Wagner James Au / New World Notes

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VRChat User Concurrency Back Up to Pre-Mod Ban “Protest” Levels — Update: Now 6000+ Over Last Week’s Protest Levels

VRChat mod ban EAC total concurrency

Update, 8/3: Yesterday's peak concurrency was 70,478 — well over 6,000 concurrent more users than last week Tuesday, when the protest started. As I suspected, the trend remains: VRChat gonna VRChat.

As I suspected last week, the "protest" by some VRChat users over the company's ban on modified clients has all the indications of a vociferous but small subgroup, rather than reflecting any broad community uprising. You can see that in the user concurrency levels from this VRChat dashboard, which today shows a 5,581 increase of users from last Monday, when the announcement was posted.

One week later, the only indication that there was even any kind of user disgruntlement is on Steam, where thousands have since barraged VRChat's listing with a negative review. But even there, the loss is a few thousand concurrent users at most, and is offset by growth from the Quest userbase. Also, a little bird tells me we may see much more growth evident today at the peak time of 8pm PT, so stand by there.

As I wrote last week, some of the mod ban protest was legitimate, since there was concern that a few mods improved VRChat's usability, such as text captions for deaf users, contrast for colorblind users, for people who are bedridden, and so on. VRChat management very quickly addressed those concerns with an update to the original announcement:

Over the last 72 hours, we’ve been gathering up all of your feedback across every channel. In addition to the information we already had on hand, we've been talking to VRChat communities and community leaders about the changes and additions that they want most, including speaking to communities focused on accessibility in VRChat…

Here’s some of the changes and improvements we’re working on. First off, some that we’re aiming to get into VRChat by the end of next week:

Horizon Adjust is a feature that we developed during a recent internal feature jam that was already on the way. It allows a user to change their “horizon” however they want to orient it, which allows controller movement and menu usage as if the user was standing even if they are lying down.

Visual Adjustments are a set of features that includes a set of color-blindedness filters that can be set, as well as a slider that adjusts the intensity of these filters. Additionally, there is an option to affect only the VRChat UI, or the VRChat UI and the world you’re in.

Notably, the method we’re using to adjust colors for filtering in the prototype does not work on Quest due to graphical limitations. We will be addressing this with further iterative updates and adjustments.

This feature will also include the ability to turn off Bloom, as well as gamma/brightness and contrast sliders.

Custom Mic Sensitivity will allow users to adjust the “trigger point” at which the user’s microphone sends audio to others, helping users with noisy IRL environments.

More here. If anything, the mod protest may be remembered for slowing VRChat's adoption by hardcore gamer-oriented Steam users, and growing it among Meta/Quest users. (Not to mention any influx of noobs who first heard about VRChat from the new HBO documentary that premiered last week.) Not sure that would be plus for the community overall, but now I guess we'll see.

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3 responses to “VRChat User Concurrency Back Up to Pre-Mod Ban “Protest” Levels — Update: Now 6000+ Over Last Week’s Protest Levels”

  1. Neff Avatar
    Neff

    Didn’t they break the new security in a day and started using mods again?

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  2. Unknown Skills Avatar
    Unknown Skills

    Why do you act as if this is the only metric that counts? people can stop volunteering time and effort in content, community effects and leadership, reduce time spent bug hunting or helping introducing new features. people can also stop donating money to VRChat or discontinue paying for premium.
    They can also undermine the platform socially and create a negative atmosphere while turning there back on new users by no longer being a community ambassador and just talking about gaming or creating elsewhere without violating directly any rules or griefing.just sitting around mouthing politics all day Lowkey could undermine things slowly over time.
    Logins metrics mean very little like they do in SL when you have undeclared bots logging in all the time.
    It’s not about the login numbers when VRChat is not operating like a business or has a rich owner like SL has trying to squeeze every drop from the cashcow they can while using a 20yr old game engine.

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  3. NiranV Avatar
    NiranV

    Concurrent User Number means nothing.
    Most people who complained still use VRChat because they have to, VRChat remains still the best social VR platform. Most people also have accepted that staying away from VRChat as a normal user is not going to do anything. Content creators and VRC+ is what counts and a lot of people cancelled their VRC+, that’s what hurt them and by the incredible speed they are pumping out all these features they lied to us and said they can’t implement because they would never be done doing so, clearly shows that it hit the spot. Regardless they have shown they cannot be trusted, they lied to us, said they couldn’t, now in fact they ARE implementing all these and in a mere 1-4 weeks record time and all it took was shitting on and destroying one of the biggest PC communities, the their modding community shows that they never cared and are solely doing this for the purpose of extinguishing fires wherever they can. They have forever left a big hole in the community and its trust, no feature can ever fix this nor make this not happen.
    They did the equivalent of LL nuking the entire TPV project because one of them was doing malicious stuff. Think of a zoo and you carpet bomb the primate section because there’s one monkey throwing his shit at visitors all day, there will be surivors, the zoo will continue to function without primates, but you will be missing a chunk of what made this zoo what it was.
    What’s worse is that all of these modders have spent so much time of their life trying to make VRChat a better place by offering all these features just to get nuked like this, displayed as the “bad” guys, put on the same level as malicious hackers. Look at all these idiotic sheep, following the VRChat devs, licking their boots, spewing their nonsense about modding all day, how modding is nothing but hacking and crashing people and can never ever be used for anything good. People who don’t have the brain capacity to understand that modding is not hacking, hence why these are two different words, they don’t understand that hackers were not even part of the modding community, they are their own secluded, closed, private, paid groups in some hidden hacker forums full of this kind of scum, these idiots see them as part of the modder community when they are not, the modding community actively fought them with anti-crasher mods and improved security and performance options (both of which i used and they really helped a lot).
    It’s all gone now and all thats left is these bootlickers smearing the image of modders with shit while EAC has changed nothing for the better, hackers are still going around (was to be expected, they are being paid after all), crashers are still very much a thing (they were never affected because crashers come 99%+ from avatars, corrupted or invalid data, all of which can be done with avatars), security has not improved at all, VRChat is still the same insecure pile of shit, people can still extract your IP, avatar ripping (copybotting) was never affected and will never be fixed (because you rip them from your cache or get them directly from the official API) all of which is done outside of VRChat and the absolute worst is that EAC also impacts your loading times and performance, world taking much longer to load, avatars are back to causing major freezes on unpack undoing all the optimization they did that a couple months ago and with EAC we now have even more security holes and that isn’t even mentioning that EAC is just another mechanic that can randomly fail and is very well known in the gaming industry for doing so, random disconnects, crashes, harddrive abuse, spying on your PC, hard-crashing your PC or straight up inability to start VRChat all of which is already happening to a lot of people.
    This update was a complete mess, unprepared, rushed and no backup plan whatsoever, once again just another lie, they said they had it ready since last year december, they said there were prepared for this, they were ready. They were neither of these things. Their PR is a disaster, the way the handled this situation was a disaster and they clearly never had any intention to make up for all this shit if it wasn’t for all the modders, mod users, mod suppoerters and EAC haters who complained and blew this shit up into their faces. All those bootlickers should be happy they are getting these features now, if it wasn’t for us, they would have never gotten them.
    They could have worked with the modding community to bring these features into VRChat without banning modding, they could have made an official plugin/modding system, workshop support, added whitelists even offered them on their website until official implementation. They didn’t do jack shit.
    I’m also already seeing worlds vanishing. The Unshattered Destination, the very best horror map in VRChat. Gone. Just today i wanted to show my friends this absolute masterpiece of a map and i found it to be gone forever. Other world creators are taking down their maps or setting them to private too in protest. Is this really what they wanted?

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