Hizumi Rei
I always play Murder 4 in public instances, and I often encounter cheating or hacking. Recently, I started seeing cases where players use invisible avatars while holding knives or revolvers. However, after investigating, I found that these were not cheats, but rather a bug in VRChat.
I first encountered this bug about 1–2 weeks ago. At that time, a player who was the Murderer stood still at the entrance to the cellar but was remotely killing Bystanders with the knife. I was convinced it was cheating, but surprisingly, no one else seemed to suspect that player.
Out of curiosity, I unhide that player’s avatar, and suddenly their avatar disappeared from in front of me. Then, I saw them walking around elsewhere in the world, fully visible.
In other words, this bug can be described as: “When a user’s avatar is hidden, it is not displayed correctly.”
The player’s movements and interactions (such as holding a knife or firing a revolver) are processed globally as normal. However, the hidden avatar itself remains stuck at a fixed point in the world locally instead of following the player’s actual movements.
Put simply, the “internal” state (user interactions) and the “external” state (avatar position and hitbox) become desynchronized. For details, please see the attached video.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13eUVpceSsPTjAfKH3dYgLJj2yXNXwpVO/view?usp=drive_link
This bug is having a severe impact on game worlds like Murder 4.
For example, imagine you are the Murderer and must eliminate all other players. If a user with a hidden avatar is stuck in the lobby, which is outside the play area, their avatar and hitbox remain there—but their actual player is still participating in the game. This means they can shoot you with the revolver, yet you cannot stab or eliminate them, because their avatar and hitbox remain in the lobby. This creates an unwinnable situation.
I have personally lost over 5 games due to this bug. Since I only play Murder 4, I have not tested other game worlds, but I believe this issue likely occurs elsewhere as well. In fact, since this is a VRChat-level bug, it can happen in any world as long as there are users whose avatars are hidden.
To clarify, this is not a bug specific to Murder 4. Murder 4 has not been updated in the last 1–2 weeks, so it is natural to conclude that the bug lies in VRChat itself. Even if Murder 4 did have issues, it would be unlikely that the Hide/Show Avatar feature of VRChat itself would malfunction in this way.
This is a critical bug that can make gameplay impossible. The cause should be identified and fixed immediately, and measures should be taken to ensure it never happens again.