An open letter to our community

4 min readJan 10, 2018

Hello everyone.

The VRChat Team would like to take a moment to speak to our rapid community growth in the past month along with some of the issues we’ve faced along the way. We’d also like to share with you some insight into our team and our vision for the future.

First off, we’re dedicated and passionate but we’re not a very large team. We all work extremely hard but, like most people, we have families and real world responsibilities to manage. Most of our growth began at the start of the holiday season. That meant portions of our already small team were spending time with family and on vacation. The timing of explosive growth could’ve been better but we managed it as best we could. As we’ve returned in the new year and with the team back at full strength we’ve been working hard to address issues and get pieces into place for a better VRChat future.

So why did we grow all of a sudden? There are many factors but some that have no doubt contributed to it. To name just a few, thanks to many talented Twitch streamers like Pokelawls, TSM_Dyrus and Youtube creators like Nagzz21 we’ve become one of the most watched apps/games on Twitch, YouTube and Social Media (more at the list below). Many others have joined the party and all have helped grow our popularity. They share out daily their VRChat fun and adventures to thousands of viewers around the clock. We went from sort of known to everyone knowing about VRChat almost overnight. We’ve gotten to know that community well and our hats are off to them for their ongoing contributions and help.

Another reason for our growth is we continue to attract lots of creative and talented creators. They have not only been adding their own content but also forming groups and helping in various ways from our discord, from making tutorials on how to create avatars or build worlds to organizing events. We’ve also gone global. Our discord community has many channels now for various languages around the world. The core of VRChat is an amazing hotbed of community creativity, sharing of knowledge, connections leading to collaborations, events, learning and more. We’re thankful to everyone involved for all their passion and creations. Coming soon we’ll be adding Playmaker which will help users add even more interactivity to their worlds.

With our rapid growth our server tech had to also scale up at an insane pace over the holiday season and that’s kept us on our toes for the past few weeks. Our server team has been very hard at work attempting to fix all the issues and improve the quality of connections for everyone going forward. We’re grateful for everyone’s patience during this effort and will hopefully have more stable and more efficient servers very soon.

One of the biggest challenges with rapid growth is trying to maintain and shape a community that is fun and safe for everyone. We’re aware there’s a percentage of users that choose to engage in disrespectful or harmful behavior. It is our top priority to address the quality of the VRChat experience, especially for new users, and our team will continue to work toward improving that. We have a trained and dedicated moderation team that monitors VRChat constantly. They are actively educating or removing users from the system for bad behavior as called out here https://www.vrchat.com/community. Additionally, we’re working on new systems to allow the community to better self moderate and for our moderation team to be more effective. We are confident we can achieve a higher quality experience for new users in the near future.

For the time being, please use all the available tools to keep yourself safe in VRChat. We know these are far from perfect.

Use the Mute / Block feature
Mute all Toggle found in the system menu which will mute everyone except those you are friends with

Hang out in Friends or Invite Only Instances if you wish to insulate yourself from the general population
Create a link to an invite only world or navigate to worlds through www.vrchat.com.

You can also report users for offensive behavior and violations of the community guidelines on our Moderation Report Form.

All of us on the team are users of VRChat. We listen to our community. We care about the issues. If you are reading any of this and feel that you’d like to help, there are many things you can do. We have an active discord (https://discord.gg/vrchat) and canny (https://vrchat.canny.io/feature-requests) which can be used to get involved in the community and provide feedback and ideas for VRChat. Canny is like a mini Reddit that allows user to post ideas which can be voted on and commented on. We scan all feedback including the canny a few times a week and try and include as much as we can into our roadmap. You can also email us directly at hello@vrchat.com. Please be patient with us responding.

We’re excited to have so many passionate people joining our community. We look forward to working with you to make VRChat a better place.Thank you for your patience as this wonderful community continues to grow.

Website

https://www.vrchat.com

Twitter

https://twitter.com/VRChatNet

Discord

https://www.discord.gg/vrchat

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/vrchatnet/

Nagzz21

https://www.youtube.com/nagzz21tv

Pokelawls

https://www.twitch.tv/pokelawls