Friends Only worlds and orange status not show as private.
GenesisAria
tl;dr: Friends-Only instances and Orange status are extremely anti-social, restrictive, and deterring. There should be some basic non-joinable information about what they are up to, such as just the world, but not the joinable id, in order to give a basic idea what they are up to and to give incentive to try requesting.
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Over the years, VRC keeps implementing more and more means to break up and damage the sociability of a social platform. I, and many others, are tired of seeing a friends-list full of "private", and it's only exacerbated by people who are in friends-only worlds showing as private as well.
I understand this change was so that people couldn't use the website or other means to just manually join a friends-only world, but that doesn't mean that it can't show the world they are in - merely exclude the instance id to prevent the ability to join without being a friend of the owner. With this it would be easier to tell who is actually in a private or not.
Potentially orange status could show the world as well if not in an actual private world (invite/invite+), again excluding the instance id without an invite. As it stands, orange status is barely different from red, and in a social functional sense, it may as well be the same, because most people don't even bother trying to request if they see orange status, giving more or less the same effect as red. Orange should be there to filter who to accept, not to deter the motive to be requested on - if they don't want to be bothered, they use red or turn off UI.
The point is to give some basic information that can inform friends what they are up to, while not giving a loophole to break-in, for the purpose of giving others an idea of whether it's worth requesting to join or not.
The issue is that in most cases, if it merely says "private", nobody has any idea what they are doing unless they've been otherwise informed; they could be doing rp or other organized event, could be having personal time with someone, could be sleeping somewhere, nobody has any clue, and 9 times out of 10 they will opt to not even bother trying due to this being the easier decision.
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Kaugumme
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GenesisAria
I'd say what bothers me most, is the lack of conversation on this topic - it seems to bother everyone (i hear complaints about it almost every time i'm on vrc by different people) yet nobody is talking about how they want it changed.
GotoFinal
I still think the same as i thought when they added orange and changed red status...
Instance visibility should be a separate option from status.
Status tells you if someone want to receive notification and allow you to auto accept requests. And that should be all.
Only green, blue and red status is needed.
Then there should be separate option for visibility, with options:
- visible,
- hide instance,
- hide world/all
No special changed in UI are needed for that, i dont need another icon for visibility (tho if someone wants, maybe just cross out the status icon or make it hollow/gray inside when instance is hidden).
All that need to change then is just displayed world name when you click on some person and whatever join button is active.
like:
- online in Gaia Night [hidden], and a gray join button
- online in hidden world. (optional, can be just private instead)
- online in private world.
- online in Cinema, and normal join button.
Additionally blue status could be improved by also adding
- online in Friends only/invite only world, and gray invite request button
I really miss being able to use red status just to make people know I don't want to get invites now, like when im watching a movie, but they could still join on me and watch it with me if i was in friends+ instance. Now all statuses except green are useless for me, so welp, thanks vrchat for removing features.
GenesisAria
GotoFinal: Well in a way red status is kind of redundant by the fact you can just disable UI and not see any invite requests, so in that way orange and red are still effectively the same in the end.
I like the idea of separate option for visibility. The point of my idea was mostly supposed to be something that should only need some tweaks to the API and how VRC reads instance info, without having to make additional UI or systems or new unique values to be read from API. A more robust system like you described would indeed be better, but consume more development time.
The issue of friends-only and invite-only worlds is a bit annoying and has been since day 1 of these instance types being added, that being the fact that they show up, and say "ask the host for permission" and yet there's zero way to pass on the invite request or anything. Non-friends of the host in these cases should deny the invite and inform the requester that they are unable to join, OR give a way to pass on the request to the host.
Maybe the whole system needs an overhaul.