they're basically just blocking abusive clients? Heck no, they do server side restrictions. And they often pay the price badly when they do not.
    - weberer 4y ago
      Huh? Almost all of them do. Try logging into WoW, send a packet that says you picked up a million gold, and observe what happens to your account.
permo-w 4y ago
what are the implications of this for users? are there ubiquitous QOL mods that a lot of people run on VR chat?
- pteraspidomorph 4y ago
  No one will admit it, because of the company's insane attitude towards modding and the heavy handed bans that result from it, plus a policy of preventing actual discussion about said bans, but yes, that is very much the case.
armchairhacker 4y ago
Since VRChat isn’t open-source and runs the servers they can do whatever they want. They could add in required ads and telemetry. They could integrate blockchain. And they can do this five years from now when they are much more popular and much larger communities are tied to them. If you’re upset that they’re banning modding and adding an invasive anti-cheat, it’s a good time to look for alternative VR platforms or start creating your own. This is one of those cases where "open-source" means something. And while the meta verse isn’t small or new anymore, it’s still experimental buggy stuff, so a small team working on their free time may actually have the potential to compete.
- pteraspidomorph 4y ago
  > telemetry I believe they do collect a ton of data on how the user interacts with instances already. > it’s still experimental buggy stuff Kind of. They did have several years to build up a community and find a content creation pipeline that kind of works for a lot of people. And many millions of VC. You're right, though, ideally the "metaverse" should run on open source software.
chii 4y ago
i don't get why so many software companies want to prevent modified clients. The fact that they can detect the client is modified (and kick them out) means they could've gone a different route - allow the instance host to choose whether to allow it or not. For some instances that are public, and needs rules and clients to obey those rules, it would make sense to ban modded clients. But for some private instances, it doesn't make sense to ban anyone, as it's private and presumably accessible to only trusted parties. The instance creator ought to be allowed control. In a similar vein, the new minecraft reporting features (https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/addressing-player-chat-reporting-tool#:~:text=Does%20this%20affect%20private%20servers,any%20size%2C%20including%20private%20servers https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/addressing-player-ch.... ) affects private servers as well, and it's not an opt-in by the server admin.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > In a similar vein, the new minecraft reporting features (https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/addressing-player-ch https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/addressing-player-ch.... ) affects private servers as well, and it's not an opt-in by the server admin. What does this mean? Do users not connect directly to private servers? Does every minecraft client have to authenticate with a central server before joining a private one? Or is it just an on-by-default "use official banlist" option?
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    > Does every minecraft client have to authenticate with a central server before joining a private one? Yes. The way it works is that when a client attempts to join a (private) server, it sends the user id to the private server, and then sends Mojang a message informing them they it's trying to connect to a server at this address. The private server then asks Mojang if the supplied user id is valid, and attempting to sign in to the server at this address. Mojang then replies to the server confirming the authentication of the client, and then the server lets them in. There's also an exchange of cryptographic keys mixed in there, but that's the basics.
  - wolrah 4y ago
pseudo0 4y ago
Maybe this would have gone over better with the community if they had made the most popular mods redundant before rendering them unusable? > Finally, we’re aware that many legitimate users install modifications to add features they wish VRChat had natively. We're very aware of the popularity of these modifications, and we’re aware that EAC means those modifications are gone, too. As such, we've been working towards native implementations of features like a main menu that's usable even when you're lying down, a portable mirror that you can use to calibrate your full-body tracking (or provide a face-cam), and more – all planned for upcoming releases.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- celdon25 4y ago
  > we've been working towards native implementations of features like a main menu that's usable even when you're lying down Imagine not having even this yet and then pretending you weren't the one who dropped the ball I hope this is the beginning of the end of VRChat and I never thought I'd be holding out hope that Zuckerborg's version will fix the mess that it was.
- zionic 4y ago
  >Maybe this would have gone over better with the community What community is that, exactly? Because at least here in 2D land most seem to be accepting censorship and “moderation”
  - celdon25 4y ago
    Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6g11f0FGPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6g11f0FGPo
- ynx 4y ago
  > Maybe this would have gone over better with the community if they had made the most popular mods redundant before rendering them unusable? ...in what reality do IKv2, OSC, and Avatar Dynamics not count as literally exactly that? IKv2: IKTweaks OSC: VRCSTT and other mods that leveraged tweaking avatar parameters Avatar Dynamics: Cross- avatar interactions
confident_inept 4y ago
I have a separate Windows machine I use for all of my gaming, including VRChat, that does not touch my Linux network or any of its files. I started doing this around the time Windows 10 came about because I didn't want to take a gamble with what any of these "security" implementations would do. I tried VRChat because it's free and works with and without a VR headset. Modded clients aside, it's fairly easy in VRChat to have an avatar with too many performance hitting effects that can outright crash other players on lesser hardware in PC worlds. I've heard anecdotes of the Quest version, while receiving recent improvements, is also prone to crashing on mixed PC/Quest worlds. To be fair, the default view settings are aggressive enough to cull the more offensive avatars (for both performance and moral objections ) back to a safe default and it can be adjusted to taste. Avatars are also graded by their performance impact and you can see a full spec sheet of their polygon counts and various performance metrics right within the game. They do a decent enough job providing good defaults and the content is gated in a way you can individually whitelist people and specific avatars/worlds as you experience them. There is a global "Trust Tier" system that allows you to move up the ranks by racking up play time and friend count, new players are tagged as visitors for a long enough time that it's not too hard to weed out bad actors. I don't believe I've encountered any modded clients personally but I will be interested to see what kind of effect this has in the in-game world.
- google234123 4y ago
  > I don't believe I've encountered any modded clients personally but I will be interested to see what kind of effect this has in the in-game world. Wow, I only played for a few hours and it seems like every lobby had someone trying and succeeding to crash people.
  - confident_inept 4y ago
    You can crash people quite easily in game without any mods by just loading an overly-complex avatar. There is the content gating system, but quite a few people just turn it off, hence the crashing.
yazzku 4y ago
'“Modified clients” are a large problem for VRChat in a variety of ways. Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues. Even seemingly non-malicious modifications complicate the support and development of VRChat, and make it impossible for VRChat creators to work within the expected, documented bounds of VRChat. 'In order to prevent that, we’ve implemented Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) into VRChat.' All this stuff sounds like it should be enforced on the server side, not client side. 'EAC is the industry-leading anti-cheat service. It’s lightweight, effective, and privacy-focused. In short, for any game or platform looking to prevent malicious users from breaking the rules, it’s a powerful solution.' EAC is the industry-leading DRM ass. It sometimes persists game installations and you need to go to greater lengths to purge the system of its trace. I don't know what 'privacy-focused' even means here. Honestly this whole post smells of PR.
- google234123 4y ago
  Have you played be chat? It actually is a real problem. Anyway, why not try to enforce security on both sides? EAC will literally fix 99% of the malicious issues…
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    Because it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Some of these mods were literally about making the game accessible to people who wouldn't be able to use it otherwise. There's no way they're going to keep up with all useful mods with their official client. Some of their concerns are valid, but at the very least they should provide an option to allow modded clients on your own private instance. Unless they manage to make VRChat mainstream (which will likely erase a lot of its appeal to plenty of current users and will mean directly competing with Meta), this may be the beginning on its slow end.
    - onepointsixC 4y ago
      >Some of these mods were literally about making the game accessible to people who wouldn't be able to use it otherwise. How?
wly_cdgr 4y ago
Well, that jumped the shark quickly
emidoots 4y ago
VRChat mods include things like general QOL improvements, but also most accessibility features are mods. Things like preventing flashing colors to avoid seizures. They want to ban them because they compete with VRC+, their premium service.
- sli 4y ago
  At least one mute person was banned from their Discord for saying they need to be able to use muteTTS to talk to other players, which sends... quite the hostile message to players with disabilities. VRChat has practically no accessibility features beyond their fairly basic rank-based privacy settings (and of course there's a mod to enhance those considerably).
superb-owl 4y ago
I'm not a VRchat user. But it's sad they decided to ban modified clients. Giving the community a way to customize their experience is a great way to grow an ecosystem and learn about what your users want. The problems they mention are all solvable without banning mods: > Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues. These kinds of issues should be solved on the backend. Rate limiting, pattern matching, etc. > Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes Keep a list of "blessed" open source clients that have a reputation, and allow people to report them. Chrome and Firefox extensions have solved this > Additionally, all modified clients – even ones that aren’t malicious – are a burden for creators. We regularly speak to many that have spent hours (or days) debugging user issues, only to realize that the culprit is a modified client. Provide better debugging info for your creators! They should know which client (or at least that a modified client) is being used. > This pain extends to VRChat support too – any time we update, we get a massive amount of bug reports that end up just being broken modifications Ditto. These tickets should be easy to auto-close if you force folks to include info about their client. I understand all this requires time and effort, and simply restricting the client-side of things is a low-cost solution. But if there's already a vibrant community of mods out there, I think you have a responsibility (and a vested interest) in trying to preserve that.
- 3np 4y ago
  Yeah, I really don't get it here. For competitive games, I can see the argument and demand for anti-cheat. Here, though? Any actual problem it would solve is better addressed either server side or on the counterparty clients. It seems backwards to require full control of all client software rather than filtering out spam on the receiving and/or intermediary ends.
- munchbunny 4y ago
  > Provide better debugging info for your creators! They should know which client (or at least that a modified client) is being used. > Ditto. These tickets should be easy to auto-close if you force folks to include info about their client. As a (former) modder, though not for VRChat, I can definitely empathize with this. Code quality with mods is a freaking wild west where modularization isn't really a thing and everyone monkey-patches everything. Supporting your mod/content amidst other mods is in the gray area where the etiquette expects content creators to support their stuff even though there's no "warranty" on the label, so you get significant variance in how demanding players are or how accommodating content creators are. That said, I don't think anti-cheat is the answer here. Officially supporting mods and driving modified clients down a predictable path where you'll know when and how a client is modded seems like a better approach. Modders benefit from having real infrastructure to work with, and as the game dev you can ask players to turn off mods for troubleshooting.
nickphx 4y ago
It's trivial to bypass EAC though..
- google234123 4y ago
  It’s trivial to bypass, not sure if it’s that trivial to evade getting caught though.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Getting caught just closes the game. They aren't banning modders.
- therein 4y ago
  Yeah, still fine with loading a modified kernel32.dll as long as it is EV signed for example.
  - donkarma 4y ago
    it's relatively simple to bypass EAC when you're just a single user since it just ignores all of the blatant signals you're giving off, it just doesn't scale well
    - google234123 4y ago
      Eventually those signals can accumulate to some threshold and they will ban single users. They do improve their anti cheat pretty regularly and a cheat that only provided 1 or 2 suspicious signals (e.g. rxw memory in the kernal space that isn't backed by some valid module) might eventually provide 3 or 4 as they improve their anti cheat (maybe they start looking in some obscure windows table to find evidence that you loaded a bad driver in the past or they stackwalk your kernel thread to find it executing in unbacked memory).
      - therein 4y ago
        > (e.g. rxw memory in the kernal space that isn't backed by some valid module) They do flag you for this but not actionable on its own as PatchGuard demonstrates the exact same kind of behavior. RWX memory in Kernel Space that's not associated with a signed module. As you also surely know, there is also a lot of rwx memory that's not actually utilized yet allocated by many drivers that you can deploy your shellcode into.
kache_ 4y ago
I thought VRChat was all about hacking things together and tinkering with VR, from my impression of the people I've met in there. They're going to lose a big portion of their clientele
- Krisando 4y ago
  No, you're confusing VRChat with Neos VR.
- _mb2v 4y ago
  That was five years ago. Now it's about screaming kids, adults grooming children, and sitting in front of mirrors in hypersexualized avatars.
  - kache_ 4y ago
    party on....
rowanG077 4y ago
Let's see how long it takes them to add microtransactions/NFTs now that they locked it down. My guess is <1 year.
- _mb2v 4y ago
  One of their competitors, Neos, already has some kind of built-in cryptocurrency: https://neos.com/#neos-credits https://neos.com/#neos-credits The selling point of Neos used to be that it allowed 10-point full-body tracking (as opposed to 6-point) while VRChat did not, but VRChat recently added that functionality.
  - krasin 4y ago
    Another selling point of Neos is its ability to create full-featured games and worlds from within VR, as opposed to need to code them in Unity to do anything custom for VRChat (and it's getting banned, from what I understand?)
  - brodokk 4y ago
    I mean yes but its not the only selling point of Neos. In the difference you have stuff like: - real time world creation and collaboration while being in game (no external unity editor) including a node scripting system - user hosting session (instead of full server hosting) at the cost of the user - inventory system from which you can save/spawn from any world (this actually have a limit in size, 1Gb for the free account) - mods are well more accepted (maybe for now because it could change like we see with vrc) and more that i forgot. Note: I'm a regular Neos user, I'm not trying to sell the game there is stuff who are annoying (like the game is not really optimized compared to vrc). And for the subject of crypto the community is actually really divided about it while is not really useful for now...
zargon 4y ago
The vast majority of Second Life users have been using primarily third-party viewers since Linden Lab open sourced it in 2007. It's been a boon for users. It just takes a bit of up-front design and planning. And Linden Lab is actually profitable. Profitable enough to dedicate significant resources to developing a new platform (Sansar), discard it, and still be profitable.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
half-kh-hacker 4y ago
Aw. This is a real shame. Back when I played I liked dressing up in a little magician outfit and flying around / teleporting (the netcode takes the absolute position of the player from the client). At the time the client was Unity + Mono (haven't checked if it still is) so you could just add a DLL with your own code that gets loaded, as well as ahead-of-time patching Assembly-CSharp to introduce your own hooks. Super simple & really mod friendly.
bulbous-or 4y ago
I'm not a game programmer. Why do games like VRChat and Fortnite need to use client-side mod detection at all? If everything goes through their servers, it seems like a huge waste of time. If it's peer-to-peer it makes sense. I'm trying to google it and there seems to be a lot of semi-informed lore, some people say it's centralized and some people say parts are p2p.
- _mb2v 4y ago
  VRChat is jam-packed with malicious users who use modded clients or run Wireshark to dox and harass people using their IP. Imagine an adult telling a little kid in VR, "I know where you live, it's in X city" and then social-engineering their way to even worse places. They did a big refactor a few years ago to remove all/most P2P networking due to the DDoS and harassment problems. The VRChat community is incredibly toxic.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    What little kid is going to own multi-hundred dollar VR systems.
    - kaibee 4y ago
      A Quest 2 is $300 and so so many kids have them.
    - _mb2v 4y ago
      The same kids whose parents bought them an XBox or PlayStation. The Quest 2 is cheaper than both at $300. It’s standalone so you don’t need a PC. There’s been a sea change in the VR player base since the first Quest came out: https://youtu.be/wbB807o-Fjs https://youtu.be/wbB807o-Fjs
    - shultays 4y ago
      Same little kid that can have a computer, a tablet or a console. Or a house while at it. It is their parents that buy/own VR systems, salary of the kid does not matter.
  - 4y ago
grumple 4y ago
It seems like the problems they say they are solving should have been solved server side rather than in the client.
bitcurious 4y ago
VRChat was the first time since the 2000s that I felt the “magic” of the old internet. It had the promise of quirky, unique, and individual (not “personalized”) experiences. It came with the ugly parts too, and a little risk, and it was kind of beautiful. Sad to see the direction they’re taking. I guess easy product placement is more important than community.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
  I feel the sentiment in my soul. Both the awe and wonder at the sense of adventure and unbridled creativity of it all, and the mourning at the knowledge that this is the beginning of the end.
- _mb2v 4y ago
  The ugly parts have taken over. The Second Life users have moved in and now dominate many spaces, along with tons of kids ("Questies") and the usual always-online contingent of furries, extremists of various sorts, and adults being creepy around young kids. There's still cool stuff there and unique and positive interactions to be had, but it's a slog.
  - jondwillis 4y ago
    human nature unhinged from physical constraints. for some reason despite growing up playing and hacking MMORPGs this never really dawned on me..
    - _mb2v 4y ago
      VRChat doesn't reflect human nature overall, just those who fail adapt to the mainstream and hide out online 24/7. High overlap with Second Life, 4channers, and heavy Discord users, less of an overlap with people who play competitive games or contribute to society.
      - imtringued 4y ago
        Exactly, all thes useless people are wasting their life. Imagine how much they could accomplish if they joined the Russian military and successfully conquered Ukraine, they would be heroes.
mikotodomo 4y ago
The VRchat experience has become horrifying, to say the least. Glad they are working on it.
FridgeSeal 4y ago
Semi related: I don’t use VRChat, but EAC is the worst piece of anti cheat software I’ve been subjected to. It’s opaque, unhelpful and constantly crashes my computer. There’s a whole stack of stuff I can’t play with friends, but EAC politely sends my computer into a boot-loop every time I try to play something that uses it. Apparently it’s my choice of hardware, because even clean windows installs aren’t enough to avoid its ire. And of course it won’t tell you, and epics help amounts to “uuhhh update your bios lol?”. At least Valorants anti-cheat has the dignity to tell you what it doesn’t like, and how to resolve it. So good luck to all the people who will effectively lose access to vr chat because of epics awful piece of software.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  > EAC is the worst piece of anti cheat software I’ve been subjected to. I don't understand how this could be the case, TFA says it's industry-leading /s
- Cloudef 4y ago
  Client-side anti-cheat has always been anti-consumer. It's more of a invasive DRM.
  - rebane2001 4y ago
    There exist different levels of invasiveness. I've had issues with EAC multiple times, forcing me to reconfigure my system just so it'd let me play games. Something like VAC might not be as good at catching cheats as EAC, but it rarely causes problems and works great on a wide variety of systems and setups.
_mb2v 4y ago
Some good memes about this on the VRChat subreddit, which was locked to new submission fifteen minutes ago in response to the overwhelming community outrage: https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/
_mb2v 4y ago
Tangentially to EAC, I've commented downthread several times on the danger to children and lax moderation of VRChat, but just to drive the point home, search "VRCat" on PornHub and you'll find all sorts of videos created in-game. These are avatars on VRChat's servers that users can and sometimes do use in public worlds. Officially VRChat's Terms of Service prohibits NSFW content. In practice, the game's loading screen tips say "no NSFW content in public worlds" and staff know exactly what's going on. There is no NSFW tagging system, no content filtering for uploaded avatars, no effective means to permanently ban abusive users, and extremely lax in-game moderation. There are tons of sexualized, fully nude, and fully-functional avatars all over the place. Spend a couple hours in the main public worlds and you're almost guaranteed to see some. Remember, this game is absolutely full of children and pre-teens, and the kind of adults who choose to hang out around them. The game is free on the Meta Quest store with zero age restrictions.
- ehsankia 4y ago
  Is that really related to modding though? I thought model swapping was built-into the game, people can change their look without any mods. How does banning mods solve that?
  - _mb2v 4y ago
    It doesn’t. I’m talking about a problem that’s inherent to the base game, and unfortunately not widely known.
- xdrosenheim 4y ago
  In my experience, and from what I asked a few friends about: We have never seen an actual "NSFW" avatar in our combined hundreds of hours of playtime, and those that use the avatars that comes close to being NSFW are usually the younger audience. It is possible to filter out avatars from the world space, and only be able to see your friends avatars. Making your own instances (servers), you are able to kick out players that misbehave. But I would like a NSFW-tag on content. And as a side-note: The game is free everywhere, Steam, too.
  - 4y ago
celdon25 4y ago
The community's reaction has been documented in a video here, and it's not good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6g11f0FGPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6g11f0FGPo
fizzynut 4y ago
The cynic in me thinks that their real plan is just to add monetisation and or implement/sell features that already exist in modified clients and that "security" is a convenient excuse.
- sli 4y ago
  They already do that: increased number of avatar favorites. emmVRC, a hugely popular legitimate mod (referred to as a "wholesome" mod by the community), used to have this feature, but removed it an implored their users to support VRChat instead if they wanted it. Other more gray-area mods still have it.
opan 4y ago
This is why we need free (as in freedom) software. VRChat barely even seems like a game, so I'm surprised there's not a more popular libre version by now. I recall there are one or two options out there (can't recall the names), but I have yet to get into VR myself, largely because so much stuff for it is proprietary.
Dylan16807 4y ago
They consider archiving avatars to be malicious? Wonderful.
devwastaken 4y ago
VRchat actively borrowed ideas from mods when the base game was barren of features, then turned around and vilified them - these mods are created by other game devs. Features such as global dynamic bones interactions were ripe for a software patent. Yet, mod authors open sourced it. Tens of thousands of hours have been spent here, and it actively increased user count and value of VRchat. Yet Tupper (ceo), not only gives nothing in return, but actively takes the work and shuts down the original. They even banned other game devs that made good mods that were commonly known. But they didn't ban any malicious authors because they were unknown. (Duh) They have made agreements with mod authors to not interfere with premium features, and they obliged even. What even is there to "anti cheat" in a social game where you can do anything? This isn't an fps game, no goal, no "game". That logic is implimented per world by world creators. Just completely disrespectful and slimy. Anything this team touches is tainted as far as I'm concerned. You don't make your product and paycheck off others work and then slap them with it. Especially not to your fellow industry. Tbh if I were Valve id be enticed to delist this game for that behavior. It against what the VR ecosystem is for.
- ponyous 4y ago
  Agree with most of your stuff, but just want to reply to your last sentence. Valve doesn't care about VR. Last week Steam VR Fest is a proof. Games that literally have basic functionality broken and are on the way to be completely shut off (due to servers being unavailable soon) were still discounted and promoted on page 1. While new indie games doing innovative stuff were left to rot on page 60. Nothing changed in the algorithm compared to previous year, promoting the same set of games once again. On top of that, SteamVR unity plugin that arguably at some point powered most of VR games haven't been updated in years with any new functionality.
_osorin_ 4y ago
I hope steam proton support will still be available. Have been running it with proton and besides not playing videos (known issue) everything else is good.
- _osorin_ 4y ago
  Correction: It seems they acknowledged the steam proton scenario and they claim EAC works fine.
andrewallbright 4y ago
This is a real shame. I met many interesting people on VR chat. Some were exploring identities that only a virtual world would allow them to. Mods enabled these people to lose themselves in the fantasy of their identity. I heard sad stories about how VRchat was where they could be themselves. They're going to lose that opportunity now. For what? Tighter control so VRchat can engineer their own knock off mods? Greedy. Sad.

246 points by cowtools 4y ago

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

Exact Audio Copy?

4ggr0 4y ago
Easy Anti-Cheat, https://www.easy.ac https://www.easy.ac

RektBoy 4y ago

Guess what what will happen? Hackers will circumvent EAC. And modders will go extinct. How to kill your game, speedrun %any.

whoomp12342 4y ago

the East Australian Current? Gimme some shell bro!

21Mayflower 4y ago

josephcsible 4y ago

It's another case of where "security" means keeping your computer secure from you. And the password stealer argument is just stupid: by the time EAC kicks in, your password is already stolen.

sensitivefrost 4y ago
How so?
- google234123 4y ago
  They are saying if you download an application (e.g. vrchat.exe) from the internet than it can steal your passwords as soon as you launch it.
  - sensitivefrost 4y ago
    That's not what VRchat's blog post say at all, though. "Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes as well as other information. These users – often without even realizing it! – run the risk of losing their account, or having their computers become part of a larger botnet." People running a backdoor client and getting their passwords stolen? That doesn't sound... wrong?
    - sudosysgen 4y ago
      The wrong part is that somehow EAC will help prevent that. It won't.
      - shultays 4y ago
        It would prevent it in a way that you know that the mod you are downloading is not likely to work and you wouldn't download it in the first place.
        sudosysgen 4y ago
        Not really, some mods will still work
        google234123 4y ago
        The chance of some application downloaded for free on the internet will bypass EAC is minuscule
google234123 4y ago
This is only partially true. Once the knowledge that unofficial clients won’t work gets out people won’t go looking for them.
- pteraspidomorph 4y ago
  Unofficial malicious clients will still work, only the safe open source ones won't. Dodgy EAC bypasses seem to be easy to find, and will likely put people who try to use them at real risk.
  - google234123 4y ago
    It's actually really hard to distribute a cheat to a lot of people without it getting flagged.
    - pteraspidomorph 4y ago
      Yeah, let me clarify my argument there. Open source, safe, well-known clients, mods or modding systems can easily be monitored for workarounds and flagged, and become unviable. Malicious actors with second intentions however can keep finding new exploits and releasing small, obscure, harmful software that has way less exposure because the vast majority of people are not interested in harming anyone, they just want their mods to do something minor like displaying screenshots in the loading screen or adding support for eye tracking. They will not seek these out. These will be sold (financial incentive) or used by people with too much time on their hands and an axe to grind.
gtirloni 4y ago
You can do whatever you want with your computer, just don't try to connect to their proprietary servers.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  But now you're into the Service-as-a-Software-Substitute problem. I can't usefully use the VRChat client without doing that.
  - gtirloni 4y ago
    I agree but I was replying to your initial point about locking down our computers. I think the downvoters don't get this. I think there's a case to be made that VRChat allowing mods in a safe way is possible, if they wanted to do it. But they clearly don't see value in that. I hope they're proven wrong soon.

Kaze404 4y ago

Wouldn't want people cheating in our highly competitive virtual hangout video game. At least it still works on Linux.

mjevans 4y ago
"Cheating", IE sideloading anything useful or improving beyond the base app? Sounds like they want to compete with Second Life for imaginary scarcity.
- jamesu 4y ago
  I'm aware of several communities which seem to rely heavily on custom mods. Not sure what they are going to do, though on the plus side maybe we will see more innovation in the multiplayer VR marketplace.
- Kaze404 4y ago
  I agree. I was being facetious.
- fomine3 4y ago
  Possibly part of aggressive anti-NFT movement?
david_allison 4y ago
> At least it still works on Linux. But Linux probably no longer works on VRChat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ&t=5052s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ&t=5052s
- Kaze404 4y ago
  Wow, that's amazing! Thanks for the link. Makes me want to dust off the old Quest 2 and play some VRChat to meet some nerds :)
- AgentME 4y ago
  This still works. This wasn't a disallowed mod, this was part of a custom world made for VRChat.

dingleberry420 4y ago

> “Modified clients” are a large problem for VRChat in a variety of ways. Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues. Imagine if non-game companies were this open about their servers being exploitable

yazzku 4y ago
I don't know why you got downvoted. It's really odd that they don't enforce this stuff server-side.
- crummy 4y ago
  why do you think no multiplayer video games have tried that?
  - Groxx 4y ago
    Because... they do...? Some things are legitimately much easier to restrict client side e.g. for FPS: you can send other-user data all (or much) of the time and not have to worry about if they're looking in that direction, or if there's line-of-sight through the hole they just shot in a wall. That kind of thing takes a lot of server-side compute, and unless it's perfect it's still a competitive advantage. But when it's not competitive? And they're basically just blocking abusive clients? Heck no, they do server side restrictions. And they often pay the price badly when they do not.
  - weberer 4y ago
    Huh? Almost all of them do. Try logging into WoW, send a packet that says you picked up a million gold, and observe what happens to your account.

permo-w 4y ago

what are the implications of this for users? are there ubiquitous QOL mods that a lot of people run on VR chat?

pteraspidomorph 4y ago
No one will admit it, because of the company's insane attitude towards modding and the heavy handed bans that result from it, plus a policy of preventing actual discussion about said bans, but yes, that is very much the case.

armchairhacker 4y ago

Since VRChat isn’t open-source and runs the servers they can do whatever they want. They could add in required ads and telemetry. They could integrate blockchain. And they can do this five years from now when they are much more popular and much larger communities are tied to them. If you’re upset that they’re banning modding and adding an invasive anti-cheat, it’s a good time to look for alternative VR platforms or start creating your own. This is one of those cases where "open-source" means something. And while the meta verse isn’t small or new anymore, it’s still experimental buggy stuff, so a small team working on their free time may actually have the potential to compete.

pteraspidomorph 4y ago
> telemetry I believe they do collect a ton of data on how the user interacts with instances already. > it’s still experimental buggy stuff Kind of. They did have several years to build up a community and find a content creation pipeline that kind of works for a lot of people. And many millions of VC. You're right, though, ideally the "metaverse" should run on open source software.

chii 4y ago

i don't get why so many software companies want to prevent modified clients. The fact that they can detect the client is modified (and kick them out) means they could've gone a different route - allow the instance host to choose whether to allow it or not. For some instances that are public, and needs rules and clients to obey those rules, it would make sense to ban modded clients. But for some private instances, it doesn't make sense to ban anyone, as it's private and presumably accessible to only trusted parties. The instance creator ought to be allowed control. In a similar vein, the new minecraft reporting features (https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/addressing-player-chat-reporting-tool#:~:text=Does%20this%20affect%20private%20servers,any%20size%2C%20including%20private%20servers https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/addressing-player-ch.... ) affects private servers as well, and it's not an opt-in by the server admin.

Manuel_D 4y ago
> In a similar vein, the new minecraft reporting features (https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/addressing-player-ch https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/addressing-player-ch.... ) affects private servers as well, and it's not an opt-in by the server admin. What does this mean? Do users not connect directly to private servers? Does every minecraft client have to authenticate with a central server before joining a private one? Or is it just an on-by-default "use official banlist" option?
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  > Does every minecraft client have to authenticate with a central server before joining a private one? Yes. The way it works is that when a client attempts to join a (private) server, it sends the user id to the private server, and then sends Mojang a message informing them they it's trying to connect to a server at this address. The private server then asks Mojang if the supplied user id is valid, and attempting to sign in to the server at this address. Mojang then replies to the server confirming the authentication of the client, and then the server lets them in. There's also an exchange of cryptographic keys mixed in there, but that's the basics.
- wolrah 4y ago

pseudo0 4y ago

Maybe this would have gone over better with the community if they had made the most popular mods redundant before rendering them unusable? > Finally, we’re aware that many legitimate users install modifications to add features they wish VRChat had natively. We're very aware of the popularity of these modifications, and we’re aware that EAC means those modifications are gone, too. As such, we've been working towards native implementations of features like a main menu that's usable even when you're lying down, a portable mirror that you can use to calibrate your full-body tracking (or provide a face-cam), and more – all planned for upcoming releases.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
celdon25 4y ago
> we've been working towards native implementations of features like a main menu that's usable even when you're lying down Imagine not having even this yet and then pretending you weren't the one who dropped the ball I hope this is the beginning of the end of VRChat and I never thought I'd be holding out hope that Zuckerborg's version will fix the mess that it was.
zionic 4y ago
>Maybe this would have gone over better with the community What community is that, exactly? Because at least here in 2D land most seem to be accepting censorship and “moderation”
- celdon25 4y ago
  Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6g11f0FGPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6g11f0FGPo
ynx 4y ago
> Maybe this would have gone over better with the community if they had made the most popular mods redundant before rendering them unusable? ...in what reality do IKv2, OSC, and Avatar Dynamics not count as literally exactly that? IKv2: IKTweaks OSC: VRCSTT and other mods that leveraged tweaking avatar parameters Avatar Dynamics: Cross- avatar interactions

confident_inept 4y ago

I have a separate Windows machine I use for all of my gaming, including VRChat, that does not touch my Linux network or any of its files. I started doing this around the time Windows 10 came about because I didn't want to take a gamble with what any of these "security" implementations would do. I tried VRChat because it's free and works with and without a VR headset. Modded clients aside, it's fairly easy in VRChat to have an avatar with too many performance hitting effects that can outright crash other players on lesser hardware in PC worlds. I've heard anecdotes of the Quest version, while receiving recent improvements, is also prone to crashing on mixed PC/Quest worlds. To be fair, the default view settings are aggressive enough to cull the more offensive avatars (for both performance and moral objections ) back to a safe default and it can be adjusted to taste. Avatars are also graded by their performance impact and you can see a full spec sheet of their polygon counts and various performance metrics right within the game. They do a decent enough job providing good defaults and the content is gated in a way you can individually whitelist people and specific avatars/worlds as you experience them. There is a global "Trust Tier" system that allows you to move up the ranks by racking up play time and friend count, new players are tagged as visitors for a long enough time that it's not too hard to weed out bad actors. I don't believe I've encountered any modded clients personally but I will be interested to see what kind of effect this has in the in-game world.

google234123 4y ago
> I don't believe I've encountered any modded clients personally but I will be interested to see what kind of effect this has in the in-game world. Wow, I only played for a few hours and it seems like every lobby had someone trying and succeeding to crash people.
- confident_inept 4y ago
  You can crash people quite easily in game without any mods by just loading an overly-complex avatar. There is the content gating system, but quite a few people just turn it off, hence the crashing.

yazzku 4y ago

'“Modified clients” are a large problem for VRChat in a variety of ways. Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues. Even seemingly non-malicious modifications complicate the support and development of VRChat, and make it impossible for VRChat creators to work within the expected, documented bounds of VRChat. 'In order to prevent that, we’ve implemented Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) into VRChat.' All this stuff sounds like it should be enforced on the server side, not client side. 'EAC is the industry-leading anti-cheat service. It’s lightweight, effective, and privacy-focused. In short, for any game or platform looking to prevent malicious users from breaking the rules, it’s a powerful solution.' EAC is the industry-leading DRM ass. It sometimes persists game installations and you need to go to greater lengths to purge the system of its trace. I don't know what 'privacy-focused' even means here. Honestly this whole post smells of PR.

google234123 4y ago
Have you played be chat? It actually is a real problem. Anyway, why not try to enforce security on both sides? EAC will literally fix 99% of the malicious issues…
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  Because it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Some of these mods were literally about making the game accessible to people who wouldn't be able to use it otherwise. There's no way they're going to keep up with all useful mods with their official client. Some of their concerns are valid, but at the very least they should provide an option to allow modded clients on your own private instance. Unless they manage to make VRChat mainstream (which will likely erase a lot of its appeal to plenty of current users and will mean directly competing with Meta), this may be the beginning on its slow end.
  - onepointsixC 4y ago
    >Some of these mods were literally about making the game accessible to people who wouldn't be able to use it otherwise. How?

wly_cdgr 4y ago

Well, that jumped the shark quickly

emidoots 4y ago

VRChat mods include things like general QOL improvements, but also most accessibility features are mods. Things like preventing flashing colors to avoid seizures. They want to ban them because they compete with VRC+, their premium service.

sli 4y ago
At least one mute person was banned from their Discord for saying they need to be able to use muteTTS to talk to other players, which sends... quite the hostile message to players with disabilities. VRChat has practically no accessibility features beyond their fairly basic rank-based privacy settings (and of course there's a mod to enhance those considerably).

superb-owl 4y ago

I'm not a VRchat user. But it's sad they decided to ban modified clients. Giving the community a way to customize their experience is a great way to grow an ecosystem and learn about what your users want. The problems they mention are all solvable without banning mods: > Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues. These kinds of issues should be solved on the backend. Rate limiting, pattern matching, etc. > Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes Keep a list of "blessed" open source clients that have a reputation, and allow people to report them. Chrome and Firefox extensions have solved this > Additionally, all modified clients – even ones that aren’t malicious – are a burden for creators. We regularly speak to many that have spent hours (or days) debugging user issues, only to realize that the culprit is a modified client. Provide better debugging info for your creators! They should know which client (or at least that a modified client) is being used. > This pain extends to VRChat support too – any time we update, we get a massive amount of bug reports that end up just being broken modifications Ditto. These tickets should be easy to auto-close if you force folks to include info about their client. I understand all this requires time and effort, and simply restricting the client-side of things is a low-cost solution. But if there's already a vibrant community of mods out there, I think you have a responsibility (and a vested interest) in trying to preserve that.

3np 4y ago
Yeah, I really don't get it here. For competitive games, I can see the argument and demand for anti-cheat. Here, though? Any actual problem it would solve is better addressed either server side or on the counterparty clients. It seems backwards to require full control of all client software rather than filtering out spam on the receiving and/or intermediary ends.
munchbunny 4y ago
> Provide better debugging info for your creators! They should know which client (or at least that a modified client) is being used. > Ditto. These tickets should be easy to auto-close if you force folks to include info about their client. As a (former) modder, though not for VRChat, I can definitely empathize with this. Code quality with mods is a freaking wild west where modularization isn't really a thing and everyone monkey-patches everything. Supporting your mod/content amidst other mods is in the gray area where the etiquette expects content creators to support their stuff even though there's no "warranty" on the label, so you get significant variance in how demanding players are or how accommodating content creators are. That said, I don't think anti-cheat is the answer here. Officially supporting mods and driving modified clients down a predictable path where you'll know when and how a client is modded seems like a better approach. Modders benefit from having real infrastructure to work with, and as the game dev you can ask players to turn off mods for troubleshooting.

nickphx 4y ago

It's trivial to bypass EAC though..

google234123 4y ago
It’s trivial to bypass, not sure if it’s that trivial to evade getting caught though.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Getting caught just closes the game. They aren't banning modders.
therein 4y ago
Yeah, still fine with loading a modified kernel32.dll as long as it is EV signed for example.
- donkarma 4y ago
  it's relatively simple to bypass EAC when you're just a single user since it just ignores all of the blatant signals you're giving off, it just doesn't scale well
  - google234123 4y ago
    Eventually those signals can accumulate to some threshold and they will ban single users. They do improve their anti cheat pretty regularly and a cheat that only provided 1 or 2 suspicious signals (e.g. rxw memory in the kernal space that isn't backed by some valid module) might eventually provide 3 or 4 as they improve their anti cheat (maybe they start looking in some obscure windows table to find evidence that you loaded a bad driver in the past or they stackwalk your kernel thread to find it executing in unbacked memory).
    - therein 4y ago
      > (e.g. rxw memory in the kernal space that isn't backed by some valid module) They do flag you for this but not actionable on its own as PatchGuard demonstrates the exact same kind of behavior. RWX memory in Kernel Space that's not associated with a signed module. As you also surely know, there is also a lot of rwx memory that's not actually utilized yet allocated by many drivers that you can deploy your shellcode into.

kache_ 4y ago

I thought VRChat was all about hacking things together and tinkering with VR, from my impression of the people I've met in there. They're going to lose a big portion of their clientele

Krisando 4y ago
No, you're confusing VRChat with Neos VR.
_mb2v 4y ago
That was five years ago. Now it's about screaming kids, adults grooming children, and sitting in front of mirrors in hypersexualized avatars.
- kache_ 4y ago
  party on....

rowanG077 4y ago

Let's see how long it takes them to add microtransactions/NFTs now that they locked it down. My guess is <1 year.

_mb2v 4y ago
One of their competitors, Neos, already has some kind of built-in cryptocurrency: https://neos.com/#neos-credits https://neos.com/#neos-credits The selling point of Neos used to be that it allowed 10-point full-body tracking (as opposed to 6-point) while VRChat did not, but VRChat recently added that functionality.
- krasin 4y ago
  Another selling point of Neos is its ability to create full-featured games and worlds from within VR, as opposed to need to code them in Unity to do anything custom for VRChat (and it's getting banned, from what I understand?)
- brodokk 4y ago
  I mean yes but its not the only selling point of Neos. In the difference you have stuff like: - real time world creation and collaboration while being in game (no external unity editor) including a node scripting system - user hosting session (instead of full server hosting) at the cost of the user - inventory system from which you can save/spawn from any world (this actually have a limit in size, 1Gb for the free account) - mods are well more accepted (maybe for now because it could change like we see with vrc) and more that i forgot. Note: I'm a regular Neos user, I'm not trying to sell the game there is stuff who are annoying (like the game is not really optimized compared to vrc). And for the subject of crypto the community is actually really divided about it while is not really useful for now...

zargon 4y ago

The vast majority of Second Life users have been using primarily third-party viewers since Linden Lab open sourced it in 2007. It's been a boon for users. It just takes a bit of up-front design and planning. And Linden Lab is actually profitable. Profitable enough to dedicate significant resources to developing a new platform (Sansar), discard it, and still be profitable.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

half-kh-hacker 4y ago

Aw. This is a real shame. Back when I played I liked dressing up in a little magician outfit and flying around / teleporting (the netcode takes the absolute position of the player from the client). At the time the client was Unity + Mono (haven't checked if it still is) so you could just add a DLL with your own code that gets loaded, as well as ahead-of-time patching Assembly-CSharp to introduce your own hooks. Super simple & really mod friendly.

bulbous-or 4y ago

I'm not a game programmer. Why do games like VRChat and Fortnite need to use client-side mod detection at all? If everything goes through their servers, it seems like a huge waste of time. If it's peer-to-peer it makes sense. I'm trying to google it and there seems to be a lot of semi-informed lore, some people say it's centralized and some people say parts are p2p.

_mb2v 4y ago
VRChat is jam-packed with malicious users who use modded clients or run Wireshark to dox and harass people using their IP. Imagine an adult telling a little kid in VR, "I know where you live, it's in X city" and then social-engineering their way to even worse places. They did a big refactor a few years ago to remove all/most P2P networking due to the DDoS and harassment problems. The VRChat community is incredibly toxic.
- mlindner 4y ago
  What little kid is going to own multi-hundred dollar VR systems.
  - kaibee 4y ago
    A Quest 2 is $300 and so so many kids have them.
  - _mb2v 4y ago
    The same kids whose parents bought them an XBox or PlayStation. The Quest 2 is cheaper than both at $300. It’s standalone so you don’t need a PC. There’s been a sea change in the VR player base since the first Quest came out: https://youtu.be/wbB807o-Fjs https://youtu.be/wbB807o-Fjs
  - shultays 4y ago
    Same little kid that can have a computer, a tablet or a console. Or a house while at it. It is their parents that buy/own VR systems, salary of the kid does not matter.
- 4y ago

grumple 4y ago

It seems like the problems they say they are solving should have been solved server side rather than in the client.

bitcurious 4y ago

VRChat was the first time since the 2000s that I felt the “magic” of the old internet. It had the promise of quirky, unique, and individual (not “personalized”) experiences. It came with the ugly parts too, and a little risk, and it was kind of beautiful. Sad to see the direction they’re taking. I guess easy product placement is more important than community.

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
I feel the sentiment in my soul. Both the awe and wonder at the sense of adventure and unbridled creativity of it all, and the mourning at the knowledge that this is the beginning of the end.
_mb2v 4y ago
The ugly parts have taken over. The Second Life users have moved in and now dominate many spaces, along with tons of kids ("Questies") and the usual always-online contingent of furries, extremists of various sorts, and adults being creepy around young kids. There's still cool stuff there and unique and positive interactions to be had, but it's a slog.
- jondwillis 4y ago
  human nature unhinged from physical constraints. for some reason despite growing up playing and hacking MMORPGs this never really dawned on me..
  - _mb2v 4y ago
    VRChat doesn't reflect human nature overall, just those who fail adapt to the mainstream and hide out online 24/7. High overlap with Second Life, 4channers, and heavy Discord users, less of an overlap with people who play competitive games or contribute to society.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      Exactly, all thes useless people are wasting their life. Imagine how much they could accomplish if they joined the Russian military and successfully conquered Ukraine, they would be heroes.

mikotodomo 4y ago

The VRchat experience has become horrifying, to say the least. Glad they are working on it.

FridgeSeal 4y ago

Semi related: I don’t use VRChat, but EAC is the worst piece of anti cheat software I’ve been subjected to. It’s opaque, unhelpful and constantly crashes my computer. There’s a whole stack of stuff I can’t play with friends, but EAC politely sends my computer into a boot-loop every time I try to play something that uses it. Apparently it’s my choice of hardware, because even clean windows installs aren’t enough to avoid its ire. And of course it won’t tell you, and epics help amounts to “uuhhh update your bios lol?”. At least Valorants anti-cheat has the dignity to tell you what it doesn’t like, and how to resolve it. So good luck to all the people who will effectively lose access to vr chat because of epics awful piece of software.

jazzyjackson 4y ago
> EAC is the worst piece of anti cheat software I’ve been subjected to. I don't understand how this could be the case, TFA says it's industry-leading /s
Cloudef 4y ago
Client-side anti-cheat has always been anti-consumer. It's more of a invasive DRM.
- rebane2001 4y ago
  There exist different levels of invasiveness. I've had issues with EAC multiple times, forcing me to reconfigure my system just so it'd let me play games. Something like VAC might not be as good at catching cheats as EAC, but it rarely causes problems and works great on a wide variety of systems and setups.

_mb2v 4y ago

Some good memes about this on the VRChat subreddit, which was locked to new submission fifteen minutes ago in response to the overwhelming community outrage: https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/

_mb2v 4y ago

Tangentially to EAC, I've commented downthread several times on the danger to children and lax moderation of VRChat, but just to drive the point home, search "VRCat" on PornHub and you'll find all sorts of videos created in-game. These are avatars on VRChat's servers that users can and sometimes do use in public worlds. Officially VRChat's Terms of Service prohibits NSFW content. In practice, the game's loading screen tips say "no NSFW content in public worlds" and staff know exactly what's going on. There is no NSFW tagging system, no content filtering for uploaded avatars, no effective means to permanently ban abusive users, and extremely lax in-game moderation. There are tons of sexualized, fully nude, and fully-functional avatars all over the place. Spend a couple hours in the main public worlds and you're almost guaranteed to see some. Remember, this game is absolutely full of children and pre-teens, and the kind of adults who choose to hang out around them. The game is free on the Meta Quest store with zero age restrictions.

ehsankia 4y ago
Is that really related to modding though? I thought model swapping was built-into the game, people can change their look without any mods. How does banning mods solve that?
- _mb2v 4y ago
  It doesn’t. I’m talking about a problem that’s inherent to the base game, and unfortunately not widely known.
xdrosenheim 4y ago
In my experience, and from what I asked a few friends about: We have never seen an actual "NSFW" avatar in our combined hundreds of hours of playtime, and those that use the avatars that comes close to being NSFW are usually the younger audience. It is possible to filter out avatars from the world space, and only be able to see your friends avatars. Making your own instances (servers), you are able to kick out players that misbehave. But I would like a NSFW-tag on content. And as a side-note: The game is free everywhere, Steam, too.
- 4y ago

celdon25 4y ago

The community's reaction has been documented in a video here, and it's not good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6g11f0FGPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6g11f0FGPo

fizzynut 4y ago

The cynic in me thinks that their real plan is just to add monetisation and or implement/sell features that already exist in modified clients and that "security" is a convenient excuse.

sli 4y ago
They already do that: increased number of avatar favorites. emmVRC, a hugely popular legitimate mod (referred to as a "wholesome" mod by the community), used to have this feature, but removed it an implored their users to support VRChat instead if they wanted it. Other more gray-area mods still have it.

opan 4y ago

This is why we need free (as in freedom) software. VRChat barely even seems like a game, so I'm surprised there's not a more popular libre version by now. I recall there are one or two options out there (can't recall the names), but I have yet to get into VR myself, largely because so much stuff for it is proprietary.

Dylan16807 4y ago

They consider archiving avatars to be malicious? Wonderful.

devwastaken 4y ago

VRchat actively borrowed ideas from mods when the base game was barren of features, then turned around and vilified them - these mods are created by other game devs. Features such as global dynamic bones interactions were ripe for a software patent. Yet, mod authors open sourced it. Tens of thousands of hours have been spent here, and it actively increased user count and value of VRchat. Yet Tupper (ceo), not only gives nothing in return, but actively takes the work and shuts down the original. They even banned other game devs that made good mods that were commonly known. But they didn't ban any malicious authors because they were unknown. (Duh) They have made agreements with mod authors to not interfere with premium features, and they obliged even. What even is there to "anti cheat" in a social game where you can do anything? This isn't an fps game, no goal, no "game". That logic is implimented per world by world creators. Just completely disrespectful and slimy. Anything this team touches is tainted as far as I'm concerned. You don't make your product and paycheck off others work and then slap them with it. Especially not to your fellow industry. Tbh if I were Valve id be enticed to delist this game for that behavior. It against what the VR ecosystem is for.

ponyous 4y ago
Agree with most of your stuff, but just want to reply to your last sentence. Valve doesn't care about VR. Last week Steam VR Fest is a proof. Games that literally have basic functionality broken and are on the way to be completely shut off (due to servers being unavailable soon) were still discounted and promoted on page 1. While new indie games doing innovative stuff were left to rot on page 60. Nothing changed in the algorithm compared to previous year, promoting the same set of games once again. On top of that, SteamVR unity plugin that arguably at some point powered most of VR games haven't been updated in years with any new functionality.

_osorin_ 4y ago

I hope steam proton support will still be available. Have been running it with proton and besides not playing videos (known issue) everything else is good.

_osorin_ 4y ago
Correction: It seems they acknowledged the steam proton scenario and they claim EAC works fine.

andrewallbright 4y ago

This is a real shame. I met many interesting people on VR chat. Some were exploring identities that only a virtual world would allow them to. Mods enabled these people to lose themselves in the fantasy of their identity. I heard sad stories about how VRchat was where they could be themselves. They're going to lose that opportunity now. For what? Tighter control so VRchat can engineer their own knock off mods? Greedy. Sad.