Did you miss the part where they had to shut down the worlds to remove NSFW that made it past their filters? I wouldn’t call that “openly selling NSFW avatars”
I think a great solution would be to open the doors to more platforms that can provide a readyplayerme-style avatar creation flow, or even something like that in VRChat by default.
ReadyPlayerMe is a great solution with a huge flaw, which is it’s an artstyle no one on VRChat is looking for. As such, having more competitors in that market that target the VRChat audience a bit better would be great.
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Is that PC only, or quest compatible?
I looked at the two PC only aquarium world and didn’t notice any nsfw stuff, I’m kind of worried that I walked past something salacious and didn’t notice…
The best part is it’s not even that complicated. They can just upload the avatar to their account as private (so it compiles the shaders and what not), use the VCC to backup the project, send them the backup, they can add it to the VCC, and then open and upload the project. It’s really easy that way.
For sure… but alternatively: one time upload tokens that can be revoked or have a timer on them like discord invite links 
It is incredibly confusing how you go from:
…it’s clear that it’s not just face talk that they are definitely struggling with allocating resources to pervasive features like this.
immediately in the next post to:
This is why i can’t understand the depreciation of SDK2
SDK2 is old. In order for them to maintain it, they need to do lots of development and testing against all the other features they implement in the game. The resources required to keep SDK2 alive is not worth it compared to just putting those resources into making SDK3 better or providing an upgrade path.
Also, I am doubtful that some of the community/social features they could add tangentially to a community market/content explorer would be that difficult or time consuming to implement. Sure they’d take time and would need to be prioritized appropriately, but they aren’t incredible engineering feats, and the value is there clearly since they added the avatar page on web.
I just am boggled by how many people constantly hand wave social features in anticipation that they’ll cause Armageddon somehow.
How is it losing them money exactly? This sounds like conjecture, unless you have some statistics to back this up.
There are a LOT more factors that go into software engineering than that.
The main purpose of EAC was to cut down on hijacked accounts via malicious mods, as well as to make it easier to moderate out hackers (before there wasn’t much to be done since they were attempting to not ban non-malicious modding, now if your client is modded they can just hit you with a ban).
Avatar search mods did not increase their bandwidth or server costs. Avatar search mods created a database of catalogued public avatars, which were hosted personally by mod developers. This same is true with avatar search worlds - these worlds do not hit the VRChat API with any traffic, they hit a third party API or even just a built-in Udon script.
As far as exploring worlds and avatars, this still remains a good way to find avatars. Avatar creators aren’t directly contributing their efforts to avatar search worlds, so updates to avatar worlds with new avatars, or new avatar worlds in general, will still provide a reason to visit said world.
Avatar searching also isn’t perfect since the relevant information isn’t always in the avatar name, so finding an avatar world around a specific theme and style is still a good idea.
I like the idea, but given the current “asset economy” and the 1 polygon difference between “good” and “very poor”, you’d often be stripping so much from an avatar that you either aim for “good”, or not care at all because 70,001+ polygons locks you at “very poor”, this is the one thing that bugs me the most about the current performance rankings, I feel like 100k for medium 150k for poor would be suitable limits on PC.
Maybe introduce ranking presets, the current limits could remain as one of them, while also adding more forgiving and more strict limits, which players could adjust based on their hardware (alternatively allow setting personal limits). As for the official avatar search feature, they could return avatars filtered by the currently selected limits, the default limits, or by the highest limits provided.
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also probably doesn’t help that the user base & vrchat probably has very different ideas of like how much different outfits one should put on a singular Avatar
If your outfits aren’t a completely filled percentile slider, are you really living?
ducks and covers
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Just wanted to say I really appreciate your response here. From the beginning I’ve taken great care and consideration to ensure my avatar search world abides by the TOS and guidelines to the best of my understanding, as well as making myself accessible for creators to request have their stuff removed from the index if they wish. I never expected either the popularity or controversy, I just remember from back when I was a new user myself, and wanted to provide a simple and easy way for new users to find their perfect avatar. And it’s had the side benefit of providing better exposure to smaller creators, many of whom send me avatar ids to add specifically because they want to show them off to people (the new “change” system on the website also helps a ton with that too).
But up until now without an official statement on the matter I’ve long been curious how the VRC team viewed it, since I’ve seen it asked by users before, but never addressed. Even though the answer is “on a line”, it’s still helpful and reassuring to hear it noted that public avatar search worlds (at least in concept) aren’t against the rules.
I’m also a big supporter of both additional avatar permissions beyond public/private as well as the eventual integrated search system you guys have talked about. They’ll make my world obsolete, but I welcome it as a better and healthier option for the long term future anyways. If my world has helped to provide data and encouraged that forward, then I’m glad to hear it =)
Lastly, I wanted to add that if there are any specific concerns or thoughts from the VRC team (particularly in regards to that line, and staying on the right side of it), I’d love to share a dialog sometime. But regardless, once again, thank you for weighing in your thoughts, and for these great QoL updates!
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So you are telling me that those search avatars worlds are not using VRChat bandwidth and are only providing ripped content? Interesting.
Amazon servers are selling bandwidth, the more we use it, the more it costs to vrchat, you can’t deny that. That said, let’s compare a player who take is time to visit worlds, find avatars, basically he will spend more time and use less bandwidth than a player who have access to a search feature that allows him to switch to any avatar at any time.
No. Still wrong. Not ripped avatars. Public avatars. The IDs of public avatars are stored, and the player is changed into the ID for that public avatar. If the avatar goes private, it can’t be used anymore.
You are the one who said that thoses search avatars worlds doesn’t hit vrc api with any traffic, so how do you actually download avatars from theses worlds?
The search causes no bandwidth imposition on VRChat since it does not hit VRChat API to perform the search. Changing into an avatar is the only thing which accesses the CDN in any way, and will cause no more additional bandwidth compared to changing into it from your favorites menu or an avatar world.
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You know those avatar search worlds currently use their own database and infrastructure for the search queries, right?
Edit: Sure, people will download avatars faster through the avatar search world, and it will cost VRChat some money. But I would imagine that if it really was causing cost issues, those worlds would be banned already. They are aware of them.
Yea, basically an avatar search feature allows you to download more often a new avatar, resulting to bandwidth and costs increase for VRChat. That’s my own and unofficial statement that EAC were primarily implemented to stop those extra costs.
I really dislike the idea of adding an avatar search functionality and these worlds that allow you to find any public avatar, because you can find there your own and private personal avatars, that once were ripped and got uploaded publicly by rippers, so it’s like a free way to see your work getting used by others when its meant to stay only in your machine,
But then!
If there’s something that i can see good about the avatar search, is exactly that, you can find those private avatars and see who uploaded it, and then report them and, then, wait, report them again because vrchat didn’t do anything, then wait and report them again, etc etc.
So it’s a double edge feature.
I’ve used both avatar world and the search worlds, when it’s an avatar world with friends we probably try on everything. With a search world it’s usually different searches, and personally I don’t try all the results unless the search term was sufficiently exact. Like Gordon Freeman. I dunno, after awhile I run out of things to search for or motivation to try on avis.
I feel like I click on less avatars per hour in the search world vs in a particular avatar world.
The 70k limit for multiple performance ranks is nice for taking a premade avatar and optimizing materials. Have lots of color options for every part, poor or very poor. Then for a more personalized version, cut down on the options, bam more optimized.
Personally I think offer the carrot as is, and can always raise the polygon count later
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As others said, typically the avatar per minute for a search world is on par or less than that of a normal avatar world. It’s not causing extra bandwidth any moreso than the avatar system typically does.
We also aren’t privy to the costs of AWS for VRChat. Most likely, they have an enterprise level agreement that means they don’t pay more based on bandwidth cost like usual. It certainly wouldn’t be enough for a few GB to cause higher bandwidth cost, if it was even a thing. That is, if they even use AWS.
The stated reasons for EAC from VRChat Team were:
- Account safety
- Making moderation of hacked clients possible
And as such, that is what you should go off of. Not whatever your own personal feelings are.
I wonder if anyone forgot they were running with mods and asked for support for issues that turned out to be caused by a mod 