VRChat adds Easy Anti-Cheat, community not happy but Linux and Steam Deck work fine

In my view the players who were running with modified clients and harassing people got what they deserved. Should have just kept it civil and not abused the developers trust/acceptance.

Honestly, from what has been said / what was happening this sounds reasonable to me. Shouldn't have abused it..

If abusers got, say banned, that would be fair. But the "issue" is all the innocent that get caught in the crossfire. As the developers wrote on their blog, there are people that make use of modified clients for accessibility issues for instance. They are no longer able to do that.

In other words, the situation is much more shaded than just "derps are upset they can't be asses anymore".

I hear the uproar is mostly focused around not being able to use custom mods anymore (there were allot).

I don't know how VRCHAT works but I thought you can connect to a private server but apparently not? it all goes through a central hub which has blocked mods due to EAC.

To be fair there were people making bad mods that ruined other peoples experiences (we talking a handful of people, overall community is not being toxic with bad mods).

Whats a bad mod? well you can make mods that crash peoples computers! lmao

Sounds familiar... Minecraft 1.19.1 anybody? (Or as it's lovingly known by 200,000+ players who have installed the No Chat Reports mod, 1.19.84)

This sounds like the type of thing that results from a bad client-server implementation and bad security, not something from a lack of anti-cheat. You're giving clients too much power to begin with, then try to solve that using kernel-space anti-cheat. That's not how you should do it.

Whats a bad mod? well you can make mods that crash peoples computers! lmao

This is apparently a misconception. Game crashes are caused by uploading and using corrupt avatars. EAC doesn't prevent users from doing this because it's not a client mod. There were anti crashing mods that would detect and not load corrupt avis that are no longer usable

It's easy to see its success in hindsight and say "lazy devs, should have used server side", but that's not how a business model works. There's uncertainty and success is the biggest uncertainty of all, so you're not buying a massive server cluster (or paying for an elastic version in a cloud instance) for a free game

It's not all free and VRChat's team have had a lot of different companies fund them over the years. VRC+ is a subscription model they have which isn't required, but enough people sign up to it. If you play VRChat you see them all over with their icons by their name tags. link I've got plenty of people on my friends list that pay the 99.99 USD for a years plan for it too. Not everyone, but a large portion of the people that stick around on VRChat long term do pay for it.

As for funding well just last year this happened. Link before that link link. If you follow the bread crumbs through the years you will see each year they've been growing in funds, so they could have potentially put some of that money towards such an endeavor.

Yet all the features like ease of use get ignored. People have been asking for things for the hard of hearing like CC's for well over 4 years to see nothing in return. Then asking for many other quality of life improvements for at lest over 6 years. For their VR tracking, preloading worlds, graphics settings, et cetera. Then you go and look at these other games like say ChilloutVR that don't have all the funding VRChat has, and they've got a large portion of it already included. I mean ChilloutVR even has Tobi face tracking and HTC's face tracking stuff built in. The game even has graphics settings so if your computer is struggling you can actually make the game run without mods. (ChilloutVR is not perfect by any means. It has problems too, but only saying that they seem to be focusing on the problems before spending money on UI improvements like VRChat has been lately and EAC to band-aid it all for the lack of work done).

tl;dr It's not exactly a free game made by an indie developer at this point. They have subscriptions and funding in the millions each year.
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Whats a bad mod? well you can make mods that crash peoples computers! lmao

I've been playing VRChat for years now. I played it even back when it first was getting started, off and on. I really started playing in like 2019. Though I have never seen a mod like that once that could crash a computer. The worst you tend to run into is those using clients to see through walls, teleport to your location, spin items on the map around you, and just see your systems FPS and stuff. Minor annoyances and you can easily block these people. There is a client that lets you see users that have blocked you via a red circle, but they still can't interact with you.

As for crashing. Well that never crashes a PC. Also that isn't even done with a mod. It's done with avatars. You are literally allowed to upload avatars that have such poor performance that you can make them have intense particle effects. Basically your crashing someones game with overloading it with shaders from an avatar. Though the game already has safety settings which allow you to block this from happening. I literally set mine to everyone can only speak and have a basic avatar other than friends. I've not been crashed in I can't tell you how long. Yet I have had the items spun around me a few times. Though this was always super rare and blocking them and then doing a respawn made it stop.

As a side note. One of my friends told me that Quest users don't have EAC and they have been using the virtual desktop or whatever in the Quest to load in some mods. Not sure if anyone has been banned for this, but apparently just using Meta/Facebook gear gets you around EAC. Nothing is stopped in the long run when it comes to mods.

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Edit: Tried playing this a bit more today. It seems EAC has killed VR support in Linux. There is a work around supposedly where you run Proton Experimental with the bleeding edge beta. I've yet to try this so I can't comment on how it works. Without any work around it will not launch into the headset and sends you right to desktop mode. Also, in desktop mode the Steam overlay for Linux is seen as a cheat I guess. Because you can't open the overlay anymore. No clue if there is a work around for that as of yet.


Last edited by UnholyVision on 30 July 2022 at 4:27 am UTC

It's not all free

I wasn't implying they don't make money. I was pointing out that the model of giving away a free game in the hopes it becomes popular enough to monetise RELIES on a tiny, miniscule capex. And that rules out a server-side game.

As for funding well just last year this happened. Link before that link link. If you follow the bread crumbs through the years you will see each year they've been growing in funds, so they could have potentially put some of that money towards such an endeavor.

But they couldn't because:
a) they were years into development by the point they were making money for their VC funding backers and
b) those backers backed the original model, so making server-side changes to counter a problem they didn't even have would have been a ridiculous move.

I stand by what I said.

I wasn't implying they don't make money. I was pointing out that the model of giving away a free game in the hopes it becomes popular enough to monetise RELIES on a tiny, miniscule capex. And that rules out a server-side game.

But they couldn't because:
a) they were years into development by the point they were making money for their VC funding backers and
b) those backers backed the original model, so making server-side changes to counter a problem they didn't even have would have been a ridiculous move.

I stand by what I said.

I could have misread something. I will agree that it's a gamble, but they did start getting paid very early on in alpha stages development. HTC gave them a big chunk of money to improve their infrastructure from early alpha. Because they wanted to see a game like it grow that wasn't just Rec Room and probably thought it would help push headsets. Also, not saying Rec Room is bad, use to play that myself when VR was very early days. Though it's not VRChat, ChilloutVR, or even NeosVR. The loading in RecRoom is horrible for world as they end before you even really get started, due to trying to support game consoles.

Anyway, if I'm not mistaken. I believe it was the Warhammer 4k Vermintine game developers that said EAC for Linux isn't just clicking a button. That you have to change up your network to use Epic infrastructure a bit so that you can use the EOC. If that is the case, that is quiet the network shift in of itself. Maybe not like moving all the content would be at this point or doing something else, but quiet the shift for a band-aid.

A) Perhaps, but at the same time, very early alpha stages they were paid and backed for improving such infrastructure. Along with the promise to further back them. As it was still early alpha you would expect such a game to go under massive changes even as an investor. Not to mention the fact such problems still existed then, but it could be way worse. It's just people didn't always do it out of troll like behavior. The writing was on the wall, as anyone with commonsense can tell you anything good can equal bad in the wrong hands. Otherwise it just shows how a lack of foresight they had if they couldn't predict at least a handful of these problems. When they had the backing for said development.

B) If some of those backers backed it for the original model in the later stages that would be something. Yet any backer of this game currently, should be disclosed that this game is still considered "Early Access". I will agree they do need to meet some expectations. Though, if things are not subject to change in early access, then these backers are just fools. I mean it's literally plastered even on the game menu. link
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That fine if you standby what you say. I just think your thinking of this differently like VRChat was a longer gamble then it was and was invested in as a full fledged title. When it wasn't that long ago when they just left alpha. Since they went early, closed, and open alpha.

Anyway, time to sit back and watch VRChat and see what happens. Specially with all the news coverage that has painted this game as dying and the upcoming push for Meta Horizon forcing all Quest users to register for Meta's Metaverse called Horizon. (I believe I read that Horizon will even be like SteamVR Home where it loads you into a world on VR launch. Since you will not be able to use a Quest if not registered to Horizon come 2023).

[quote=PatrickHogan]

Bottom line is, Anti cheat software is intrusive, and it's always going to be bypassed. General rule of thumb in security is "Always assume the client is evil" and... in short. Client side security is guaranteed to fail. At the end of the day actual cheaters can usually get past easy anti-cheat.

This reminds of of Minecraft's original chat moderation style.
Even still, its very simple to just not encrypt your own chat msgs anddd then no one can confirm you REALLY said anything (which luckily they are only using encrypted msgs, thusly only msgs that have accounts attatched to them. Except... Because the client didnt know what to do if someone with an expired auth token, (which is tied to the client's private key), that originally was a verified encryption, everyone in the server is kicked (1.19.1)

Slap a bandaid on it, and said bandaid will only make things worse...

(Like with VRC, the only ppl using mods are going to be malicious now. *mostly* anyway... only people that really know what they are doing and really want to do it -- cheaters will probably have more success due to accessibility mods... well... very few ppl make them, tons use em. but distrobuting them as normal would be unhelpful because then VRChat would be mad.
So... It will only make the cheaters better at cheating lol.
Sides, some mods were made to protect everyone in a room from other hacks lol

(Why cant VRC just claim they are inadept and ask for that code anyway?)