And there was much defecation.
Well, VRChat players have had a bad week, and we’re not even done with it, yet. Because in one fell swoop, they managed to crap all over their playerbase by implementing Easy Anti-Cheat.
The problem is that EAC bans all mods. While I don’t think anyone would be sad to find that the sorts that get up to legit mischief were no longer able to do so, it goes way deeper than that. Imagine, if you will, that you don’t have a terribly competitive PC (a stretch for me, I’ll admit). You can’t really run VRChat in VR, but with a modified client, you can run it in pancake mode (2D mode; on a normal screen). Well, guess what? You can’t anymore, because EAC doesn’t stop at just the truly malicious launchers, it’s everything except for the official one.
As they explain in the announcement:
The integration of EAC means that all modified clients are blocked. The problems mentioned above will be minimized if not outright eliminated, improving the VRChat experience for users and creators.
Malicious client modifications are responsible for a massive amount of issues for both our team and our users. We’ve been listening to you cry out for a solution to being harassed, griefed, and constantly crashed, so we’re taking further steps to address one of the roots of the problem.
Our Trust & Safety and User Support teams witness first hand how much damage modified clients do to the platform.
Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes as well as other information. These users – often without even realizing it! – run the risk of losing their account, or having their computers become part of a larger botnet.
These networks of modified clients perform malicious actions without informing users – such as reporting back user locations to harassers or stalkers, ripping and archiving avatars, allowing mass harassment of users via automated actions, and even acting as nodes for distributed “zombie” botnets. We’ve directly observed this happening innumerable times, and it alarms us!
Additionally, all modified clients – even ones that aren’t malicious – are a burden for creators. We regularly speak to many that have spent hours (or days) debugging user issues, only to realize that the culprit is a modified client. This frustration ultimately has a chilling effect on VRChat creators, hurting their enthusiasm and preventing them from building awesome things.
On the one hand, mods have always been against the terms of service. On the other hand, a lot of these mods are accessibility features that, frankly, they’ve had years to implement natively and simply haven’t until this announcement. While the security concern is real, it’s hard not to argue that maybe, at least in the interim, some form of whitelisting or exceptions would be in order.
For what it’s worth, the announcement has been updated to address the backlash. That said, it you were expecting them to back down or delay the rollout of these changes, you were wrong.
Let’s follow that up with the hard part: we are going to be releasing this update, and we do not have plans or intent to revert or roll it back.
However, we hear you and see you saying that many of the modified client features that are being lost due to this are extremely important to you, or in some cases allow you to use VRChat at all, when in regards to modifications that added accessibility features that VRChat currently lacks.
Addressing these concerns and feedback is our highest priority. We are changing our internal development roadmap and priorities to focus on the features and additions that you want. Currently ongoing projects are being paused, rescheduled, or re-prioritized, and resources are being re-allocated to account for this change.
They go on to say that they’ve been in touch with VRChat communities and community leaders vis a vis desired features. They even say that the accessibility concerns are at the top of the list. That said, who knows how long implementation will take. Meaning anyone that has trouble playing vanilla VRChat is going to be left with their ass dangling in the wind for an undisclosed amount of time.
Source: Gamespot
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