Recently saw a Reddit rant about a VRChat avatar with a hilariously ridiculous number of triangles (above), and had to laugh in recognition at the title: "Friends joining with these half a million polygon avies are literally ruining the experience (not only for me)! This is outrageously stupid and unnecessary!"
Maybe unnecessary, but also inevitable, on metaverse platforms: When you give novice grassroots creators UGC tools for enhancing their avatars, many will add so many enhancements, they often end up making avies with quite a lot of polygon junk in their trunk.
This also has been a challenge in Second Life for many years. Many of the top-selling mesh bodies in SL are extremely resource heavy, and tend to degrade performance of everyone around them, including the users wearing these bodies. (They're so resource heavy, a former Linden Lab engineer once compared them to a local DDOS attack!) Some SL shopping events have even taken to setting up a "viewing sim" near the actual kiosks, so shoppers can view the wares at a safe, less laggy distance.
As for VRChat, there's some guidance in place which makes this less of a social problem:
For one, avatars with more than 70k polygons are considered "Very Poor" in VRChat's avatar ranking system and can be blocked, so they're simply not seen by others.
That way, people can still create high poly avatars, but everyone else in the world can set their safety settings to filter them out. I.E., as an insider explained, "that means that people can choose not to see any avatar that is beyond the threshold they set. So, you can choose to block all Very Poor avatars, or Poor avatars, or whatever you see fit."
The mechanics have helped shape community standards around high poly avatars:
"There’s a lot of community pressure for individuals to optimize their avatar," as my expert tells me. "With the safety settings, it’s typically possible to filter out the worst offenders. Most events will enforce rules, where you have to have an optimized avatar. Generally, having a poorly optimized avatar will get others to turn yours off."
That's a pretty good if not perfect solution — like the Reddit thread suggests, many VRCers will still complain, even if they can just set their preferences to not view high poly avatars at all.
I suspect that response reflects a broader social concern that's also inevitable: If you have a neighbor who regularly burns tires in their backyard, and the sight of black smoke disgusts you, you can simply shut your curtains. But then you no longer get to enjoy the full view of the world around you — and definitely resent the person who caused you to close the curtains.
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Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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