Social VR Breakthrough: VRChat Doubles Concurrency in Under One Week, Struggles to Scale Amid Mass Interest, Rampant Trolling

Ladies and gentleman, social VR has its first runaway hit: Just last week, VRChat was attracting peak concurrency rates of about 7000 on Steam, already impressive growth from a concurrency in the hundreds only a few months before that. Six days later, as this screengrab from Steam DB attests, VRChat is getting closers to 15,000 peak concurrent users. (And not all users go online via Steam, so total concurrency is likely much larger.)

As longtime New World Notes readers have probably guessed by now, that sudden success has a level of catastrophe to it -- in fact, as this letter to their community suggests, the developers of VRChat are begging for patience as they struggle to scale their servers to account for so many new users:

With our rapid growth our server tech had to also scale up at an insane pace over the holiday season and that’s kept us on our toes for the past few weeks. Our server team has been very hard at work attempting to fix all the issues and improve the quality of connections for everyone going forward. We’re grateful for everyone’s patience during this effort and will hopefully have more stable and more efficient servers very soon.

What's hampering that scaling? Many have compared VRChat to a Second Life Welcome Area on meth, so it's no surprise VRChat is getting swamped by trolls:

One of the biggest challenges with rapid growth is trying to maintain and shape a community that is fun and safe for everyone. We’re aware there’s a percentage of users that choose to engage in disrespectful or harmful behavior. It is our top priority to address the quality of the VRChat experience, especially for new users, and our team will continue to work toward improving that. We have a trained and dedicated moderation team that monitors VRChat constantly. 

Until that team is up to speed, they recommend muting users by default (as above). It's good that VRChat grasps the importance of abuse management and fostering a genuine user community, because the virtual world is likely in a do or die moment: YouTubers and Twitchers greatly contributed to VRChat's growth, but videogame streamers can quickly lose interest and move onto another MMO. And if Second Life is any guide, trolls can only troll for so long before becoming bored, and heading for the door -- while also causing many of those they've trolled to quit along the way.

Comments

[Son of Spam]

Meanwhile in Second Life, the amount of tumbleweeds blowing around the mainlands has increased three fold.

Great Work Ebbe!

[dotdotdot]

you don't know de wey