Hello everyone!
This is part 2 of the VRChat deep dive! You can find the first part, talking about amenities you can commonly find in Worlds, here. This time, we'll be talking about the VRChat community and moderation.
THE VRCHAT COMMUNITY
VRChat doesn't have a proper private messaging system, so communities on VRChat usually have communities on other platforms, like Discord or Reddit. That way, people are able to communicate outside of Virtual Reality.
Ingame, VRChat offers VRChat Groups, a newer feature where you can represent your Group with a custom banner above your username, access Group Instances, and more. Groups are a good way to meet like-minded people or people with similar interests! There are groups for various things - social anxiety support groups, groups for people with disabilities, groups for similar interests and hobbies, anything you can think of. I'm personally part of a group that gets together to dance to EDM on weeknights!
 |
| A picture of a VRChat Group homepage. This Group is made for people who are hard of hearing. | |
My warning is that many communities are 18+, and, like anything else, experiences can be mixed. Inherently, when meeting new people, you risk encountering unpleasant social situations and people. There is a subset of the community, like any community, who engage to cause problems and harass others for their own amusement. There's also an unfortunate trend of parents buying children VR headsets or letting them play with theirs unsupervised, and these kids are often called 'Quest Kids' after the Quest headset line. Public instances tend to be overrun with misbehaving kids who are far too young to be on the platform or trolls who want to cause problems.
Some of the things a person like this might do are show shock images (offensive images that are violent, sexual, or profane with intent to shock the viewer), play shock videos on the World's video players, wear inappropriate avatars, say vulgar things, be disruptive, or play loud or inappropriate music or noises. VRChat is not a child-friendly game, because you're responsible for moderating your own experience. VRChat is rated as being for 13+ and older, but I would not recommend it for anyone under 18 without active supervision.
Another warning I have is that the most popular Worlds and Instances with the most people are the ones you want to avoid. People often go into the most full lobbies to cause trouble and disturb the most amount of people at a time, and there are some Worlds people have insisted to me that I should avoid entirely. The Great Pug is consistently on the front page, and thus, consistently flooded with bad behavior. It's a genuinely lovely World - it's a bar and lounge with several floors and a comfortable atmosphere - but a Public Instance of The Great Pug will rarely be anything other than rowdy and full of kids running around.
But it's not all doom and gloom! It's time for the good news.
MODERATION
Thankfully, there's moderation tools. The VRChat Help Center explains common questions including 'how to report someone' when they've broken VRChat's Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, or Creator Guidelines. You can block a user (which prevents you from seeing or hearing them), use the Personal Space feature (which makes people disappear when they try to get too close to you), and use the Safety System with customizable Shield Levels (read more about VRChat's Safety and Trust System in their official documentation).
I've also recently been given an updated piece of advice on this front -
with the advent of the VRChat Groups feature, came Group Instances.
Unlike a regular Instance, a Group Instance has the benefit of Group members who are given permission by the Group Owner being able to moderate users in the instance. Some Groups will make their own World and make it so they're able to teleport logged troublemakers to a different space than a regular user (this allows Groups to have their own 'jails' which work as a ban.)
That's all from me for this time! This post was denser than I expected, so the VRChat multi-part series is still ongoing. See you next time!
