I'm not a VRchat user. But it's sad they decided to ban modified clients. Giving the community a way to customize their experience is a great way to grow an ecosystem and learn about what your users want.
The problems they mention are all solvable without banning mods:
> Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues.
These kinds of issues should be solved on the backend. Rate limiting, pattern matching, etc.
> Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes
Keep a list of "blessed" open source clients that have a reputation, and allow people to report them. Chrome and Firefox extensions have solved this
> 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.
Provide better debugging info for your creators! They should know which client (or at least that a modified client) is being used.
> This pain extends to VRChat support too – any time we update, we get a massive amount of bug reports that end up just being broken modifications
Ditto. These tickets should be easy to auto-close if you force folks to include info about their client.
I understand all this requires time and effort, and simply restricting the client-side of things is a low-cost solution. But if there's already a vibrant community of mods out there, I think you have a responsibility (and a vested interest) in trying to preserve that.
The problems they mention are all solvable without banning mods:
> Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues.
These kinds of issues should be solved on the backend. Rate limiting, pattern matching, etc.
> Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes
Keep a list of "blessed" open source clients that have a reputation, and allow people to report them. Chrome and Firefox extensions have solved this
> 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.
Provide better debugging info for your creators! They should know which client (or at least that a modified client) is being used.
> This pain extends to VRChat support too – any time we update, we get a massive amount of bug reports that end up just being broken modifications
Ditto. These tickets should be easy to auto-close if you force folks to include info about their client.
I understand all this requires time and effort, and simply restricting the client-side of things is a low-cost solution. But if there's already a vibrant community of mods out there, I think you have a responsibility (and a vested interest) in trying to preserve that.