VRChat world discovery is a uncontrolled catastrophe. It makes the Creator Economy much less useful than it should be for all but a tiny handful of world creators which is so narrow in scope that doesn't even include some of VRChat's most prominent world and game makers because it is too efficient at sending too many players to too small a number of worlds only.

I want to be very clear that this is NOT a staff problem.

All VRChat staff I've ever encountered are doing their best to counteract as much of the effects of VRChat's ineffective world discovery system as they can. I see them encourage creators to use Creator Economy features, support creators through CE, and I've always seen Creator Economy staff doing their best to make the system work despite the terrible state of world discovery.

It is time to do something about world discovery!

There are clear steps which VRChat needs to take to make Creator Economy make more sense for worlds to adopt:

It's time to take the "classics" off the menu. The prominence of these worlds is no longer justifiable as countless other worlds which are better optimized, better looking and more feature rich have been released since and have been held back by this de-facto policy that massively preferences being "first" above absolutely everything else. Worlds should be allowed to rise and fall on their merits, and the tops of the lists should be a bubbling fountain of variety.

The current system is extremely favorable to minimal "turn-key" worlds and "games" which monetize "gameplay" for a week or two and then are deleted after their attention curve has waned. These worlds are usually promoted by their creator spinning-up dozens (or hundreds) of instances (each instance adds one to the total player population for a minute or two even if it's the same player), which promotes it up the Hot and Popular listings, until a critical mass of unsuspecting players (or atrocity tourists) are flowing through to sustain the position. This sharply demotes earnest worlds of any level of effort or quality made by active community members. Active community members are also much more likely to re-spend VRChat credits on other content within VRChat than someone who is obviously only here to grab some easy cash and dip. Allowing this kind of exploit to continue cultivates a sense of platform decline and general ruin that makes it that much harder to justify any effort, monetized or not.

Many players have simply stopped using the favorites system entirely because it fills up so quickly, and must be constantly purged of blanked entries due to the high rate of world deletion (You might want to look into why that is...). The current limit of 400 means that players can only give out 400 "thumbs up" to worlds they like. Which is it? Is this a utility to bookmark worlds for later viewing, or is it a metric? It's treated like a metric, but doesn't mean anything (anyone can farm favorites). This particular part of the system is very obsolete and desperately needs to be overhauled.