Hi, I'm one of the people who stopped playing when EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) was introduced. I and most of my friends stopped playing for 6+ months. It genuinely became unusable for some of us between the time that EAC blocked modding and the time that most of the features that mods added were finally implemented into the game natively. The development speed and communication also shifted drastically since that event and it genuinely feels like a different team. We know what's going on behind the scenes now and get to actually have an input in upcoming features in a way that we didn't get to even just a year ago.

A lot of us have decided that these changes in development speed and communication are enough to warrant coming back. Those who disagree have left entirely for alternatives like ChilloutVR that explicitly allow modding. Things died down because the situation changed. The problems that were caused by the decision have for the most part been fixed. The people who still don't trust VRChat work on ChilloutVR now.

Also, VRChat has had a sizeable increase in its playerbase. People leaving the game was noticeable, but any lingering effects have been smoothed over. There are just a lot more people playing now.

tldr: yes, things have changed a lot. no, the people who were angry didn't "go back after a week" like some other comments suggest. a lot more people play this game now and the developers are more transparent with what they're working on. the problems that were caused by banning mods have mostly been addressed.

[–] DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago

Hey this is exactly what I was looking for..thank you!

[–] pory@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wait, a chatroom platform had anti-cheat? How do you cheat at VRchat?

[–] Voli@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

People could put in models that would crash other people games

[–] paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Easy-Anti Cheat prevents modification to the game. Some people used malicious mods that could, for example, grab every single grabbable item in the instance and teleport them to one spot and crash people nearby as a result. Most mods were not that and everyone I know hates those people.

Some people say mods allow you to upload crasher avatars. This is not true. You can just upload an avatar with an absurd polygon count or custom shader that crashes people — no mods required. People who use these avatars are "crashers" and while they're not as common nowadays, everyone hates them.

Some people say mods allow you to "rip" (pirate) avatars from other people, even private ones. This is partially true. Most (all?) ripping happens by taking VRChat's local cache, de-obfuscating the avatar (or world) you want, fixing it, then re-uploading it to your account. Mods can automate this process, but EAC doesn't stop ripping. Recently, VRChat announced that they've made some changes to make ripping harder, but they didn't explain what or how. Hopefully this becomes less of a problem.

Sidenote on piracy: it's really easy because of how Unity packages work. Ripping is a form of piracy, but piracy doesn't necessarily mean ripping. Don't pirate VRChat avatars or worlds. People put a lot of work into making this stuff and they need an income. There are good free avatars you can find on gumroad/payhip/etc.

tldr: malicious mods could let you be malicious. except for game worlds, you can't really "cheat" at vrchat, but you sure as hell can make the experience worse for everyone else. most mods didn't do that, which is part of why there was fallout when they implemented EAC to eliminate modding.

[–] pory@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So there was no way for individual servers (chat rooms?) to disable the anti cheat and let people "steal" models and potentially crash other users, but also benefit from the variety involved with mods?

[–] paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

Even if that was somehow possible, it would be infeasible to implement and wouldn't solve any problems. The best solution would have been to implement mod features natively first, and then implement EAC. That's the consensus of me, my friends, and the people I saw talking about it on twitter. Most people who supported the move without nuance were streamers who didn't understand that most mods were not malicious and were just happy they wouldn't get crashed or ripped in public lobbies anymore (which the update didn't actually stop).