First, I’m still very upset about your horrendous rollout of the EAC update, and of not only banning all mods but eve sending threatening cease and desist letters to pillars of the modding community like the EMMVRC team. These are fans who love your platform and working to make it even better for no profit – and even driving up your own subscriptions by requiring VRC+ subscriptions to unlock key features of their mods. Killing the work they did was bad enough, but threatening legal action against them after the fact is disgusting. Shame on you.
My wife, myself, and another 10-12 people in our immediate friend group have all cancelled our VRC+ subscriptions both in protest of your conduct and in belief that the benefits it provides aren’t worth it without the functionality added by the mods – especially avatar searching. What point is there in extra avatar slots if I can’t find any avatars I like?
Specific to your announced update plans: I’m glad to see you prioritizing the critical accessibility and some of the easier QOL mods that until now modders have had to provide to make your platform functional and comfortable for disabled, atypical, or easily overwhelmed players. There’s a LOT more to do, but it’s a good start at making things functional at a minimum level for them.
Moving forward, the one question on everybody’s lips is the obvious one: when will we get avatar searching? While the features you’re working on now are definitely more critical, the ability to search avatars is desperately needed to make the experience better and more user friendly.
The most general reason why avatar searching features are needed from an experience standpoint is this: if I want to look for an avatar now that you’ve killed the functional search features from mods, I have to stop spending with my friends to do so. Searching for an avatar right now is an isolating, individual experience because rather than being able to browse through avatars while gathered around with my friends and talking, I have to leave the group and go do it on my own. In a social platform like this, that’s counterintuitive. It’s also just boring. My wife and I play this, and I am much into looking for avatars than she is. I don’t want to have to drag myself away from her and my friends to look for cool new avatars. I’d rather just not get new avatars, but that takes away a huge part of the fun for me too. I LOVE discovering awesome new avatars to use!
As for actually FINDING the avatars you like, “avatar worlds” just don’t work. They don’t. Not if you’re looking for anything specific, anyway. I have particular tastes for avatars. I love puppet style ones, and little drones and cute hovering robots and such – and even among them I’m really picky about what I like. When I had a search feature, even a clumsy modded one, I could find ones I liked with enough digging and trying different terms and such. Now? I just can’t. Avatar worlds feel like trying to find a needle in a thousand random haystacks. Instead of looking for a cool new avatar being fun, it’s extremely frustrating! I load a world, which may have only two or three avatars in it or may have dozens of random ones completely unrelated to what I actually want to find, look around, and try another world. Over and over and over. And eventually, I give up, because I want to spend time with my friends in VR chat – not aimlessly wander through a bunch of abandoned avatar piles.
Without search, the entire game experience is just not as good. By a lot. Until we get search back, I see no point to a VRC+ subscription. Neither does my wife. Neither do my friends.
So, please, tell us when we can expect an avatar search feature. It’s better for us, it’s better for creators, and it’s better for your revenue. Even if it’s going to be a while, give us a roadmap. What features do you need to complete before prioritizing avatar searching, and approximately how long do you expect those features to take to develop to a degree where you’re willing to start moving resources towards working on the search feature?
Are we looking at weeks? Months? Within the next year? Do you even have any intention of a search feature, or are you deliberately avoiding mentioning it because you have other plans to monetize an avatar marketplace that excludes free avatars – putting profit before players?
) but I figured I’d throw it out there as this feature combined with the camera changes would REALLY open up filming/photography capabilities in VRChat!
