VR Chat Opens Avatar Marketplace

 

 By Bixyl Shuftan

 

When the Newser took a look at VR Chat in 2018, people could get a number of free avatars there, but if you were a content creator looking to make money, there was no simple way to sell avatars to other players there as at the time unlike places such as Second Life there was no inworld economy. This changed in December 2023 when Paid Subscriptions were added to help the "over half a million" content creators get paid for their work. It is powered by Tilia, which still helps process Second Life's buying and selling of Linden dollars for real-life currency. This inworld economy allowed for inworld avatar stores to be made, but people had to find them to access them.

But in May, this changed when it was announced VR Chat was developing an Avatar Marketplace.

 Identity is a big part of VRChat – and that means finding an avatar that fits you. Yet, that can be a bit of a pain, especially if you aren’t adept with Unity, or if you don’t feel like visiting hundreds of worlds to try to find something that fits.

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But what if you didn’t have to do any of that – what if you could simply find something that works for you from inside VRChat? What if you could browse through a ton of easily accessible options, all organized by category? What if you could do so while supporting avatar creators, ensuring they have the means to keep making the fits you love?

Well, you’ll be able to shortly – the Avatar Marketplace is coming

To find the avatar marketplace, a VR Chat user goes to their menu and to the "Avatars" section where the marketplace is located. One can browse it and "search for published avatars, and see their details."

VRChat is listed as having over 66 thousand steady players. Tubefilter commented that fans of furry avatars would likely make up many of the marketplace's customers. Road to VR stated some of the avatars would be branded ones, such as ones from games.

 

Sources: VR Chat, Business Wire, Road to VR, Tubefilter, PC Gamer

 

Bixyl Shuftan

 

VR Chat Security Update Results in Mass Protests by Playerbase

 
By Bixyl Shuftan

In the past few years, VR Chat has enjoyed an increase in numbers. They've gone from 9,100 active users in February 2018, when the Newser gave a review, to 42,500 in December 2021 (link). These are numbers that have made it a true rival to Second Life in contrast to the various Opensim worlds. The world has gotten both praise and condemnation. Early in its history, it was documented that several players came to the aid of another who suffered an epileptic seizure (article). More recently, there were allegations that younger teen users were being "groomed" into sexual acts (article). 

This week however came a move by the development team that resulted in both pushback from many users plus fewer people getting online in the world. 

On Monday July 25, the developers announced a security update (link), the largest change being the installation of "Easy Anti-Cheat." "If you’ve played Apex Legends, Fortnite, Gears of War, Elden Ring, or many more," they stated, "you’ve seen Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC). 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."

The reason for this security update, they stated, was because of problems with modified viewers being used to grief other users, "“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."

The problem is, EAC will not just block harmful mods, but ones useful to players. Some help in avatars being more interactive. Some help enhance the experience, such as VRC-CC which allows closed-captioning for deaf players so they can see movies inworld. 

https://twitter.com/TheFoxipso/status/1551640725455982593

Apparently, there's been an "unspoken culture," as Alexandra Hall of Kotaku describes, of mods being tolerated "unless they flaunted their upgrades or otherwise caught moderators’ attention." The result has been a "thriving underground mod scene" that allowed players to enjoy the game in ways not intended by the developers and for disabled players to get around the platforms shortcomings many say the developers were slow to adress. Some were also made to help protect players from malicious mods, "oftentimes unofficial mods have been the only means by which to access certain features, ranging from support for exotic hardware like advanced trackers and networked sex toys to addressing accessibility concerns like closed captioning and text-to-speech. Also popular were mods that tried to protect against malicious 'crasher' avatars, mods that helped to increase framerates in the notoriously sluggish, Unity-based game, and mods that allowed avatar searching, a basic-seeming feature that VRChat still lacks."

The development team acknowledges there is a problem, "we hear you and see you saying that many of the modified client features that are being lost due to this are extremely important to you, or in some cases allow you to use VRChat at all, when in regards to modifications that added accessibility features that VRChat currently lacks." But are going ahead with it, "we are going to be releasing this update, and we do not have plans or intent to revert or roll it back." 

The result has been numerous complaints, including many angry ones, from a number of VR Chat's users. The Steam page was full of recent negative reviews. "The latest update introduced Easy Anti-Cheat which has turned the game into garbage," wrote a Yifrick, "This was an amazing social game but now the developers have gone and ???? on it and everyone who loved this game by including this spyware under the pretence of making the game 'safer' for users, when it does absolutely no such thing, and actively harms the community." "Many hours i played and some years on it," wrote an Appie_Dude, " but when I heard of the new update, no (I) am done, am out. ... the devs won't listen to people and go for the money now. You ruined a game, goodluck." "You literally just destroyed your community who heavily relys on mods for quality of life improvements since you are so slow to do it yourself," wrote a Smackdatmoney, "What a actual shame that you continued and STILL went through with it anyways even after massive community backlash. ... you've just became another one of those companies who see their own community as 'idiots who dont know what their talking about'. ..."

In one review by a Soulful, "there's not a lot to be said here about the state of VRC. I've had issues for a while, game has serious optimization issues for folks who play through virtual desktop, has pretty much no graphical optimization implemented in any capacity, atop of compounding problems with lack of communication, community engagement, and a huge lack of understanding with their userbase's needs and wants. I lived with these issues, in hopes that these features would be implemented sometime, having relied on modding and even Steam's own built in VR stuff to help with these problems, which has been a godsend for those times when there's more than a handful of folks around ... For a long while the VRC team either would ignore a lot of these posts of critique and even real complaints of issues, or directly missing the point of something being brought up to begin with, it was nothing new, now though they're showing their ugly heads when it comes to something as big as adding an anti cheat. Normally I'd be for them implementing something into the game to help with dealing with malicious users doing things like code injecting or script kiddy nonsense to harass and disrupt other people. (But) to destroy something as big and as fundamental as the modding community, the Steam community, and even just plain ol Meta/Quest users on Virtual Desktop ... outright shutting down all sorts of background apps and taking snapshots of your PC if it even suspects even a little bit of something 'suspicious' or 'malicious', and is already VERY well known for not playing well with lots of 3rd party software used in day to day services, including VR services, and from the statements they've been handing out, and lots of the other things going on with VRC itself lately in terms of monetization, it's very clear where they lie in terms of the future of their platform. And it's not to be user friendly, not to be community friendly, and definitely not to be true to the spirit of a social platform to push any envelopes in the VR industry."

Someone named Keith complained the update didn't really stop malicious users, writing, "EAC was defeated in less than 2 hours after it hit the Beta Branch. This means that any malicious actor who wants to continue to use mods to cause problems can do so unimpeded. ... even if EAC was a perfect anticheat with no way around it? That wouldn't stop 99% of crashers, rippers, and account hijackers. The VAST majority of those people utilize completely vanilla clients because VRChat's code is just that insecure. ... at the end of the day EAC is a pure negative. There isn't a single pro about its presence in VRC. It will only make the crashing and other issues worse as it strips people of community made defenses, it takes away many accessibility features disabled folk relied on to be able to participate, and without the community driven QOL options many people use, VRChat just becomes an inferior platform compared to other options."

In the past few days, upset users have "review bombed" VRChat. Its recent reviews were ranked "Overwhelmingly Negative."

"Disabled players are feeling the brunt of this update the most," stated an article from Eurogamer that appeared in senegalbgs.org, "They say they are now stuck with a game they cannot play, with no guidance on when the game will be made accessible to them and no guaranteed way of making sure their needs are being listened to. ... this is a huge setback, particularly considering the work that is going into accessibility options in high-profile games . They say they now find themselves stuck in an ecosystem that has taken away the tools that allow them to join in without providing a sufficient alternative."

Not everyone is complaining. Talking to Marusame, who started out in Second Life, but appears much more often in VRChat now, he stated he didn't use mods, "Most people are just (complaining) because they can no longer use mods that give you power like flying around, crashing people, messing with things like turning off mirrors or making things move around or generally being a nuisance. ... though this doesnt get rid of crasher avatars. Imagine if in Second Life someone could whip out an avatar and crash a sim?" She also thought people had plenty of time to get ready, "I've known they was gonna do something like this for MONTHS. I've hanged out with some of the devs and one works on security. ... so for me, this change didnt do much other than lobbies are filled with less crashers now and they are more chill. (It) reminds me of the Second Life Windlight UI thing where everyone said they'd go to Opensim because of it, and a month later everyone came back."

So what to do? There are calls not to get on VRChat for a week so the drop in numbers will get the attention of the development team. There are also calls for those who signed up for VRChat Plus, a $9.95 USD a month subscription service to cancel. 

I had a few words with Johnny Vulpine, who was "a longtime SL user and also a VRC user." He recommended using a couple alternative clients to get onto VRChat, Neos and ChilloutVR, "If you are looking for something similar to VRC where you can hop in, throw on or upload an avatar and go socialize. ChilloutVR might be more your speed. Like VRC, it's easy to get in and just go. Content creation is done outside of the game and uploaded in. If you are looking for something more like SL but in VR, I think you will love Neos. Neos is a VR social app just like VRC and Chillout. But like SL, it has a full range of building tools in-game, you have an in-game inventory which already comes stocked with some basic things. Or you can upload content built outside the game. I will add that the learning curve for Neos can be a bit daunting. BUT you do not need to learn every aspect of building and content creation to enjoy the game. There are already TONS of avatars (many of the same ones used in VRC) that you can pickup and use for free."

Marusame was less enthusiastic about the alternative clients, saying ChilloutVR was harder to use, "the api is fried, also the sdk is janky was harder to upload an avatar than vrchat especially to get material toggles and has a harsher public avatar upload review process." But went on to say they are "doing a lot of hiring so maybe they actually want to do something. Neos VR I hear is more complicated and you can build in world, very Second Lifey experience. But development is dead at the moment with people leaving and infighting."

So what are Second Life users thinking of this development? There was one meme of two sailors getting disciplined by their captain. One was a VRChat user, complaining this was cruel and unusual punishment. The other was a 16 year veteran of Second Life, who was taking things in stride, and looking to the VRChat user and asking, "First time?"

Erron Kelly in Venturebeat would comment that there was something about VRChat that reminded him of the early "Wild West" days of the Internet, which while offering an unexplored frontier also had bad guys such as trolls using racist language, "VRChat taking steps to sanitize that stuff? In the long run it’s probably good for the software. But every time the Old West gets settled it’s a little sad. That’s just me being nostalgic about how I grew up. The people losing access to genuine quality-of-life mods? They’ve really got something to complain about."

Sources: Vice, PC Gamer, Venturebeat, Steam, Eurogamer/Sengal, Kotaku 

Bixyl Shuftan
 

A Look at VR Chat

By Bixyl Shuftan

Several months ago, Linden Lab announced the release of it's "next generation virtual world" Sansar. Anticipated for two years, the reaction from most Second Life residents, who were presumably the far majority who explored it, was that it needed plenty of improvement and left it behind. There are other virtual worlds out there, such as InWorldz and High Fidelity. But these two have been around for some years and have yet to attract anywhere near the attention the largest virtual world has received. But are there any other new ones out there besides Linden Lab's new creation? The answer to that is yes. One other recent one is VR Chat.

VR Chat was created by Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey, and was released via the Steam distribution service on Feb 1, 2017. But it's been in recent weeks the virtual world has taken off, an article in PC Games News in mid-January saying the client software had been downloaded over a million times in two weeks to 1.7 million. The reason for the attention the game has received is due to players broadcasting experiences over Youtube and Twitch. This includes recordings of the "Ugandan Knuckles" meme (some profanity in videos in link) that caught on to the point players found themselves followed by bands of badly-made avatars of the red "Sonic" character asking in African accents if they know "de wey." While the meme is considered lame by many (including yours truly), the publicity has gotten VR Chat the kind of publicity that has escaped most other virtual worlds other than Second Life.

To download VR Chat, head to it's page on Steam. The software is free. Clicking it on, you'll need to register an account. After your email address is added, and you agree to the terms of service, you should be ready to go in. Your first place will be a tutorial area to help you learn how to get about. For me, the most challenging part was just getting started, not being able to move from where I appeared. Then I realized that unlike Second Life, the movement keys are not the arrow buttons on the keyboard, but the WASD ones. You move your mouse to look around.

Another important button is the "Esc" key, which brings up a menu with 11 buttons and a sliding bar. You can adjust the bar for how loud you want to sound to others when you're speaking on your microphone. The two buttons I was using the most were "Worlds" which brings up lists of places you can travel to, and "Avatar" which allows you to change your appearance from a selection. Most of the choices in the Avatar section were varieties of normal human or robots, with a few others such as an elf, an orc, and what looked like a greenish anthro deer.

Unlike Sansar, you can actually grasp things. Just get your hand close enough, and press the left mouse button. You can hold an object for a while, and even hold and fire a pistol. I found throwing balls to be tricky, though. The only way I could throw something with some reliability was to swing the mouse upward and then let go, and the object would go some distance in the air. Different objects seem to have different weights as one "frisbee" would keep going up while a solid block only went up a few feet before falling back. You can also grab a pen and draw something. Unlike Second Life, you can't really add objects to your avatar indefinitely. If you want to hold anything else, you'll have to drop what you're holding.

After the tutorial area, your next location, and the one you'll appear when logging on the game is "The Hub." The place is divided into several areas. At "Featured Worlds," there are portals to several places. "New Worlds" has a few more of recently made locations. The "Help Area" has a number of signs with hints on getting about. The "Social Sculpture" is basically a blue square with several blocks which anyone can try to make something. There's also an avatar area with hints on how to change yours and a mirror to show you what you look like.

To travel to another place, you can use a portal if where you're already at has one to where you want to go. Otherwise, press the "Esc" key and select "Worlds" on the menu. You'll see several lists, which you can move about on using the arrow buttons. Once you select a world, you have the option of teleporting over, or you can create a temporary portal that those nearby such as friends can follow you over. Places can sometimes be small, such as a "Sword Art Online" one that turned out to be just a single room.

But most VR Chat worlds I saw were much bigger. One was a representation of Times Square, filled with parody ads and ads for locations. There was also a place that looked like an European village. Another place was made of floating islands in the sky. I also saw some gaming areas. One was a "Wild West" game between outlaws and sheriffs in which the latter would try to stop the former from taking the gold bars in various places back to their hideout with both shooting at one another. There was also a space-themed capture-the-flag. I also saw two maze games, one with simple walls, the other an underground cavern passages maze. There was also a small island done in the style of "Minecraft." I saw a listing to, but never visited, a "My Little Pony" area.

But the most common types of locations I saw advertised themselves as places to get avatars. Despite the "Ugandan Knuckles" fad, I never saw any of the deformed red Sonic avatars. In the several places I looked, amine girl and various cartoon avatars seem the most popular. But these aren't the only ones. A friend was able to appear in a "Windows 95" avatar. One time in "The Hub," I saw a guy that looked like a fish in a TV screen. To chose a look in one of the avatar places, click on it. But the look is temporary. After you log off, you'll go back to your old look. So if you want something other than the starting avatars, you will have to go back to the place after logging in.

Both worlds and avatars take programs outside VR Chat to make. Unity SDK can be used to create avatars and worlds. Avatars can also be created with Maya and Blender. Created worlds are private, limited to the creator and any friends he wishes to bring in, until the creator contacts VR Chat's team and requests that it be made open to all.

So far, meeting people there has been much like meeting people in a Second Life welcome area. Only instead of chat, it's all voice as there is currently no chat function. If you have a working microphone, press and hold "V" to talk. Besides a couple friends from Second Life whom helped show me around, different people reacted in different ways. One was helpful. One just wanted to curse at everyone else he saw. Most just went about their business or chatted with someone willing to talk. So far the only one who pulled that "Show me da wey," line was in a mummy avatar, not the deformed Sonic character. But you won't always run into someone, particularly during late night and early morning SL time.

Like Sansar, VR Chat is new, having been around only for a year. It's not as versatile as Second Life. And there's no economy, no trading or virtual currency. On the other hand, it's my personal observation it's more lively than Sansar. I remember reading that someone else who was both in Sansar and VR Chat stated Sansar felt more "managed." Hamlet Au (Wagner Au) was quoted in Motherboard as saying the focus Sansar had for high-quality images wasn't necessarily what was wanted, "Many also seem to be putting the cart before the horse. Carefully laying down an economic infrastructure when there’s hardly anyone there to use the economy. ... Most gamers don’t care about all that. They just want to jump in immediately, start playing around with the system, cause and enjoy chaos, and have fun with each other.”

Although VR Chat got plenty of attention due to a silly meme, it also made news when something serious happened. In one crowded room in which someone was recording, one player was witnessed having a seizure. Most stood around, not sure what to do, with one person telling others to back away to give the person room to recover and asking no flashing lights be used, and with one or two people clowning around like they didn't notice what was going on. Eventually the person recovered and logged off.

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Personally, VR Chat seems to be better than Sansar, but it's no Second Life. It lacks the versatility of the more established virtual world. Right now, thanks to youtubers and a meme, it's riding a wave of popularity that has enabled to give it numbers that Sansar and others like High Fidelity wish for. But will the people stay once the novelty wears off? Second Life gained a community of dedicated users that stuck around once the media all but stopped talking about it. How VR Chat develops over time will help determine wether not people stay. Perhaps some of those there who start to tire of the memes but still have a taste for virtual worlds will head to the one that still has a sizeable following after almost fifteen years.

Wikipedia, PC Game News, Polygon, Motherboard, Rogue Shadow

Image Credit (bottom): Rakucia

Hat Tip: Skylark Lefavre, Rakucia

Bixyl Shuftan