The problem is adding an appealing option that catalyzes decayed socialization. This happened with orange status as a large chunk of the population are persistently difficult to interact with because of the “unknown”-type deterrent of the location being “private” and status changing being too much effort or usually being used for other things than what would they are doing at any given moment.
…The key with orange though is the severe discrepancy between the reason someone turns it on, and the affect it has on others. Psychologically, orange status differs little from red status, and has a “do not disturb” effect, because of not having enough information to incentivize requesting.
Having a complete toggle off for grabbables has advantages and disadvantages. For example if someone buries someone in stuffies while they slept for a cute bit, the person waking up, if they had props disabled, they would have no clue they were buried in stuffies, and that’s a missed interaction. Sure that’s a silly and unnecessary thing, but when these add up by the dozen, it subtracts from the experience because they may not even know what they were missing.
This also occurs with people who disable avatar animators - where people may be commenting on a cute dress or something and then the one doofus that has animators disabled may have a delayed reaction or possible no realization that everyone else is seeing something different they are. This is more destructive to social interaction than people tend to realize.
Personal mirror is very clearly defined being a personal mirror, that’s it’s function from start to finish, it’s a mirror for you only. It allows you to set it transparent so you can see yourself and who you are interacting with at the same time, this is productive in taking people away from the socially damping context of everyone staring at a wall. If someone has their mirror set to opaque (reflecting environment) then yes this creates a barrier that can cause someone to be unaware of what’s happening behind it.
I notice these things all the time in peoples’ behaviour patterns… Ofc blocking is the worst case where is actually extremely disruptive of conversation flow for everyone in the room if anybody talking is blocking anybody else who is talking. But avatars also affect this, as do worlds.
I already find it impossible to interact with quest users because they never see the correct avatar and it’s too much work to try and make quest compatible versions that give a similar enough experience. People see me as something not me.
. . . It is very important that i am talking to someone and communication is happening; if we’re both talking past eachother with a different realtime experience, then communication is nil and it’s not worth engaging in. This is a pervasive issue that variably hampers peoples’ ability to bond on the platform and can lead to more shallow fragile relationships.
Synchronous experience is a very big deal (aside from again, i consider mirrors to be one of the exceptions as long as everybody knows where they are and can turn it on to join the spot).
VRChat needs improved synchronicity* between users from it’s current state, not more breaks from it.
*(ie better networking, sync physics etc)
Recent displeasure i’ve experienced, fooling around with friends and i have a pistol on an avatar i’m using, i can fire that semi-auto at probably around 8-10 shots per second, and they only ever see a couple shots remotely… Breaking the immersion and fun of fooling around with these. I have some ideas to improve this, but the update rate of parameters is the limit (which is 8-12hz iirc)… The networking limitation eats up IK precision too - this was all implemented to pander to quest, having pc users suffer quality for it.
Sorry for long post - i just spend a lot of time on topics like these, and there’s a lot of ground to cover. …I can’t agree with the notion of implementing systems to satisfy the insecurity of the few, at the cost of everyone else’s quality of experience. I’m sure VRChat also considers topics like these a lot when weighing pros and cons of whether they should implement a feature to the game.