VRChat is a popular social game for both VR and Non-VR user's alike, serving as a general online platform that aims to bring people together from around the world, which allows users to interact with others with user-created 3D avatars and worlds with the use of Unity's engine and various built-in and community tools to make development easier.

In VRChat 2022.2.2's update, "The Security Update," the update brought a variety of security changes that brings a change to VRChat forever.

After backlash and review bombs on Steam bringing the recent reviews down to a whopping 22% "mostly negative," the developers released a post stating the following;
Since the announcement yesterday, we've gotten a LOT of feedback from all of you regarding the incoming 2022.2.2 VRChat update that integrates Easy Anti-Cheat.

We are reprioritizing, reorganizing, and changing our internal development roadmap to focus on the feedback you've given us.

Let's follow that up with the hard part: we are going to be releasing this update, and we do not have plans or intent to revert or roll it back.

And with that, the community has been left unheard.

So, what happened here? Why did this go so wrong?
Well, with the release of "The Security Update," came the introduction of Easy Anti-Cheat, with the intent of preventing modified clients and any external tool from hooking into or interacting with VRChat, without an option to play the game without it.

This update is aimed at modified clients which typically enhance the game, provide extra security features in of itself that is not provided within the base VRChat client, and quality of life that should already be present in the game, such as crash prevention, automatically reloading the game and rejoining servers, seeing where other players are, among other more advanced features that you could find online with a quick Google search.

Among these clients are also ones that are built to provide accessibility to users who are, for example, hearing impaired, among other disabilities.

It also disables things such as frame rate unlocking that are present in some video card software and drivers.

After the update's release, anybody using anything that classifies as a modified client will prevent you from opening the game, or if you attempt to open it in after it's launched, the game will close. This also comes at the risk of banning your account and placing a VAC ban on you Steam account if you play through Steam.

Additionally, for Linux users, this might eliminate VRChat's compatibility with Linux itself. Anti-cheat universally is known not to function correctly on Linux, due to the open-source nature and easy ability to bypass it. Even so, EAC luckily within the past year has opened up the avenue for opt-in Linux compatibility with their own means. But that doesn't mean they will tick the box for Linux users, though rumor has it that it will function on the Steam Deck.

Here's a video that can explain some of the security vulnerabilities that come with EAC and a few of the issues listed here.

So, what solutions can be otherwise implemented?

There's various ways to go about it. The first and foremost way would be to completely disable EAC.

Another way, on top of removing EAC, would be to implement security into the game itself which prevents certain problems from being hooked internally, or detects file changes. This would remove the worry of security of an external cheat engine and provide more flexibility for need-to-be whitelisted clients, such as those for accessibility, until the introduction of those features into the game, albeit warnings about external client use would be at the user's discretion.

A third way this can be solved, is do something along the lines of what ARK: Survival Evolved has done with their EAC implementation; allow world owners to choose if they want their world to require EAC or not. If an world requires EAC, only players with EAC can join it, alongside being able to join non-EAC ones. Meanwhile, players that want to play without EAC, can do so, but be limited to worlds that don't require EAC. This works particularly well in ARK: Survival Evolved, and has for several years without complaints. Players should be allowed to launch the game in EAC or non-EAC mode. If the game is launched in non-EAC mode, players will be unable to see EAC worlds at all or have EAC worlds greyed out or marked as EAC only. Filters should be created in the game within the settings or world pages to filter EAC or non-EAC worlds respectively.

With this petition, the community of VRChat stands together for a better security solution that will not completely alienate the use of 3rd party programs in a hope to be heard and their decision to not listen to the community be reprimanded.

On VRChat's update post on Steam, comments are disabled, so currently, the only method of speaking our word is otherwise by hoard on their forums, their Discord server, YouTube, Steam reviews, among other platforms. However, none of these platforms create a number of how many people actually want the update to be reverse. Here, we are doing that, creating a number, and showing how many people actually want this change to take place.

With that all in mind, take care to give this petition a signature for better security, better accessibility, and better flexibility for a better VRChat.