I’m very much of the opinion that genuine friend groups shouldn’t be hard defined, nor have leaders/moderators/etc in any capacity (aforementioned issues of being over/under people gets to heads far too easily), because such a thing shouldn’t be necessary if everyone are genuinely just friends with each other.
Frankly, the idea of having a hierarchy and people who ‘make decisions’ for the collective group of ‘friends’ in that context is just, icky.
“Us vs. them” is the very core of every issue that’s pervaded the human existence since, ever, and the more that can be removed from every facet of our existence, the less conflict and ultimately happier we can all be. Which means no “Us” to there be a “vs. Them” to happen.
That said, I’m not going to say there isn’t room for people to have experiences the way they want to have experiences. If they want to have a hard defined “We are the X” and that sort of thing like a clan or whatnot, then that’s for them to do for themselves, I nor anyone else outside of that collective should be dictating how they operate.
Nor for other scenarios where it’s more like a fan or interest group within VRChat where “Everyone who likes X anime or Y game can easily find other people who are into that in public lobbies”, that’s the sort of thing a ‘group’ system should be being geared towards to in the context of VRChat as a suggestion of direction.
The problem is when it’s built into the game as a native function, it puts pressure onto everyone playing the game to be like that. Which, I don’t want that kind of experience to seep into the groups of friends I have. At least, no more than it already does with people organizing outside of VRChat, that I staunchly and actively avoid participating in for the reasons stated above.
Which as a extension of this problem, I can be friends with X person entirely independent of anything else, who happens to be or eventually becomes friends in a friend group. Now I’m thrust into being friends in some capacity with the rest of this group because the initial friend is constantly with these other people. Which is fine, when there’s no hard definition as to what this collective of people are. If they do possibly end up doing that, now I’m thrust into petty internal squabbles and having to cut ties with people for reasons that could have been entirely avoided when it inevitably falls apart. To say nothing of how much harder it is to just be friends with multiple different kinds of people when it’s made even easier to be a single collective that’s hard defined and more obnoxious to bounce around between different people.
Which also to respond to “Should recognize the group was ran by a poor choice of leader,”
A, I didn’t choose that, nor choose there to be any ‘formal’ structure at all.
B, I just want to be friends with people, I shouldn’t have to be answering to anyone in a hierarchy for a friend group.
C, Even if I can see problems coming from a mile away with someone claiming to be leader, I can’t exactly go “You, f### off or we’re going to have a social meltdown with everyone here in T minus 7 days.” can I?
I think it’ll be pretty cool if we got a section where we had an avatar section when we visit somebody’s profiles! I think this will help with a lot because from my what I can see, the only two ways people can clone an avatar is either from worlds dedicated to avatars or just cloning them if they don’t have a world ready. I also think it’ll help with the avatar search as well just a little bit. All you would have to do is look up the person and then you will see not only their worlds but also the avatars as well when you scroll down the profile.
I’m also going to add this since I saw this suggestion a couple months ago and I think it’ll be a good addition as well: There should be a way to check time that’s not going AFK just to check it. I haven’t looked if this idea was already implemented in the beta but it would be nice to have that.
Groups will be great for exclusivity events, and simplifying instances and invites… but knowing which group to join or what the groups events are like, all of that is going to be on an invite only type situation because the events most likely will be closed to those not in the group so how does one even get involved… without public events to find out what is interesting to someone, why would they join your group. I still believe before groups you need an EVENTS calendar where people can find out about public events, or even group only events, and then they can know which group they want to join to attend said event. Or go to a public event and find out there’s a group being promoted so they can easily find more of the same. An event’s calendar is in EVERY social application I know except VRChat… it boggles my mind.
For me to put it simply VRChat is a place to go to. Yes my local pub has event calendar, but my friends and I can agree to show up around a certain time anyways.
There are enough various groups organizing things outside of VRChat that it’s okay to start in the middle.
The most common that I’ve seen is discord invite codes in worlds relating to groups.
I guess a tricky thing with vrchat is that for an event calendar they kind of need a vr and web interface for systems like that.
Which they already have, are you not aware of the web interface vrchat.com and there is also an android app which easily gets tons of information directly from the game… there is nothing complicated about it at all. It’s as simple as making a form, I have updated the descriptions of my worlds many times on the website interface which is then seen in the game immediately. Again, there are over 30k people online at any given time, many of which might like to see for instance a live singer, but wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to find one… or one maybe that they would like. An event calendar or list would at least give people the opportunity to find these things without having to search, find, and join groups which may or may not have content they are looking for. I don’t understand why this is such a big deal, every social platform online has an event calendar.
I know that this is a little off from your guys’s current update but is there any way that you guys would be able to add a button or a toggle that allows us to have our worlds that we create automatically shown at the top of our worlds list I’m just on the curious.
In the case what I am asking is if we have created any worlds to have a toggle that automatically opens up our world’s list with our worlds being first to be opened.
Just wanted to provide a link to a canny post about the near clip feature. In the second to last dev update, it was mentioned that it would not persist across sessions because VRChat does not want “unnecessary support requests”.
For sure, but what happens when someone grabs a unique name for your group that already exists? Especially if they don’t do anything with it/use it to troll?
If someone’s group name is being duplicated by other fake groups, I would imagine that group is already on some other platform like discord where they can link to the real one.
About half my friends list is often on green/blue, and even then, most orange users you can just request off of.
If people are not accepting your join requests and your logic is that you want to reduce giving people the ability to have a better user experience, then you need to either: find new friends, or realize that maybe people are ignoring your join requests for a reason.
If your groups are being torn apart for that reason, they weren’t good groups to begin with.
Sorry I didn’t respond to many of these! I took the first vacation time I’ve taken in uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I can’t remember and went to Twitchcon to meet a bunch of VRChat community people.
I’m back now, though!
Normally I try to respond to some posts-- at least until it starts going in circles, or we get repeat questions. I’ll catch up a bit.
There will be a cap on the amount of groups a single user can join. I’d like to have it as high as we can put it, but there’s technical limitations. When we start adding systems that push notifications or announcements to many people at once, there’s a lot of ways to flood ourselves with traffic.
I don’t know what the tooltip is, but yes, “represent” is the verb we’ve been using internally for showing a group in your nameplate.
I also want this, but that gets complicated. We’ve talked about it a LOT. Here’s the first example of the problem:
Friends+ allows anyone to join as long as a friend is in the instance.
Group+, as you described, allows anyone to join, but only if they are friends with a member of the group.
Does that member need to be in the instance for their friend to join? (probably yes)
What about other people in that instance that aren’t in that group-- as in, the friends of group members? Can their friends join?
If so, isn’t “Groups+” confusing nomenclature, since it differs in behavior in a way more complex than one might initially think?
There’s also technical limitations-- social graphs are expensive to compute in some cases, so we have to kind of put our toes in the water one at a time.
tl;dr: Groups+ has been something we’ve wanted from the start but they’re more complex than you think. Won’t be in at ship but will be in later, we hope.
Yes.
See my response to Salbug above regarding “Groups+”. It’s complicated. Not yet.
We’ve also wanted this from the start. Not going to be in on launch, though.
Yes!
This will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Since groups are unique via their “short name” like ALIEN.0123 (and can be brought up by typing their shortname and discriminator), it’ll be tough to impersonate.
There will be some rough spots as we figure out how people abuse it and patch those holes. It will not be perfect to start. Give it time.
I see you leaning towards a “Verified Group” idea. We have been talking about it for years. It’s complicated, but not off the table. Not in for launch.
Known bug, it stalled a bit because we can’t reproduce it but I’ll poke again.
It isn’t possible to change the properties of an instance on the fly yet, at least from the user side. Secure instances was actually a HUGE step towards making this possible.
In short, not yet, and not on launch. Probably with the eventual “Travel Update” the design team occasionally mumbles about.
Not at launch. We started looking at that as a possibility but ran into too many abuse vectors off the starting line. Announcements and group instances are meant to be the “good enough” until we can loop back around to making this possible and less abusable.
That’s the “Random” row/category!
That sounds neat, kind of a more advanced version of the “home instance type” option. Probably not at launch, but great idea.
It appears to be missing! It also appears to be a known issue. I’ll note that you’ve asked about it.
Since the shortname is the unique identifier, it is also what you use to quickly get to that Group’s page. We also should probably surface it in the nameplates when you open the Quick Menu.
We expect impersonation to occur but it is not a reason for us to put a halt to plans. We’ll deal with the issues as they come, which does mean things will get messy for a bit. You’ve been around VRC for a bit, Kortir, “VRChat is messy” is kinda normal sometimes.
These seem like cool features. We want to make static portals good again, because right now they’re kind of awful. It’s on the list of things we’d love to eventually do once we have resources.
If you didn’t know, VRChat eternally operates at 110% resource allocation, lol.
I know, I want it too. Please see above note on resource allocation.
This is a good point in this discussion. We aren’t like other platforms. Our content evolves over time, there are valid reasons for worlds to be highly rated and trending for long periods of time.
Not at launch, but eventally!
If group names (the full name, like “The Really Cool And Fantastic Bread Group”) were unique, you’d have a namesquatting problem.
Instead, we have the “shortname” solution, where Groups choose a shortname of 3-6 characters, and are assigned a discriminator. That way, you can have up to 10,000 BREAD.1234 groups, but they can all have different full names.
Since users will look up Groups using these short names (they’re kinda like Discord server invites), we expect impersonation to be less of an issue than you might expect. Not GONE, but less.
We likely need to put some effort into surfacing the shortname more often and more prominently so you can quickly check that yeah, that guy really is in the famous BREAD.1337 group.
(BTW, if you haven’t picked up on it yet, the shortname/discrim separator is probably going to be a period . unless a whole bunch of you say that you hate it, I like how clean it looks imo)
Definitely not. There will be an initial creation barrier that we’ll loosen over time.
Tags have 10,000 discrims and they’re randomly assigned, like Discord names, so there’s no “main” tag to claim.
We’ve talked a lot about “approved” or “verified” Groups internally. It’s complicated but we want to find a way to do it. Not at launch.
Not doing this yet, but eventually!
Waiting on further work, not done yet.
We’ve seen this request a few times and know about it, but it’s a really advanced use case, and our backlog is maaaassive.
In other words: good idea! I hope we can find time to get to it eventually.
If anything, it’ll be a Community Guidelines update. I’m not a lawyer, but as far as I know, the TOS wouldn’t need changes for this.
Eventually! (but not immediately being worked on. sorry!)
I also sense that. “Our guild had a bad loot council” has been a phrase I’ve heard more than once. Then again, I’ve been in TONS MORE guilds with great leadership.
Welcome to… well, I was going to say “the internet”, but I think that’s just life in general
You can’t steal Group names, they’re non-unique. Anyone can name their group anything (within our rules, of course)
Shortnames, however, ARE unique. They can’t be stolen. They look like this: GROUP.0123. Only ONE group will have that shortname, ever. I don’t think shortnames can be changed.
You choose a short name with 3-6 characters, and then you’re assigned a random 0000-9999 “discriminator”.
VRChat does not solely consist of groups of friends. Be careful what you presume! There are many use cases for VRChat that we see in action daily that doesn’t fit that mold.
Ah, like worlds? We’ve talked about that before… it’s a neat idea.
There’s been some discussion on how to deal with this, but it got sidetracked temporarily… because we had to deal with a glut of bug reports caused by people not being able to use their menus due to their nearclip settings, and not knowing what caused it.
I’ve poked the bee’s nest on the task but no updates yet.
Similar with Friends+, but yeah, that group member needs to exist in the instance for their friend to join.
>>Can their friends join?
No, it would strictly be for friends of group members only. Slightly more strict than friends+ in other words if that makes sense.
I think what they mean by this in this context is a button you hit, that automatically pulls you into a public instance of a completely random world. Here’s a canny that goes into detail about that.
And my comment from that canny.
I’m all for this honestly. Having a button that when pressed, would drop you into a public instance of any world uploaded and published (including Labs worlds would be opt-in) to VRChat would be nice to have. Could also incorporate this with portal dropping to further enhance the world hopping experience. So for example, in general the feature (VRChat Roulette?) would work like this
Pressing join would immediately have you travel to a random public world, what world it would be is a surprise until you see the initialization screen.
Pressing drop portal would start portal placement and you won’t know what the world will be until you drop the portal.
Of course, could have this feature come with a warning similar to community labs.
I could see it being a bit problematic when joining a world you haven’t even seen the thumbnail of. You could end up joining a world that just crashes you, has things in it you don’t wanna see etc.
Way to both completely skip on the core issue point I initially bring up (thus further driving home the incredibly blatant “We do what we want, not what anyone else tells us if it’s not either benign to what we want, or happens to be parallel, in a game that’s meant to be a social/community experience, something that by nature doesn’t really work with a strict top-down style of decision making” behaviour), and the fact I literally address this point and why that doesn’t work.
But, running under the assumption we missed it,
I literally make the point of “There are many use cases for VRChat that we see in action daily that doesn’t fit that mold.” in the very post you skip to, to respond to,
But, in the very next paragraph,
You can’t have a native function of the game exist, and it magically only touch the thing you want it to touch in the way you intended it to touch. A single person or single insulated group of people can not have that level of clairvoyance. It will effect social dynamics in ways you never intended, and it will be in many, or even most, cases for the absolute worst.
And the reason I’m so uppity about this point now, is this doesn’t just effect purely VRChat directly. F###ing with the nature of social dynamics leaks into ALL aspects of the relationship between people. I can have friends that now don’t even play VRChat anymore get effected for the worst by a social relationship between people that person knows going sour due to something stupid happening in VRChat that was a direct result of this “Group” system being instated.
There will be certain types of social groups that will benefit from having a built in system to instate hierarchy of people and whatever else no question, which is more than can be said for the other top-down decision made no one wanted but you lot, who didn’t revert like you should have,
but the problem is, much like your
VRChat is not just organized raves and your posse of developers and ‘on the inside’ individuals you so clearly exist in your own little bubble in. There are many different kinds of social dynamics that exist beyond that, that will, not might, implode and break down if you introduce anything that instates a push to force people to be above other people or to be forced to ‘organize’.
I would love to see group exclusive avatars (avatars that can only be used by the group’s members) in the future as groups eventually build a foundation. It would be really useful for communities that use avatars to help identify each other and it helps prevent impersonation.
I don’t want to assume, but wouldn’t queue systems like RabbitMQ paired with caches like Redis solve this? Or is it a financial limitation?
Systems that can support such large notification system can exist. I mean, look at Discord. They do limit it to 200 servers now, but VRChat also has way fewer users.
I guess it depends on how groups will end up working, but personally, I’d love to see them be less strict and more casual. Or at least, maybe alongside the groups feature, it would be nice to use the user “favorites” feature to allow those users to auto-join me, while others still only see orange.
I’d imagine it would just be “Group user, plus one”. So friends of a group user can join, and no more. Groups are inherently, in my mind, a mode that exists between Invite+ and Friends+. Though Invite+ is also flawed IMO since you can only invite people that request.
Thanks for at least keeping it in mind. I really do think that near clip should be allowed to persist, especially if there are options to fix or override the state of it, plus a disclaimer about it’s usage similar to horizon adjust. Even perhaps an overall, temporary reset state that changes all of the user’s settings to default. Similar to how the safety feature works where it blocks everyone as an override.
My post is less about pointing out specific technical problems, and more about telegraphing about the issues we have to be concerned about. There’s technical issues, design issues, social impact issues, etc etc that have to be considered.
Letting anything go unbound is dangerous, almost entirely because its impossible to put a bound on something that was previously unlimited without pissing off a whole bunch of people. Often, you have no idea what the issues will be until you’re at scale and “oh my god I never expected X to break in Y way.”
In other words: release small, make bigger later? Really easy. Release big, panic reduce later? VERY HARD. (see: Very Poor on Quest)
We have talked about this a LOT. Not at launch. Definitely later.
Creating groups will be initially limited in some way. The current thinking is to limit it VRC+ subs and VRChat accounts, maybe? still working that out internally. It will opened up later to all users, after we’re confident in the infrastructure.
Anyone can join a group though.
It is difficult to illustrate the scope and amount of design, planning, forethought, polling, data analysis, exploration, implementation, experimentation, and more that has gone into Groups. Our team is full of experienced, talented developers from a vast array of backgrounds. We’ve been doing this for just a bit! We hope Groups is a system that everyone will use in their own way – and if they don’t want to touch it, that’s fine. It isn’t a requirement. They don’t have to.
As an addendum, I appreciate your continued input. However, I won’t be responding to any more of it since many parts of it border on insulting the VRChat team, which makes it difficult or impossible to respond constructively.
