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VRChat is getting demolished by fans. Where? Everywhere. The game's Steam page has been steadily review bombed over the past couple of days. The official Discord server is full of very angry fans. The game's Reddit page is full of angry people. Even the VRChat official community suggestion and bug reporting site is blowing up with the fervor of thousands of angry fans.
At last check, just one post complaining about this move on the community suggestion site has already pulled in nearly 20,000 upvotes from supporters.
It's all due to a recent announcement by the VRChat development team that they will be adding Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) into the game. Those who are on the cutting edge of builds may already have Easy Anti-Cheat in use as it was added to the beta branch of VRChat on July 25th.
In their statement, the developers say that the addition of EAC will solve the issue of "malicious client modifications" that are apparently responsible "for a massive amount of issues for both (their) team and (their) users." The devs go on to say, "We've been listening to you cry out for a solution to being harassed, griefed, and constantly crashed, we we're taking further steps to address one of the roots of the problem."
The problem here, and it is one voiced by thousands of upset fans, is that these malicious mods account for just a tiny fraction of all the mods used for VRChat. Most of the mods are open source, available on sites like GitHub, offer several quality-of-life improvements, and are often heavily curated by the community.
An overwhelming selection of VRChat mods enable and enhance functionality within the game. There are mods that allow users to search for public avatars to use. There are mods that enable the use of haptic suits. Other mods facilitate the use of VR while laying down. Still other mods help those with disabilities navigate menus and the game environments. This includes features like speech-to-text, which is not a standard feature within the game. Even something as simple as receiving a notification when a buddy enters into a world is done through these mods that are now banned from use.
In fact, a lot of the mods that have been released for VRChat were born from the lack of support and response by the official developers. Things like accessibility features included in various mods have not been added into the game yet by the developers. The only official word on some of the now missing mod features are that they might be coming as official updates in the future. No timeframe for when any of those will be added was announced.
There were also very popular mods that prevented clients from crashing with certain users made use of avatars specifically designed to crash game clients. Without being able to use these anti-crash protection mods, users will undoubtedly have an even worse time when someone logs in with one of these troll avatars.
The blog post from the developers tries to paint EAC as some sort of a silver bullet that will take care of all the woes present in VRChat. They go so far as to claim that mods are "a burden" and even suggest that this will have a positive impact on creators that will no longer need to debug world issues for those using modified clients.
And if that wasn't already bad enough, Easy Anti-Cheat was bypassed in just a few hours of the beta going live.
The VRChat communities across all of the game's different channels have called for a boycott of the game. They are also suggesting that those subscribed to the premium VRChat+ cancel their subscriptions to show their displeasure. Some have even suggested completing ditching VRChat and moving over to other social VR experiences such as ChilloutVR.
