Improving VRChat's Communication Methods

Official Official Notes
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Hi everyone!

We are already looking into ways to improve communication internally! This has been something on our mind, and something that’s been communicated to us for a good while.

What are key features the creator1 community would like to see from VRChat’s communication pipeline?

Here’s some things we already have in mind. Check these out, let us know what you think about them, and tell us your own ideas.

We’ll be reviewing feedback through early January and talk about next steps in a February Developer Update.

Dedicated Discord Server for Creators

Right now, creators have to vie for attention on our massive public Discord. This… is not ideal!

We think a dedicated Discord would help a lot here.

This server would serve as a place for discussion and feedback, and also provide a place where we could use automation like TicketBot to provide more direct, dedicated support and feedback when required.

This server would also give us the opportunity to hold Creator-centric Stages and events to help communication. It would also allow us to hold more targeted testing and feedback sessions on upcoming changes and features. It could also provide a place for creators to support each other and chat directly with VRChat developers.

We have a handful of questions still pending with this idea, though:

  • How and when does a Creator get an invite to the server?
  • Are there requirements? What are they?

… among dozens of others! We think we have some of the answers, but we want to hear what you think.

Creator Partnership Program

A Creator Partnership Program is almost certainly in the future cards for VRChat, although the structure and layout of such a program is still in the planning stages. How would you expect this program to work? What services would you expect it to have? What requirements? We want to hear what you have to say!

Structured Release Pipelines and/or Cadences

With our most recent SDK and VCC update, a lot of people were blindsided by the lack of information. “btw, Unity 2022 is out, have fun” isn’t very helpful!

We think that establishing a structured release pipeline or cadence and then publishing that information would help mitigate this problem a lot, so that those releases aren’t as vulnerable to unexpected issues pushing things faster. This would also mean we’d be communicating delays.

Improved Messaging Channels

By “channels”, I mean “ways we can reach you.” A lot of the problem with contacting creators is that you’re so dang hard to find! You have to actively come looking for us. Sometimes, though, we need to tell you something.

As such, we’re looking into getting resources to implement creator notifications or messaging into the VCC, kind of like a Creators-centric news feed.

Improved In-App Articles

The in-app articles we have are pretty good, but for technical reasons, are very hard to write! (the format is really bad omg) We want to use them more, but this difficulty in writing them makes it hard to use them as a tool.

We have plans to improve these in-app articles in the coming year, and part of those improvements could also include a way for us to target users who have worlds or avatars uploaded to their account. This would let us let people know if an impending change or update might affect them.

Note 1

1By “creator” in this post’s particular usage, we mean any type of creator related to VRChat creation where you use the SDK. This is including but not limited to:

  • World creators
  • Avatar creators
  • Udon programmers
  • Tool creators
  • Shader creators
  • Asset/prefab creators

In some of the solutions and methods we list above, other creators might also benefit – for example, we envision the Creators Discord being a place where video content creators could also go to provide feedback and ask questions.

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Dedicated Discord Server for Creators “Are there requirements?” / Creator Partnership Program “What requirements?”

No rule dictating how our public speaking behaviour outside the program affects how we’re treated inside either the Discord or the Program.

I will refuse to participate and encourage all creators to refuse entering such a Discord or Program if there is any rule in that Discord or Program that says anything along the lines of “we gave you access to this Discord or Program and think it’s not cool if you keep criticizing us regardless”, or implied. The integrity of a creator’s opinions is far more important than access to any Discord or Program.

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I can’t see us ever implementing a rule like that, on any of our channels! Noted, regardless.

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I think this would be fantastic. Having a dedicated place for people to genuinely aggregate information and for VRC devs to interact would be great. Especially if it used discord forums for topic discussions.

I think if you could do a discord integration where users can connect their discord to vrchat, and they can gain access if they’ve at least uploaded one piece of content. That would be an easy gate. It could also be some threshold.

Though also the entire discord could be in tiers. You could have sections dedicated to beginner, advanced, and veteran creators so the feedback is more focused.

The impression I have gotten for a while is that VRChat conflates release schedules with roadmaps/progress visualizations. The Canny is the closest we have to this, but it’s still suboptimial.

I think if you could host a Trello to show all features or bugfixes and their blockers or other state, that would be great in communcation. Obviously you wouldn’t need to just expose whatever actual info you use, but having some way to sync the state or update it with useful info would be great. That, or a way to see the status of features and bugfixes in some other way.

For example: Impostors. You told me at some point that you only announce stuff in the dev logs when they are within 2-3 months out. However, there have been countless times when this did not happen, like impostors.

Being able to see a trello, even if it just transitions from “in progress” to “currently blocked”, would do a LOT in communicating the state of things with people.

This would be perfect! Tarkov actually already does this!

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It could even be a separate message feed in-game that people can subscribe to.

At the end of the day, I think VRChat need to focus on this: It is less about transparency, and more about effective communication.

Right now it just kind of feels like the messenger has to gather a bunch of information and throw it out to the world. I would much rather if certain information is double checked with someone else before being released. I actually would love if you just didn’t talk about some things until you’re more certain about their arrival (assuming that creator/user input wouldn’t be necessary). More of a Valve approach.

Like, I respect you guys, but how could you not anticipate that a software that does not have beta channel functionality would be able to handle a beta, and why was the decision to just force the update? That seems like not enough thought was given into the process, and someone had to make a reactionary decision to a worsening and immediate problem. Plus that now the package creators have to run around like headless chickens trying to update their packages when it’s nearly Christmas.

I don’t care if it takes a while for VRChat to do things. But I want to know that when you do them, they are thoroughly processed and verified before they are released. You say you care about releasing things that only work, but then you often release half baked features, or some features get prioritized without any mention of features that were waiting around. It feels like startup culture.

You need a central location that people can go to consistently get contextual updates, and not just dev updates. We should be able to see the current progress of things in relation to other things.

You should be able to build internal processes that allow you to do more verification without much more overhead. This stuff should be inherent in how you work. Hopefully that makes sense.

I did hear from some undisclosed persons that there is a Discord server for certain creators already run by VRChat, mainly older creators of the platform. A lot of people that were in there were not happy with how it was run and how they felt about it. Mainly things along the lines of: ideas were stolen, they were used for free labor, and they were basically ignored when genuine gripes were aired.

This is hear-say, but I feel like it’s important to bring that up in context of this discussion, since it is still the experience of some people in there. Even if it wasn’t necessarily true, it is how they ended up feeling.

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I’d see community leaders and such being part of the Creators Discord as well. They often stay very on topic with what’s going on or what’s demanded in the game and its communities, but they don’t necessary produce popular content themselves. They also might benefit from certain features from SDK when it comes to groups etc. anyways. And so they can provide valuable feedback on pair with others. This can also benefit as a way to improve communication, as they can then spread that info deeper into circles of people who won’t necessary be included in the Creators Discord

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Remember that Google Doc of world submissions before Community Labs, can we get that but for creator applications :yum: Before you say no, it would be funny!

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Addressing non-English creators

One of the concerns re existing closed beta programs is the language barrier. This makes a lot of sense when you need close interaction for closed beta bug reporting, but with a creator partnership program - there’s a lot of creators that don’t speak great English. Allowing them to participate with the understanding that someone will probably be using machine translation will be important.

Input into the VRChat roadmap

There have been things promised by VRChat that end up being deprioritized and not implemented for months or years (world OSC/physbones, image loader, etc). There are also longstanding bugs that need painful workarounds at times as well. Having a more effective and transparent way to provide input into the roadmap - and to understand better why our pet issues aren’t up next - would help a lot to build trust.

Better visibility into in-progress/WIP features

Often times when features are delivered they’re not quite what people want - but often when VRChat does deliver them, they’re then left with few changes for a long time. Being able to provide input earlier, at the WIP stage, might help avoid this issue to some extent.

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I had this thought too. Do you think that requiring only one upload of any kind would result in a too-noisy server, where it’s hard to get feedback from those who produce a ton of content?

If the answer to that is yes, what’s the magic number?

In this particular case, we’re talking about our internal>beta>live pipeline, but we can consider other ways of communicating.

I think we fear putting up too much information. If we do, we have a big Trello that shows our features and what we’re working on, and tons of stuff shows as Blocked for very long periods of time, or dates get shifted 6 times in 3 weeks or etc etc, and that looks bad. Maybe it doesn’t look bad to you, but it could look bad to someone.

Is that a valid fear?

Edit: Oh, also, I’ve looked around for applications of our size that tack dates onto feature releases while they’re still in development. I can’t find any. I’m not saying we couldn’t be the first, but I’d rather tread solid ground, yeah?

Speaking of valid fears… :scream:

Noted. As long as there’s understanding that we don’t have language resources and there’s going to be lots of machine learning for translation, I think we can make that work.

Providing input is great, and we want to hear that for sure.

My fear is that when input is provided, output is expected, right? So if someone says “prioritize my feature!” and it doesn’t happen… is that okay?

It might be OK, to be clear. I just want to illustrate what I fear.

Yep, you’re preaching to the choir. Some of our past methods were very gut-driven and did not rely on early user research, data, and feedback. That’s changing. Thanks for calling it out, though.

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For those with long-term grievances which are neither easily dismissed nor easily solvable, I think participants who proactively care about issues whose timelines stretch into the years can easily take up too much space in discussions, or alternatively not enough.

I would suggest that when such discussions arise with no clear resolution in sight, that they - on a case-by-case basis - be confined by policy to specific threads, so as to clear the air for other creator-company communications.

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This is why I mentioned tiers. You can have any creators, and then you can have one or two categories for creators that have uploaded more vrchat content, created VCC packages, are well-established creators, etc.

I think it’s a valid fear, but I don’t think that single fear is a reason to not have the feature. In my case, seeing that a thing has continued to be blocked, but that “blocked” status is confirmed every two weeks as you do your standups/sprints would communicate to me that it was at least confirmed to still be blocked and not forgotten about.

There are always going to be people that won’t understand and will take things the wrong way. I’ve actually tried being an advocate in defense of VRChat since a lot of people make really baseless claims about things. I even saw someone that doesn’t use the VCC get convinced to use it by a friend of mine, despite their fears and opinions towards VRChat.

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sounds fun

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Would love the idea of a dedicated server for Creators. I’d hope it would lean more towards being Community run, but VRChat endorsed. VRC API integration for minimum trust rank and uploads could be part of the criteria. I’d want anyone to be able to join & read the messages in the server, regardless of creator validation.

Some pipeline for better communication on issues that directly affect creators is desperately needed. Canny feels like shouting into the void a lot of the time, especially if it’s not an issue during an open beta. As the clearest example, I can think of ~ Since OSC’s release it’s had a bug that makes /input/ endpoints unusable in VR and the canny post has not seen much acknowledgment (Same with the git repo issue)

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It’s interesting that Discord is deemed the only solution for this. When things like these forums exist.

Discord is already where all of these notifications and announcements are being made. Maybe that is part of the problem? Something to consider.

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Realistically discord is THE place for communicating anything (like this), thats how most all indie online games are run nowadays. Also, like no one uses these forums unless we are actively prompted to by a discussion like this.

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exactly

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Due to our demographics and other requirements, Discord is pretty much the only acceptable and widely-usable platform that we think would work here. Tons of companies use Discord to great success in this manner.

Forums are nice for some things, and I personally greatly prefer them, but I am north of the demographic target. :upside_down_face:

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@tupper Do you see this improving the Canny/Feedback boards situation any? As others have mentioned in this thread, it can feel a bit like a black hole at times. (But nothing like the massive black hole it was 3-4+ years ago.)

I’ll re-iterate: The Canny situation has improved immensely. But it still has a lot of room for improvement.

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I’m excited to hear about this, and eventually will be eager to join, but I have some critiques if this were to be implemented! Also congratulations on releasing SDK D&D 3.5e.

We all know that VRChat has always been community-oriented. If more resources were going to be put into prioritizing and discussing VRChat’s development among the top 1-10% of users who create assets, worlds, Udon tools, etc., I still wish for VRChat to provide an equal amount or more user support to the playerbase even so by the community Discord server as it already is; and for voices to still be heard by everyone via Canny.

Understandably, there’s thousands and thousands of suggestions and bug reports to go through and not each one could be fulfilled, but I don’t want them to be ignored due to this program rolling out.

I just hope that people don’t start seeing this as a hierarchy.

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Maybe. Canny is tough. There’s so much and it takes up entire FTE positions just to manage that one channel of input.

That being said, if you look around at applications at our size and larger, you’ll see that feedback kinda disappears into a black hole, even for UGC platforms. Even bug reports are kind of a pain in the butt for them.

So, I think we’re doing a pretty okay job with Canny. Of course it can always improve – everything can always improve! – but it might be a case of the immovable object of diminishing returns slams into the unstoppable force of scale.

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Discord is not particularly indexable and the medium heavily biases towards short-form responses. While many may successfully use Discord as a communications channel, the strong interconnected fabric of VRChat’s community might benefit more from slower moving, well-reasoned posts which can be referred back to.

Teaching moments on Discord are ephemeral if they land at all; and although forums are not the common medium younger demographics grew up with, it may be one that produces the kinds of discussions that best elucidate problems and suggest solutions.

Currently, some pretty engaged and motivated creators use Twitter to air out their grievances. This isn’t just for visibility, it’s also because the medium of long-form (such that a chain of tweets is that) is useful for conveying the full context of a concern.

Some deep thought needs to be given (and exchanged) as to the objectives of the communication and how the medium can best facilitate that.

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