Prismic247
The Problem
In spite of making up the core foundation the platform, worlds have been left behind for quite a long time now, and are long overdue for needing an uplift.
For comparison avatars can now have styles, content warnings, and up to six 1080p images for its gallery, and all of this can be managed from the website. User profiles have gotten icons and banners at up 2k resolution, icon frames, nameplate themes, profile effects, and badges, also all manageable from the website or in-game. Groups can have banner and nameplate and icon images up to 2k, have gotten events, and is also all manageable from the website.
Meanwhile, worlds are still stuck with a single 800x600 image (not 1200x900 as advertised) that can only be uploaded/changed in the SDK, no recognized categories other than "Avatar" and "Game" (nothing analogous to avatar styles), content warnings still aren't used, etc.
Add in that world discovery hasn't meaningfully changed since labs was introduced in 2019, while in the same time the userbase has grown from 15k daily to 150k daily, and the number of uploaded worlds has likewise increased immensely.
This request is to highlight that worlds are in dire need a major uplift across the board. At the very minimum to bring it in line with other aspects of the platform that have gotten that attention, but ideally to bring it in line with the how similar platforms regard their virtual spaces. Particular things that could use improvements:
Suggested Changes
Allow worlds to feature more images, and at higher resolution
  • Worlds have the greatest need for multiple images, given that they can feature a large variety of spaces, and take the most time investment to load (compared to avatars, groups, profiles, etc). Allow creators to show off their spaces, and users to be able to use that information to better decide what worlds are worth their visit.
  • Bring the image resolution in line with at least avatars, and allow for them to be customized on the website.
  • Allow YouTube videos to exist alongside images instead of as an alternative to them, and let them be watchable in-game.
Create more recognized categories for worlds to tag themselves as
  • Right now only "Avatar" and "Game" really matter when it comes to tags/categories. If VRChat can decide on a list of styles for avatars to benefit them, then they can do the same for worlds. Come up with a few broad categories that are commonly used to add to "Avatar" and "Game", like "Cozy", "Scenic", "Home", "Educational", "Story", "Horror", etc. Akin to styles, let world creators pick any 2 they feel best matches their world, and have discovery rows for the genres.
  • Add the ability to tag what languages a world supports and is are designed for. VRChat supports a wide array of global communities, and having a way to more easily discover what worlds are accessible to them improves the user experience.
Track and display to users when they last visited a world
  • VRChat has a massive number of worlds with dozens if not hundreds more being added every day. Part of the problem of world discovery is that it simply becomes impossible to remember if you've been somewhere before when trying to find something new in a genre you're looking for.
  • An example of this is horror worlds; there's hundreds of them, but eventually you end up joining one you don't recognize only to realize you've already been there before.
  • This applies to other categories as well. For example sometimes you want to check out specific avatar worlds to see if there's new content, or a game world that got an update. This would allow you to compare the last updated date with your last joined date to see if there's anything new worth checking out.
Allow users to rate worlds, at the very least for personal reference
  • Giving users the power to record how they felt about a particular world in a succinct way would go a very long way towards improving and optimizing the user experience. Could be a thumbs up/down, or a 5 star system, but either way this would help keep users from stumbling into content they've been to before and were disappointed by, or remind them that it was a good experience worth revisiting and recommending. Keeping this personal to the user removed the concerns of abuse via review bombing and other associated problems. Favorites doesn't serve this purpose as the number of favorites is extremely limited relative to the number of worlds that exist, and can't reflect disliking.
  • Taking this one step further, perhaps allow creators to see this data as a world analytics datapoint. This would help inform them of what content their users like and don't like, what to make more of and what to disregard. VRChat could also make use of this information to get a better gauge on what their users are enjoying or not.
  • Taking this one final step further, if someday down the line VRChat does want to experiment with having ratings be public, or factor into discoverability/recommendations, they now have the data to act on it. At any time if VRChat doesn't like how it's playing out or influencing things, they can just hide it from the public again. YouTube still has a dislike button after all even if they made the number private to viewers.
Improve world searching to bring it in line with avatar marketplace search
  • A simple text search with fuzzy matching and a couple sorting options is woefully insufficient for finding the content users are looking given the massive number of worlds on the platform. Avatar Marketplace has more search options, so give them to worlds to. Combined with the above suggestions, let users search by those new recognized categories like avatars can with styles. Add a filter by platform support so no one accidentally gets left behind in multi-platform groups. Add a sort by creation date. Let users filter out worlds they've visited, or worlds they haven't visited.
  • Get rid of the weird "avatar" world category when searching that necessitates the creation of worlds like this one to fix user confusion.
Conclusion
There's certainly plenty more that could be improved, but these were at the top of my mind as a player and creator for changes that would go a long way towards modernizing both user and creator interactions with worlds, and give them the proper recognition and respect they need as the foundation of the VRChat platform.