I think the general idea behind this feature makes sense. Large events and club instances can have real performance problems, and many users either do not know about VRChat’s existing safety and avatar visibility settings or do not use them effectively.
My main concern is this part:
That feels too restrictive. Improving performance is fair, but completely removing the user’s ability to locally override it, even for friends or people they manually choose to show, seems like a bad tradeoff just to avoid what is described as a “slightly awkward” social situation.
I also do not really agree with this reasoning:
Most users do not make their own avatars, so they usually cannot optimise them themselves. And for the people who do make or modify their avatars, that pressure would still exist even if local overrides were allowed, because they would still be hidden by default in these instances, so if someone wants other people to see their avatar without requiring manual exceptions, they would still have a strong incentive to optimise it.
Instead of the instance directly locking avatar visibility to a performance rank, I think this should use the existing Avatar Optimizations options VRChat already has.
Since users can already block avatars by performance rank through Block Poorly Optimized Avatars, Avatar Performance Gated Group Instances could simply set that existing option to the desired level and then give users a way to revert to their usual setting.
If that happens, the user should get a clear message saying that their setting was changed for this instance and that they can revert it if they want, ideally with a button in the message itself if possible.
This would still improve performance by default while preserving local choice.
It would also fit well with adding some much needed options like Always Show Friend Avatars and Allow Override with “Show Avatar” to the existing Avatar Optimizations settings, similar to what Avatar Culling has.
I made a visualisation for what the new Avatar Optimizations could look like:
Edit:
Feedback Request for this: Avatar Performance Restriction Overrides | Voters | VRChat