If you read about VRChat Community Labs in our previous blog post, you might recall us talking about a future version of Community Labs where the review process was automated. We’ve now reached that stage!
Community Labs is now in “Stage 2”. This means that your world going public depends entirely on how well it does in Community Labs. Depending on user’s behavior in your world and other metrics, Community Labs will promote your world to fully Public after a set of conditions have been met.
The best way to sum up these conditions is “How much are users enjoying this world?” and “Are we seeing any common problems that might be indicated by user behavior?”
These conditions are being kept under wraps to prevent “gaming” the system, but we are paying very close attention to how this entire process is going. In fact, this system has been in place for the entirety of Community Labs so far, but we just turned off the little bit where it makes worlds Public.
We’ve already been reviewing data and analyzing the general performance of the automated Community Labs system over time. We’ve tweaked a lot of it, and we’re comfortable handing over the “making worlds Public” reins to the r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶ ̶r̶e̶v̶o̶l̶u̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ automated systems.
What do I need to be worrying about?
In short, you no longer need to submit your world to the Public World Request form! This is now totally automated. Submit your world to Community Labs, and you’ll eventually make it out into Public.
We’ve documented the updated process (as well as provided a FAQ) on our VRChat Community Labs documentation page.
Now, if you want to be categorized as an “Avatar World”, a “Game World”, or a holiday world (when the holidays we create World Rows for come up), we’ll have a new form in place for that. Unfortunately, this bit still requires a bit of human intervention to categorize the world. If you request one of these tags, we’ll take a quick look to ensure that it is actually an avatar/game world, then add the categorization. This will change in the near future as we design and implement new processes — users will be able to simply apply those categories themselves. Keep an eye out for this form on the Submitting a World to be made Public documentation page. We’ll be implementing that form later on today (11 April 2019).
gimme that tl;dr
Community Labs Stage 2 is Live. We’re taking down the “Submit a World to be Made Public” form because it isn’t going to be used anymore. Going Public is now automated over time. Put your world into Labs, and you’ll eventually go Public — unless you don’t. Docs pages are updated.
No other changes are occuring!
Keeping an Eye on the Singularity
We’re rolling this out right now and it’ll take a few hours for our automatons to realize that we’ve given them the unending, eternal task of reviewing worlds. Once it is set off, though, you’ll start seeing worlds in Community Labs pop out into New.
We’ll continue to watch how Community Labs rolls out, and tweak the process as we see need. As always, this is a bit of an experiment-in-motion, so we appreciate your patience as we iterate on our process and improve Community Labs going forward.
