i dont know if vrchat team already knows about the new crashing methods people found to upload & use crash avatars again. Vrchat lobbies getting killed everyday ending up in users make group+ or friend+ lobbies only wich results in less interaction with new people.
It’s pretty annoying and i dont know whats the point of crashing the whole lobby. These guys just killing the game wich is sad because i found many friends and i really enjoy talking to them and playing games in worlds.
I would be really happy if you guys can do something against the crashing avatars. One big provider is hexedware. They do even create thier own lobbies and have no fear to display them self as winner.
I’m in the sunset bar loop, there’s rumors that a particular bar (won’t say which) sends crashers to other bars as an attempt to kill competition. Instance crashes, and people flood to another. If you’ve ran a bar, it’s why you’ll get a large influx of people at the same time, their previous instance crashed, so they went to a different instance of the same bar.
Multiple people claim to have heard this particular bar/group discuss this in their public instances. Bar owners don’t like to leave to have any discussions, due to the small burden of instance ownership transferring, no matter how private, the topic is almost always discussed in a not so private corner of their own groups public instance. I’ve heard many owners say they won’t stoop that low, and enjoy the friendly competition.
The thing is they probably know about it, you can report users and make complaints, but they can’t make drastic actions without risking limiting people’s freedom and they can’t explain it to us without rising exposition their detection technics just for them being dodged right after.
So sadly, in this status quo, there isn’t much to be done aside of doing group ban and making group + instances.
Their also flat out sending them into avi search worlds like yaas perma’ing accounts that never merged their accounts, literally just lost mine a couple hours ago, I wished the devs gave us the ability to default avatars when loading into worlds, I’m no longer able to do much now with my non merged account.
If they can’t fix things and protect the users adequately without taking away people’s freedom, even with proofs and reports… Then there is a big problem with how they operate and search problems.
Protecting your people and giving them their due freedom and privacy is one of the basics in any social environment.
I had some crash issues due to some random folks lately… But mostly due to their Avatar crashers, which can be dodged if you… block every single avatar in public lobbies.
If you can tell who is the one loading the Avatar and crashing the lobby, look at the groups they are in and note any that look useful and if you get Crashed again look at groups any that might match or same avatar that they are using.
Avatar upload by… { user_here }
same as last time just keep not and if you have the Avatar ID Global Block that Avatar and they are block next time the lobby gets crashed, but your fine and the only users left have that avatar/player not showing.
Note names and rank if they are making new users to go in a crash the lobby that will be a bit harder to find then who might be sending them. that would need server side info AKA IP, time, zone. and time to check
Is there a user who joins then abit later a player joins and Lobby gets Crashed well might be joining off them to.
and I’ve done some looking into Hexedwerecheats and there are hosted by cloudflare what might be not with in there TOS of selling Hacked/Mods on there site. so might be able to Send a email to CloudFlare and get the like shutdown all so sending the discord server linked to the page to discord mod team and see if they would look in to it.
To block out the most of the crashers, would be to create a additional join-filter like Group+ or Friends+ wich would be like to disallow New Users to join or even Known Users. This would fix most of the problems as the crashers often use new accounts only and the trusted ones are very rare. As i said this would reduce the crashes drastically.
This join rule should be seperat to the existing join rule, its just a additional security layer on top of the existing one. A abillity to change the security option in runtime from admins would be even more sick!
Feel free to like this post if you think this would be a good feature.
Also there should be a option to close up the lobby temporary instead of permanently. Stable lobbies with 40 Players or more then could be closed & saved from being crashed ( if the crasher not already in ). When player count drops admins could then enable joining again to get back to thier player count with small chance of getting a crasher in.