My initial gut feeling is against making yet another discord server because looking up information or answers to previously asked questions is a nightmare to put it mildly.
Making a traditional forum would solve some issues, but having a discord server would be very handy for other things. It’s difficult to say what the perfect choice would be, if one even exist…
Requirements for a partnership program is definitely a tricky one to determine. Given that there are avatar creators, world creators, tool creators, shader creators, hell sometimes people do all of the above! So i’m not personally sure what would “qualify” someone. Would they have to have a certain amount of content generated? What if they only have a few worlds up but they’re masterpieces? What if someone has made a few avatars from scratch for sale for VRChat? Does that person get a higher priority than someone who sells kitbashed avatars? What if someone is just starting to work on something for the game like a neat Udon script, but have no portfolio for past work, does that person count as a creator yet?
I think personally if someone has made something for VRC, they can be called a creator, but plenty of people have done that, myself included having had uploaded a few worlds. But i’m not sure if i’d even qualify for being a “serious” creator. Given this is a “partnership” program, I think that you could employ a system similar to what Twitch uses for streamers where they can be “affiliated” or “partnered”. That way you can comfortably fit people who want to be serious or just happen to have had made lots of content, as well as those who are more well known creators and will continue to be. This way you can have a place to support even the little guys like myself who just “really” need to figure out why something in my world isn’t working after an update, but aren’t friends with other creators that can help me out.
I think there’s be a lot of people up for helping manage a well structured discord (no i’m not wanting to nominate myself). If there’s lots of help then it could be kept very structured and functional. There’s also lots of ways discord bots can be used for channel opt-ins etc.
Can also keep a lot of it on slow mode to encourage more meaningful messages instead of hasty ones.
edit:
Public feedback is still needed outside of creator feedback though, particularly in regards to stuff like UX (which is why i keep bringing up public surveys).
Imo, no requirements for entering a dedicated creator discord; only requirements for accessing more exclusive channels. Just don’t have the server attached to social media, so people seek it out by word of mouth after announcing it’s creation. This will ensure lack of filter bias, but also prevent influx of heaps of users that might be bots or whatever, and also making it feasible to have said discord without the dumb phone verification requirement.
I think the best version of this would be a more dedicated creator-centric server that focuses on UX, avatar, world, and so on so people can go there for relevant help from a more knowledgeable crowd that doesn’t have to deal with heaps of random noise. Then have like tiers of unlock you can apply for that each have more exclusive/direct help, maybe just like 2.
The casual creators have free access to general channels for help and sharing, community runners have community-centric channels they apply/request for, and then the advanced channels for technical nerds pushing the boundaries of udon etc, and using atypical methods that may break with changes.
This has already been talked about though ofc.
ps: i mean tiers not as an exclusivity group, but like an ask-in kind of thing, so only people that actually go through the steps to want in get the more targeted technical chatter more directly to vrchat developers… not for favourtism, but just to filter out random people cluttering it
I don’t see why a Trello would need to have dates, at least not for anything that isn’t at the QA stage; like if it’s mostly ready to ship and just in the polish stages, you can add dates; even if an update sits idle ready to go for some days, this is common in game dev to have a system complete but delay release to give a bit of time, and allow announcement to circulate a bit for prep or hype buildup. You aren’t forced to drop it the instant it’s ready.
But having a full catalogue of everything that’s currently on the table for development, so people know what page vrchat is on would go a very long way, even if things are changed semi-frequently, so people can get a quick digestible snapshot of where vrchat’s collective head is at at any given time. Information is step one, making the development cycle less chaotic comes after.
It’s just hard with the canny because you can’t always weight how much something is desired by how many upvotes it gets, when canny is already way too far out of the way, and is a “you have to search for it first” kind of place; there’s no embeds or anything so sharing it around is difficult, there’s just not enough exposure. Having avenues in the discord for highlighting relevant cannies to gain notice and be upvoted more would help make that more useful data.
This isn’t just an issue with canny itself, most of these feedback boards used for games etc are full of stuff that gets buried and duplicate-posted all the time and so on because they’re just not good systems.
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Yeah, and there’s also a lack of like incremental versioning that allows legacy content to exist in bubbles so that something made in a certain state of vrchat continues to function in that state. Not that that is a requirement, but if there’s no communicated direction/vision, and there’s no incremental versioning to allow things to exist in static states of the game so they can build their stuff around it’s exploits and limitations, then it’s just destructive and chaotic. How much wonderful old content is just lost due to progress breaking it? They’re not able to future proof it, and it’s not encapsulated.
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Discord has a forum feature.
※ Having an automated system that clones discord forums to a read-only web forum archive could be a good option for discoverability via google searches etc. Better a more classical forum than these ask things for archiving however.
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Just have it strictly moderated and zero tolerance for any ad hominem or other signs of aggression. It’s meant to be a professional space and should be treated as such. Disagreement is fine, but disagreements need to remain respectful and professional.
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A lot of questions and responses will become antiquated quite quickly as the nature of the platform changes, and it’s too difficult to get the information to the public what has changed since, what is still valid or not; this is the problem with like youtube tutorials for example.
The tags are extremely limited per forum channel. You can’t just keep making more tags, you hit a cap.
It sounds like you are referring to VRCPrefabs, which used to be an open group that anyone could get invited to if they wanted in and were interested in contributing and communicating creatively; then one day they decided to close their doors and have an admission requirement to gain access, which is decided by moderation or whatever. I was in it years back but when i lost my discord account, i lost access to the server and they weren’t accepting anyone back in. As far as what has gone on inside there since i can’t say.
There is also a large closed shader community that likes to gate as well.
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Overall i already try to network a lot of information between contacts and contacts of contacts, a sort of “intelligence network” so to speak, which has been helpful and why i try to bring a lot of things to light myself, because it’s data that i’m getting fed back to me via various contacts (a lot of which from people that for various reasons don’t end up speaking out about their concerns, or don’t know how) and observations, but having a more centralized place for it would be better, because then instead of scurrying around in cyber tunnels i can just refer it all back to a single place.
SDK Release Channels, please.
For the love of god, have specific channels for SDK releases.
You could switch between two VCC Package listings, one for public use and one for earlier access, so you don’t have to operate right next to live for your funky experiments.
Official - Tried and tested, the stable stuff everyone has access to by default.
Release Candidate - Asset creators and those more adventurous get that stuff, with plenty of time to update tools and assets to work with the next version, depending on the severity of the release. (A move to a new unity is maximum severity.)
At least those two, so people can actually prepare for new SDK’s.
That the transition of all the tooling from 3.4 to 3.5 went comparatively smooth was more a matter of luck. That stuff could have gone completely backwards, and creators getting bombarded with people crying why Tool X isn’t updated yet.
Small suggestion for this question
Incredibly bad optics to only release these tools directly after monetizing the platform. Do you only care about creators now that you can make money off of their hard work?
for me i feel like this is only being done now due to the creator economy release and the fact that you now make money from the content that we upload to the platform. i hate the fact that you never once reached out and talked to us personally what so ever for years up to this point and only when money is involved you then take a stance to try make a dedicated communication bridge this just feels bad. i think your team handles things in a poor manner when dealing with your community and its easy to see your true intentions is not about the community is more of just do the minimum to make profit.
i once loved everything about vrchat but with the way things are handheld and the way things go on with the community the more i do not trust you.
it would of been a different story perhaps if you guys did reach out to creators more and talk to us long before you did any of the creator economy.this i feel would at least not come off as badly as it dose now.
Regarding Canny, this doesn’t work for me, maybe I need a longer username so the search will treat me like a real person, rather than a spelling mistake
For stackexchange the questions and answers are both editable later on by other people. So when something is out of date, it can be labeled as such. It’s not perfect, as I’ve gotten the best help from posts marked duplicate or off topic, but that would not be a problem with a VRChat specific site.
The best way I can describe actually interacting with stackexchange is that it’s interesting and different.
All I can say is that whatever this turns into, it needs to be indexable. This way creators can just google something and it will pop up.
Currently a ton of VRChat specific knowledge is locked away in niche small discord servers and the only way to learn things is to “know a guy”.
A forum would be nice.
I agree that a structured release cadance will solve the issues that came up recently, and allow creators to plan around release schedules in a way that fits their real lives.
For the exclusivity of a potential discord server, a lot of time would be wasted assessing whether creators were worthy of direct information. Most of the time, whether or not people are willing to take the time to read documentation already creates a divide. If they want information they should be allowed to have access. In the VRC creator community, it’s the knowledge of the nuances of the quirks and process that divide the major output contributors and the casual output contributors. This knowledge is often found by those who have spent a significant amount of time troubleshooting problems, or those lucky enough to find it in an odd part of the Internet.
This kind of information should not be restricted. Communities that know how to make things higher quality or more performant often feel worlds apart from people trying their best while being mislead by available information instead of the correct information. I feel like the squeeze of restrictions and culture of shaming as a solution only discourages people from continuing to grow and learn.
Perhaps if we are seeking out a format recommendation, perhaps there could be a creator community public discord to push read only articles and announcements, a ticketing system to request assistance with specific issues, which could in a case by case basis be solved with a locked text chat conversation in the discord, with the knowledge that the conversation will be indexed and published on the website later. The ticketing system is absolutely similar to the canny, but if the idea is to use discord for accessibility purposes that’s the format that makes sense.
Creating Discord Server for Creators is interesting.
However, I feel it does not solve any current communication problems because I feel VRChat currently doesn’t use already existing places efficiently.
I’m heavily working about VCC, so I’ll talk about VCC.
The Current VPM system is incomplete as a package manage, so I reported many bugs and I requested features for VPM not only for me but also for future VRCSDK.
However, it looks many of them are not reviewed; at least there is no public triage.
(I’m making an alternative VPM client, and some bugs of VPM have been fixed in my client, so I believe it’s not hard to solve them.)
It looks this is true for other places.
I think adding more public triage will increase meaningful communication with bug reporters and feature requesters.
In addition, Discord is not indexed by Google so hard to search information.
Moreover, English chat is extremely hard for non-english (especially for Japanese) speakers (including me)
because reading english is much slower than native speakers & slang & abbreviation are hard to understand. I want VRChat to communicate much on issue trackers.
It seems really foolish to put off or completely forget about suggestions that users considered important or possibly needed in the future, thinking “hmmm, this doesn’t seem important right now”, only to have situations arise later where they are really needed. VRChat seems to have little foresight into what will happen in the future.
When VCC first came out, I thought “This is a really cool system!” that could keep up with SDK updates and properly manage other tools. It was actually revolutionary.
However, the current situation has had the exact opposite effect.
At times, it broke projects, even though just updating VCC and doing a few standard steps. This is a reasonable situation that users should avoid updating.
It’s not a good situation.
It could have been possible to avoid this if OpenBeta of VCC or the source of VCC had been available before release, but it wasn’t, so I had to say “The latest VCC is unstable, so do not update it, wait for more information!” when the VCC version was unstable, and “Update your VCC to the latest x.x.x! Otherwise, your projects will be broken by a package that requires the latest!” when the VCC version was stable but made breaking changes.
Of course, I fully understand that there are some staff members who are very cooperative.
However, that does not seem to be the company’s policy. This is a tough situation to say the least, and we even think that it would be faster to give up on the official one and make an alternative to VCC in the Third-party. This is really sad.
The recent series of problems have given the developer community a lot of doubts.
I feel that a less than desirable situation is coming for everyone.
Perhaps this is one of the parts that needs to change.
[JP]
ユーザーが、重要そう、或いは後に必要になるであろうと考えて行った提案を、「うーん、これは今重要なものではないようです」と考えて後回しするか、或いは完全に忘れてしまい、後にそれが本当に必要な状況が発生してしまっているのは本当におかしな話です。VRChatは将来のことを殆ど見通せていないようです。
VCCが出た当初、"これは素晴らしいシステムだ"と思いました。SDKの更新に追従し、他のツールを適切に管理出来る。実際、革新的でした。
ですが、現状は真逆の効果を与えています。ある時には、VCCを更新して標準的な数ステップだけでプロジェクトが壊されることさえありました。更新が控えられて当然の状況になっています。
これは良い状況ではありません。VCCのOpenBeta か、リリース前にVCCのソースコードが見られれば 避けられた可能性があったでしょうけれど、そうではなかったので、私はVCCのバージョンが不安定なタイミングでは「最新のVCCは不安定なので、更新はせずに情報を待ってください!」と言い、安定しているけれど破壊的な変更が加えられたタイミングでは「VCCを最新のx.x.xに更新しましょう! さもなければ、最新のVCCを想定したパッケージにプロジェクトを破壊されます!」と言わなければなりませんでした。
もちろん、非常に協力的なスタッフも居ることはよく理解しています。
しかし、企業としての方針はそうではないようです。これははっきり言って厳しい状況で、公式のものを見限ってthird-partyでVCCの代わりを作ってしまった方が早いのではないかとさえ思ってしまいます。これはとても悲しいことです。
今回の一連の問題は開発コミュニティに強い疑念を与えてしまいました。
誰にとってもあまり望ましくない状況が訪れようとしているように感じます。
恐らくこれは変わるべき部分の1つです。
One of the challenges that VRChat faces is how to balance the needs and expectations of the creators and the users, especially when it comes to introducing new features or changes that might affect the existing content. For example, the recent SDK and VCC update caused some issues for some creators who were not aware of the changes or how to adapt to them.
A dedicated Discord server for creators, where they can discuss, share, and get help from VRChat developers and other creators is a good idea. This would also allow VRChat to hold events, testing sessions, and stages for the creator community.
A creator partnership program, where VRChat would offer some benefits and services to the creators who meet certain criteria and contribute to the platform is fantastic. This could include early access to new features, revenue sharing, promotion, and more.
A structured release pipeline and/or cadence, where VRChat would follow a more predictable and transparent schedule for releasing new features and updates is good, as well as providing more documentation and guidance for the creators to prepare for them.
There is already a successful creator only server. Their verification is store based, you need to have a store with a couple of items in it to apply.
You can check how they do things or even cooperate with them. VRC Creator Central
Oops, I forgot to mention that Pull Requests to UdonSharp (I believe this has been official thing) have been abandoned for a long time.
These include fixes for critical issues, but have been completely silent. This makes people less willing to cooperate.
In fact, one of my friends is completely disappointed and no longer willing to cooperate.
[JP]
そういえば、UdonSharpへのPull Requestが長期間放置されていることについて言及するのを忘れていました。(あれはもう公式のものだと思っています。)
これらには致命的な問題への修正も含まれていますが、全く何の反応もありません。これでは協力しようと思わなくなります。
実際に、完全に失望し、協力しようと思わなくなったフレンドが居ます。
Has slack been tabled as a discord alternative for this dedicated location? Any particular cons that stand out with this? I see a clear benefit of being able to pulse check and keep communications between creators productive.
I think we can classify the creators, and the parts that are not easy to classify or interweave can be gathered together into comprehensive categories.
Those with excellent abilities in this area can make more demands on behalf of the group and VRchat staff. Of course, individuals can also make demands, with different priorities.
In addition, I think there is a need for more types of testing or experimental VRchat servers. They are not independent of one person and not necessarily connected to the whole, but a relatively isolated place suitable for a group of people to experiment.
This makes it easier for the group to experiment with some future, long-term features or major changes. For example, in the future, due to performance or various needs, they may choose to replace URP and conduct a large-scale experiment.
I think you only need to switch to the test version on Steam to join these experiments.
I think VRchat is a platform project, a large project that constantly faces challenges in the overall environment. It must be challenging enough in terms of engineering and technology to introduce novel solutions or try its best to use mature solutions to get rid of bad habits, otherwise things will continue like this. Unable to withstand change, it becomes stale and problems persist.
I don’t think another Discord server is a good idea. Everybody will just join both because they don’t want to miss anything, and all the announcements will end up duplicated anyway. Also instead of one server we would have to search in two.
A 100% agreeing on public communication using Collaborative Projects. That would make a dev feedback loop that is maybe easier to follow than through discord, at least for everything that is related to such projects like VCC and similar.
You might be talking to the wrong people if we’re talking about the same one. The shader discord is comically reticient to reject people.