Please do not remove fallbacks from VRCHAT!!!!!! Imposters are difficult for those with vision impairments, and they're also just plain ugly to look out. Low quality versions of models walking around would break the immersion and prevent those who want to be perceived a certain way from fully expressing themselves and their creativity. I see it as a breach of individuality and a differential that condescends and contracts PC vs Quest users further promoting a hierarchal divide between the two platforms

Impostors are mediocre and uncontrollable in how they treat certain bone configurations without majorly modifying the avatar for a specific bone shrinking algorithm that vrchat could change at any time (since it's all server side), fallbacks look infinitely better and more expressive and ensures creativity is kept to the user, and it rewards players who spend the extra time to make them for their own avatars. Removing them is incredibly short-sighted, and only acceptable if fallback avatars instead just become force-locked to single avatars and let people maintain control of how others will see them on all platforms, ie; let fallbacks replace impostors by forcing them to attach to a specific avatar, rather than VRChat's pixellated impostors which as people noted, are not as performant than just a standard avatar fallback.

This change is, objectively, enshitification. Imposters are vastly inferior in every respect. They are buggy, ugly, and broken. People often appear naked, with horrible clipping issues, lacking gestures and visemes, the list goes on.

I tend to shut off people's avatars if they show as an imposter. The gray robot is more appealing on the eyes then the bowl of mashed potatoes that imposters are.

I am genuinely boggled as to why this decision is being made. I spent a good amount of time not only making fallbacks for myself, but helping others do the same. It is extremely frustrating to see, yet again, more of my hard work to to waste for a stupid decision. Forgive my frustrated tone, but this change literally makes no sense.

Imposters are good to see the general look of someone's avatar without much effort, but to me they look more like an LOD that's rendered way too close. (Distance-based impostor replacements when btw?)

Fallbacks, when used properly, give users much more control of how they might be seen. Some of them might even be purpose-built for a specific effect, like having a low-poly Playstation/Nintendo 64 version of your avatar as fallback.

It'd also negate all the work some avatar creators did for their fallbacks, sometimes even using them as a selling point.

I'm also told that it would make it impossible to use sign language with an Impostor, as those don't have tracked fingers.

Seems a bit niche and I'm sure not a lot of people bother checking what their fallback even is, but it's still a lot better to have the option rather than have to rely on the forever-imperfect impostors.

I think if fallbacks continue to exist they need to make them somehow assignable per-avatar. Having a completely different fallback that doesn't at all match your currently selected avatar is the biggest flaw of the fallbacks system. Having to remember to manually switch your selection every time you change avatars is not a solution.

The other main issue is that currently most people I see have neither an impostor nor a custom fallback, hundreds of tigerbees, freakhounds, and 8 balls. Even if they don't kill the fallbacks system entirely, they need to get rid of the public fallbacks, those only exacerbate the shortcomings of the system.

Fallback Avatars have a Lower rendering load than Imposters.

Imposters is can Not use Gestures and Expressions.

Even if the conditions for Fallback Avatars were stricter, I don't think this would change.

My main avatar has an issue on its imposter variant where the skirt clips into the body, thus exposing the undergarments underneath it. This does not happen on the non-imposter avatar, even with fallback shaders on. Thus, I'm forced to use a fallback over an imposter if I don't want to expose that part of my avatar.

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I actually saw a comment on https://feedback.vrchat.com/open-beta/p/1643-cannot-change-fallbacks-in-new-avatar-menu giving the idea of uploading another avatar as the fallback for a particular avatar as opposed to user in general; I think this would very well with the idea of imposters being per-avatar.

I have to agree, fallbacks just look infinitely better compared to the slop that impostors auto generate, even if it isn't outright producing eldritch horror its usually unusable in another way, butter hands, missing limbs, missing clothes, smeary texture coloring and these issues persist between impostorizor versions.

a lot of pro consumers want to have high fidelity fallbacks. Impostors look horrible in a lot of situation.

Also as something to note, VRChat stated they wanted to put a built-in avatar optimizer in the SDK. It would make sense for VRChat to streamline the process of creating Fallbacks for all platforms.