I'll try to make this as easy and fast to understand for everyone:
VRChat and Mods: Vrchat is by far the best social VR platform, hovering around 30k players daily. It is still, however, very early access and has extremely bad development woes. The community banded together to help this platform, and created client-side mods that solve many of the problems the game suffers from and adding features. Mods are against the TOS, but VRChat silently allows them because in truth, they helped the community grow massively and keep the game safe.
What Happened: Today, VRChat low-key announced in their normal beta trials they are adding Easy Anti Cheat (EAC), specifically to stop client mods. Beta trials are usually a month long, but this beta is lasting only 1 day. This was very much planned to stealth drop as they knew the community was going to explode (as confirmed by a community representative on their discord). After the discord started exploding, they made this official statement.
In a nutshell:
This is the fallout of day 1:
The Result: Basically, a huge review bomb campaign, the Discord is still on fire for about 8 hours now straight, users campaigning and dropping the paid subscription service VRC+, and on vrchats own community suggestion and bug index site, there is a post disparaging this move and explaining the hidden motives upvoted 18,600 times. That's about ~60% the daily average players and still growing.
Opinion (This is not news, this is my thoughts as a member of the community): As someone who knows a lot about the inside of the community, yes malicious mods exist, but they are a tiny tiny fraction of users hidden on secret discords. The "good" mods are open source on github, safe to use, curated by a few discord communities with 100's of thousands of members. The mods vastly improve the game, make it safer, run better, archive community content, improve the experience for people with disabilities and social impairments, and just overall fix the sloppy early access Vrchat.
People being harassed and griefed [crashed] in this social game is not due to mods. It's due to exploits in how creative people are with uploaded content using the normal upload system and server storage system. Stealing custom content from users has literally nothing to do with client mods. You do an regular api call to the vrchat servers and download the custom content, just like downloading from the steam workshop, and then unpack them using unity unpacking tools. Vrchat refuses to encrypt data.
This move will not solve much of anything. Malicious mods will circumvent EAC within a week, and continue to exist as always. Users have no way to protect themselves now. It only hurts the community greatly, adds more bloatware to the game hurting performance, and makes the game less safe. Striking down mods is a horrible decision and will have ramifications on the community and game. It's a bad blow to the game and the peddling misinformation in their blog post is salt in the wounds.
VRChat and Mods: Vrchat is by far the best social VR platform, hovering around 30k players daily. It is still, however, very early access and has extremely bad development woes. The community banded together to help this platform, and created client-side mods that solve many of the problems the game suffers from and adding features. Mods are against the TOS, but VRChat silently allows them because in truth, they helped the community grow massively and keep the game safe.
What Happened: Today, VRChat low-key announced in their normal beta trials they are adding Easy Anti Cheat (EAC), specifically to stop client mods. Beta trials are usually a month long, but this beta is lasting only 1 day. This was very much planned to stealth drop as they knew the community was going to explode (as confirmed by a community representative on their discord). After the discord started exploding, they made this official statement.
In a nutshell:
Opinion: As a member of the community who plays regularly with thousands of hours, uses mods and knows the modding community, this is a false information and peddling a narrative that is not true, massively stretching the truth. I explain more further below.
This is the fallout of day 1:
The Result: Basically, a huge review bomb campaign, the Discord is still on fire for about 8 hours now straight, users campaigning and dropping the paid subscription service VRC+, and on vrchats own community suggestion and bug index site, there is a post disparaging this move and explaining the hidden motives upvoted 18,600 times. That's about ~60% the daily average players and still growing.
Opinion (This is not news, this is my thoughts as a member of the community): As someone who knows a lot about the inside of the community, yes malicious mods exist, but they are a tiny tiny fraction of users hidden on secret discords. The "good" mods are open source on github, safe to use, curated by a few discord communities with 100's of thousands of members. The mods vastly improve the game, make it safer, run better, archive community content, improve the experience for people with disabilities and social impairments, and just overall fix the sloppy early access Vrchat.
People being harassed and griefed [crashed] in this social game is not due to mods. It's due to exploits in how creative people are with uploaded content using the normal upload system and server storage system. Stealing custom content from users has literally nothing to do with client mods. You do an regular api call to the vrchat servers and download the custom content, just like downloading from the steam workshop, and then unpack them using unity unpacking tools. Vrchat refuses to encrypt data.
This move will not solve much of anything. Malicious mods will circumvent EAC within a week, and continue to exist as always. Users have no way to protect themselves now. It only hurts the community greatly, adds more bloatware to the game hurting performance, and makes the game less safe. Striking down mods is a horrible decision and will have ramifications on the community and game. It's a bad blow to the game and the peddling misinformation in their blog post is salt in the wounds.
