VRChat Community Wracked by Protest Over Ban on Modified Clients

Above: Steam's VRChat ratings bombarded by protesters

A Metaverse platform is nothing without a thriving community, but the flipside is portions of that community can seem to endanger the platform. VRChat is experiencing that now, due to an announcement that seems benign on its face:

“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. If you’ve played Apex Legends, Fortnite, Gears of War, Elden Ring, or many more, you’ve seen Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC)...  The integration of EAC means that all modified clients are blocked...

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. 

Excuse me while I recover over flashbacks around various modified third party-made Second Life viewers which were banned for having dubious features. As with Second Life, a highly vocal number of VRC players have been protesting VRChat's move since it was made, include bombarding its Steam listing with bad reviews. Which as you can see above, is also an indicator of how small the protest is: Less than 10,000 users have recently posted a negative review. (Based on various figures, I'd estimate VRChat has about 5 million monthly active users, give or take.)

Do the protestors have any legitimate points? Somewhat, in the sense that some mods include some features that provide text captions for deaf users, contrast for colorblind users, and so on. But then again, from VRChat the company's point of view, thousands of users are reportedly having their accounts actively stolen by modded viewers every month.

Which side is right? Rather than weigh in, I'll quote a famed and highly respected member of the VRChat creator community, who requested I quote them anonymously, "due to the toxicity online" (their words), and provided great context on the situation:

A large majority of the people complaining are complaining over "extra" features they got used to using even though it was always against TOS to use these. So I don't have sympathy for those people, especially the ones that going around spamming hate everywhere or trying to dox people.

However, it does negatively impact people with disabilities that used mods to make the platform usable. So I do feel bad for that player base, but VRChat have said they are working on getting some of these features out ASAP.

The end of mods is also a benefit for VRChat creators, my source tells me: 

Now that mods are banned, there's less time needed from devs to troubleshoot issues caused by mods and they can put full focus on making these features officially. There's gonna be a little pain in between but I think for the long term of development, it was a needed step.

It's also on community to take the time to communicate with devs with proper feature requests on Canny. [A feature request page here.]

Many have not used it because they got used to mods having what they want, which makes VRChat devs not aware of some of these request features. So its sorta like a domino effect.

People also refuse to request official features due to the old argument of, "X feature has been requested 3 years ago on Canny and hasn't been added", which leads to people not trying any more requests which is also bad too.

Features people relied on, good and bad, that were provided through TOS breaking-mods are being removed. So naturally people will be super vocal about it. But because mods have been used by so many people for a long time, many just assumed it was normal to have these. Lots of misinformation over the years that a large portion of the community believed in. You'll get a lot of young users getting especially angry about something they use being taken away. Just like anything else online

A lot of the more vocal client mod users have always been toxic when it comes to defending using them or chasing people down on social media for saying something about them, so this action from VRChat just amplifies that sort of behavior and sadly, people with legitimate reasons to be upset are getting drowned out by the more immature rants.

Having talked with several other VRChat users, that all sounds roughly right, though they are all welcome to weigh in below. Before commenting, however, perhaps take a look at this thread from another VRChat creator with a balanced take:

Hey #VRChat community, commenting on the #NoEAC #VRCMods issue here: If you want to be taken seriously you HAVE TO rally around the issues with accessibility. No other argument holds water and is either hostile, based on rumor and speculation, or just flat out wrong

— IgbarVonSquid (@IgbarVonSquid) July 26, 2022

Steam capture via @Thrilluwu.

Comments

[Kito]

"less than 10k" is inaccurate if you're looking from Steam. Please observe the feedback canny of over 22k users requesting this to be reversed: https://feedback.vrchat.com/open-beta/p/eac-in-a-social-vr-game-creates-more-problems-than-it-solves

I am also one who signed such a Feed Back, despite not liking mods. EAC will not solve the problems the devs are expecting it to do.

[Luther Weymann]

Where is the Emerald code when you need it?

[Stacy]

Not going to renew my yearly premium membership through steam now.

[Tad Noodle]

If anything, this makes me less inclined to VR chat, knowing the majority of the user base is toxic and spends their time in the game harassing and dosing people. I do hope, though, that the Devs will wade through the toxicity, listen to the productive feedback and implement features to help those with accessibility issues.

[Your Argument Against Mods is Dumb]

Quote:
Soo... The long blog post, praising EAC as a silver bullet that solves everything. Except it isn't, and the only thing it actually "solves" is wholesome modding.
Here's simple facts:
* Most games that use EAC (or other anti-cheats) still have cheaters. For VRChat, this means that malicious mods will still exist and be used to annoy people in publics.
* Some of VRChat's problems (avatar ripping, crashing) have nothing to do with client mods. It's exceedingly easy to do both without mods. In fact, wholesome mods are used to prevent crashing and make ripping harder. All EAC does in this case is make people crash more due to lack of protections.
* The blog post once again shifts the blame to mods for account theft. At the same time, VRChat Team soft-endorses OSC software, "as long as you can build it from sources yourself". What do you know, the same applies to most wholesome mods - they're completely open-source and safe. This is a blatant two-faced lie to spin the narrative in your interests.
* Mods causing issues for creators or VRChat Team on game updates? The main source of update breakage is VRChat deliberately obfuscating their code, making mod development harder. As for creator issues, some mods also provide brand new possibilities that VRChat refuses to consider or will consider "soon" (see below).
* VRChat has been historically slow at adding features. You promise mod features "soon" but people can have them now, via mods. It's very likely that "soon" in this case will be either "years", or "never" for more niche features or features that don't align with your team's grand vision. To this day IK2 is far from perfect (people still use you-know-what), avatar favorites are pitifully limited, and most mod features are not even mentioned anywhere, with their canny posts lying forgotten and buried.
* You have a lot of angry people on your hands, duh.
Given that this update seemingly fixes nothing while also angering quite a few people, how about you choose a different course of action? Here's what I suggest:
* Drop EAC and forget it ever existed. Same for any other anti-cheat.
* Focus on actual security - not trusting the client, fixing exploits, having serverside checks. It's actual work, but it's also the only thing that has results. Not pretending that an anti-cheat solves anything.
* Drop obfuscation from most of the code. It didn't stop modding and only caused issues on game updates. Mods for non-obfuscated games break way less on updates. You can keep obfuscation on parts you deem critical to security, like Photon - not that it will stop anyone, but at least it will send a clear signal.
* Adapt to the reality of people modding the client. Update TOS to distinguish malicious and non-malicious modifications. Normalize talking about mods, so that most issues investigations can be safely started with "do you use any mods? If yes, try without them". You don't have to support mods, obviously, but you'll have way easier time dealing with the fact that people use them.

[Your Argument Against Mods is Dumb]

I want to add even more to the discussion about using mods causes you to get your account stolen.

Not a single Quality of Life or Accessibility mod ever, ever did this. This is what happens when you go to a sketchy website trying to get a risky and cheaty mod. That's the risk you take when you respond to the arabian prince who promises you his family's wealth.

Get your mods from trusted sources that have all their code up on Github for everyone to review. These public posted quality of life mods were 99% of the mods in use by users. Not the 1% toxic trolls. How do I know? I basically live in VRChat for the past 8 months, acruing 2,000 hours of game time. I basically live there every evening 7 days a week.

I personally know a laundry list of content creators (asset creators, not streamers) and again the majority are against EAC. So if you want to convince anyone here how awful mods are, you're going to need more proof.

Oh, asking for my proof? That quote from above and the Link from Kito... is posted by Knah, the largest creator of public reviewable mods. Anyone can check the code and activity. They have a Discord with 68,000 members. 40,000 online at any given time.

Another massive quality of life mod that obeyed "Morals" was emmVRC. Their discord has 109,300 members, 60,000 currently online. Thats half of the entire population of the VRChat official discord.

So no, we were not a minority. If you are looking at the PC Population, it was damn near the entire population. The entire population here at almost 8pm in VRChat steam... is 18,156.

[OkZoomer]

Damn we thought people on secondlife were addicted to living online? VRchat users make us look downright normal