EDIT: I'll remove my review if they reverse this decision, however as of today (7/26/2022) they actually doubled down and confirmed they don't intend to do so, despite a petition/request on their official project board getting over 22,000 upvotes (nearly the same number of active players on Steam at the time of writing this, or any other day.) They claim they are "listening" to the community, but they aren't - they're stepping on our toes and ruining the tools that we've built to solve their problems. Imagine a Bethesda game filled with crashes and multiplayer features where other players can ♥♥♥♥ with your camera and make you crash, but you can prevent 99.9% of those issues with mods. But then you wake up one day and Bethesda blocks you from launching the game even if you have so much as a third person camera toggle installed as a mod. That's what happened here.

It's perhaps the best excuse for dropping a fortune on VR equipment and one of my favorite games, but I can't recommend it since they decided to add Easy Anti Cheat recently.

Not only is EAC an overzealous program that has caused performance headaches for many like myself (I'd go so far as to say it made Elden Ring, New World, and many other titles "unplayable" at times with how stuttery it got,) but also does more to punish innocent players than it does to protect anyone - the intention is noble, the execution is trash.

Mods in VRChat, like anywhere else, are a mixed bag. Sure, there are people using some to do shady stuff like ripping and stealing other folks' avatars. However, many of us use mod tools for improving and securing the experience for ourselves - improving performance, blocking malicious avatars and other content intended to crash the experience, improving existing performance and security options, and a lot of hard work that was made to make the experience more accessible and fun for many people.

While I understand this was done to try to combat many of the bad actors that lurk in VR Chat, it concerns me that it genuinely makes me feel like my experience is actually going to be less safe now, as well as more laggy - which, in a VR game like this, is only going to make the experience less immersive and prone to headaches and motion sickness.

EDIT: I'll remove my review if they reverse this decision, however as of today (7/26/2022) they actually doubled down and confirmed they don't intend to do so, despite a petition/request on their official project board getting over 22,000 upvotes (nearly the same number of active players on Steam at the time of writing this, or any other day.) They claim they are "listening" to the community, but they aren't - they're stepping on our toes and ruining the tools that we've built to solve their problems. Imagine a Bethesda game filled with crashes and multiplayer features where other players can fuck with your camera and make you crash, but you can prevent 99.9% of those issues with mods. But then you wake up one day and Bethesda blocks you from launching the game even if you have so much as a third person camera toggle installed as a mod. That's what happened here. It's perhaps the best excuse for dropping a fortune on VR equipment and one of my favorite games, but I can't recommend it since they decided to add Easy Anti Cheat recently. Not only is EAC an overzealous program that has caused performance headaches for many like myself (I'd go so far as to say it made Elden Ring, New World, and many other titles "unplayable" at times with how stuttery it got,) but also does more to punish innocent players than it does to protect anyone - the intention is noble, the execution is trash. Mods in VRChat, like anywhere else, are a mixed bag. Sure, there are people using some to do shady stuff like ripping and stealing other folks' avatars. However, many of us use mod tools for improving and securing the experience for ourselves - improving performance, blocking malicious avatars and other content intended to crash the experience, improving existing performance and security options, and a lot of hard work that was made to make the experience more accessible and fun for many people. While I understand this was done to try to combat many of the bad actors that lurk in VR Chat, it concerns me that it genuinely makes me feel like my experience is actually going to be less safe now, as well as more laggy - which, in a VR game like this, is only going to make the experience less immersive and prone to headaches and motion sickness.