VRChat Groups Features
tracked
Karet
We are all very excited about the upcoming Groups system in VRChat but the finer details of what will be possible with the group system remain nebulous. The roleplaying communities of VRChat have been keeping close watch on Tupper’s original groups post as we believe we will be the largest and most in depth users of this system when it comes out.
Our biggest fear right now is that this will just become a way to organise your friends list, therefore we would like to put forth some suggested features for the groups system.
Requiring group membership to use an avatar.
Much like how making an avatar private locks it to the creator we would like the ability to require group membership in order to use or favorite an avatar. This is the critical #1 feature that we need to have as currently there are a number of ways our community avatars can leak out and this has resulted in people outside of our communities intentionally using our image to defame us.
Semi-private Group worlds
Currently worlds can be public so anyone can join them, or private so you have to have an invite link from the world creator to start an instance. Having the ability to make a world public for only your group would circumvent the need to spread links around through external applications for private worlds, as well as prevent the publishing of a bunch of worlds that have no use to the general VRChat public.
The ability to create Roles/Tags/Ranks.
So far we know there will be “Leaders/Officers/Moderators/Etc” however there is no way for vrchat to know how many different roles or what permissions that a particular group is going to need. The ability to create and assign new roles via the vrchat website would allow the groups to segment themselves however they need to. Obviously there would need to be a limit to how many roles can be created as VRChat can only store so much data per player but we do need more than just administrative roles.
Expose Group membership and roles to Udon.
We cannot anticipate all of the different ways various groups will want to use their different roles and giving us the ability to create new roles would further compound this problem. Allowing udon to see if you are in a group and what your rank in that group is would make it possible for the world creators of these groups to specify who has access to what so we wouldn't have to rely on VRChat to make all the tools for us.
Allow players to join multiple groups.
As stated in Tuppers original post, players should have the ability to join multiple groups. People have many different interests and in the roleplay communities there is a ton of overlap between groups. It would be nice if Udon could pull a list of the groups the local player is in so we can search through them and confirm membership, otherwise just having the group the player is currently “representing” would work well enough.
We understand that this is quite the wishlist and not everything can be done, but hopefully we have been able to help guide the groups feature to be the best that it can possibly be.
Signed,
Loli Police Dept, The Mortisian Syndicate, SCP Foundation of VRChat, United Hollow Republic.
Log In
∗Lotus∗
Absolutely expose group roles to Udon. It would simplify so many admin systems and prevent spoofing entirely.
Scout - VRChat Head of Quality Assurance
updated the status to
tracked
xxx_red_xxx
I agree with this for my group too!
Bartender Mec
Adding these features sound interestingly fun, can't wait for what the future holds.
Baeronius
If group assignment is exposed, wouldn't that mean an abuser could give themselves the Admin role then disband the group?...
Also, if "group worlds" become a thing there needs to be two types that can spawn. The first is the "public" type we have now, while the second is a "Clubhouse" that is members only. This would be so the worlds can still be used without locking up the entire map.
Karet
Baeronius: They wouldn't be able to give roles through udon, udon would be able to see what role they have.
As far as worlds, we are arguing that the worlds this would benefit have no use to the general public. Currently, and for all of vrchats history, they go unpublished and can only be accessed through a private link.
We are asking that instead of having to pass a link around, let the world show up in the worlds menu for members of the group.
Khangaluwu
I back this!
ReploidSham
My main request is setting visibility settings for a group, so you can choose to make it visible to members already a part of it or some such.
Hayaki
Hi! I like the idea of exposing someone's position in a clan to Udon! I also like specifying how robust the role setup should be. You're right! We weren't given much information on that and the possibility of role functionality being gimped is pretty daunting! But I also have some complaints with your ideas and I do hope you consider what I have to say.
The idea of locking game content to someone's clan membership status is concerning. In an area of this community where immaturity among younger clans, fickle relations, and infighting is common; exploitation to the ends of discriminating against ex-members or members of other factions is worrying.
When considering worlds, I worry about, "It would be nice if Udon could pull a list of the groups the local player is in." This could be easily exploited by users with malicious intent to the means of harming the experiences of members of certain clans.
Suppose if a faction were to create certain worlds only made available to members of their clan. Otherwise, a user wouldn't be allowed past spawn. Or worlds where the creator can choose to display malicious content directed at and visible only to members of a given clan. This is detrimental to the experiences of the common user in both cases and is especially harmful in the latter example to the unsuspecting users who are made to deal with problems that don't belong to them because they aren't prepared for the kind of luggage clan membership can come with.
When considering avatars, I find the idea of restricting use to members of clans simply unfair. When it comes to clan-specific avatars, there are generally cases where members of a clan provide temporary access to their personal accounts to the ends of receiving a private custom avatar with love, from their favorite clan. This is a very dangerous practice but it is nonetheless common practice. Does your concept of by-membership restriction include this use case? If all forms of clan-specific avatars—public or not aren't addressed, the whole concept falls apart.
My worry is that this system is pushed to being employed in the use case of these privately uploaded avatars which would at the very least be encouraging the use of a dangerous practice that has lead to account theft and at the most be a means for any factions to hold user-content ransom to the trepidation of clan members. This has been attempted before to unfortunate success where clans claim their avatars, despite Section 9.3 of VRChat's Terms of Service, be their clans property and may be revoked at any time.
Having touched on that, recall the mention of Section 9.3 which states that should an avatar be shared to a users account or tagged public, a non-exclusive license should be granted to any users of the content.
No matter the use case, be it public or private avatars, being able to grant then restrict access to an avatar by clan membership would require a drastic change to VRChat's Terms of Service as well as a reconsideration of the legality of avatar sharing and publishing. In practice, such a system would be heavily favored toward any given clans and work to harm the experiences of those on the short end of the stick. Overall, I find the entire concept to be completely unfair.
Thanks for reading.
Karet
Hayaki: That is quite the post and I appreciate the feedback! Let me see if I can address your concerns one by one:
"The idea of locking game content to someone's clan membership status is concerning."
This is already the case in any world that uses a whitelist system. Groups will use whitelists to make sure that some content is only available for the intended audience. having the ability to check if you are in a group will only mean that we don't have to constantly be updating our worlds just to keep the whitelists up to date.
"This could be easily exploited by users with malicious intent to the means of harming the experiences of members of certain clans. "
I understand the concern here, however, this can be mitigated by having only the currently represented group exposed to udon, and then the user can choose to not represent a group publicly. Though it's kind of a nonstarter as it is already prohibited to upload malicious content. This is a general VRChat problem, not a groups problem.
"Suppose if a faction were to create certain worlds only made available to members of their clan. Otherwise, a user wouldn't be allowed past spawn."
This is exactly what we want. Right now the workaround many groups use is to just not make the world public as the content is not intended for the general public. In the case of the LPD for example, we have our avatars in a private world that we only give to our members as we don't want people outside our group misrepresenting us. As well as the public world LPD Station has a whitelist so that only our members can get into the back room. this is so that we can organize our events and patrols without interruption from the public.
"Or worlds where the creator can choose to display malicious content directed at and visible only to members of a given clan."
It is already against the rules to upload malicious content. This is why the reports system exists.
"When considering avatars, I find the idea of restricting use to members of clans simply unfair."
I disagree, the case could be made that an avatar creator keeping their creation private so that only they can use it is also unfair. Or they can make it public but only let their close friends clone it and hope it doesn't spread around. We are simply asking for a middle ground.
"When it comes to clan-specific avatars, there are generally cases where members of a clan provide temporary access to their personal accounts to the ends of receiving a private custom avatar with love, from their favorite clan. "
We are not asking for this, we do not promote the sharing of account information. We have generic avatars for our roleplay that are technically public but only intended for use by our members. Currently, there is no way to protect these avatars from spreading and we are simply asking for some middle ground between public and private.
"This has been attempted before to unfortunate success where clans claim their avatars, despite Section 9.3 of VRChat's Terms of Service, be their clans property and may be revoked at any time."
We are not saying that Avatars should be the property of the group, we are asking that an avatar creator be able to share a private avatar with a group they are in. We already know this is going to be possible with the upcoming "Creator Economy" update as it states in the promotional material: "Subscribers can get access to exclusive avatars to show their support". We would like this system to be adapted to groups so that money doesn't have to be involved. Section 9.3 stops applying when a creator sets their content to private. We are simply asking for a middle ground between private and public. The avatar creator is free to leave a group and take their content with them at any time.
"No matter the use case, be it public or private avatars, being able to grant then restrict access to an avatar by clan membership would require a drastic change to VRChat's Terms of Service"
No, it wouldn't, this is already the case with the creator's ability to make their content private after it has already been public.
I hope I was able to address some of your concerns. In short, most of what we are asking for is already possible to some degree, we would just like the process to be made easier.
Cap Destructo
LPD Programmer here. It would be awesome to have the Groups functionality exposed through the API so that role assignment, member invites, etc, can all be synchronized with our Discord server through our custom bot. We rely heavily on roles in Discord to determine permissions and allowable activities, so automatic assignment would be a huge plus.