VRChathas banned mods and implemented Easy Anti-Cheat in a move that has sent the game’s community into a frenzy. The popularvirtual realitysocial environment has been facing a huge amount of criticism along with being review-bombed on Steam as players protest the recent decision.
VRChatwas first released in 2017as a spiritual successor to virtual 3D social spaces such asIMVUandSecond Life. The game allows players to take the form of heavily customized avatars in virtual reality and participate in various activities in a social setting. Movie nights, comedy clubs, virtual raves, and all sorts of social activities are possible within the game’s various player-made environments. The game saw a major increase in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic as more and more people turned to virtual reality for some semblance of a social life during the initial lockdowns that saw concert venues, nightclubs, and other social spaces closing their doors for months.
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Unfortunately, the developers recently made the disastrous decision to implement Easy Anti-Cheat, an anti-cheat service featured in manyonline games such asElden Ring,Fortnite, andHalo: TheMaster Chief Collection. While Easy Anti-Cheat is ubiquitous in the gaming industry and utilized by hundreds of titles, online games with strong modding communities such asVRChatcan suffer greatly from its presence.VRChat’s reason for the change is reportedly due to the fact that “malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues.”
VRChatis well-known for amazing custom contentfrom entire worlds to highly specific mods. Many now-bannedVRChatmods added vital accessibility features such as closed captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing players along with mods that reduce brightness and bloom effects to make the game accessible to players with light sensitivity and eye strain issues. Many other mods add helpful features such as a password system for enhanced security and improved locomotion systems to help players move around the virtual world.VRChatappears to be aware of this major hit to accessibility and is determined not to undo the Easy Anti-Cheat implementation, instead opting to re-prioritize development toward adding the most important missing accessibility features into the base game.
The damage has already been done, however, asVRChat’s Steam page has beenreview-bombedleading to its “mostly positive” rating dropping down to the lowest possible “overwhelmingly negative” rating. AlthoughVRChatinsists that it will re-implement many of the features that mods brought to the game, it will be impossible for the developers to account for every mod that players found useful. All in all, the community is understandably outraged that the game has seemingly taken one step forward and two steps back.
VRChatis available now on Oculus, PC, and Viveport.
