Why Legendary might not be a rank after all

[Foorack]

Why Legendary might not be a rank after all

This Merge Request is written in the form of a write-up, so it can be potentially linked to as a one-stop explainer.

Let’s have a talk about the “Legendary Rank”, and the overall functioning of the Trust system on the public API side. In this post I will...

1. Give a brief overview what the Trust system is and importantly how it is represented in the API. If you feel you have a confident understanding of Tags then you can skip the "Background" chapter.
2. Talk about recent findings in regard to various trust theories and where the rumor evolved from.
3. Attempt some sort of "wrap-up" of why things aren't as we have thought them to be, and why it is time for a tiny but important change in how the "system_legend" tag is defined.

Chapter 1: Background

VRChat Safety and Trust System

The VRChat Trust and Safety system is a new extension of the currently-implemented VRChat Trust system. It is designed to keep users safe from nuisance users using things like screen-space shaders, loud sounds or microphones, visually noisy or malicious particle effects, and other methods that someone may use to detract from your experience in VRChat.

The system was initially released as part of the Open Beta on September 21st 2018, and was shortly after revised on September 26th the same year.

We will completely and fully ignore what variables or how the system hands out the regular trust ranks up to Veteran. What we are instead interested in here is how they are represented in the API.

The Tags System

VRChat has a metadata system in form of Tags. Tags are short and simple text strings that can be attached to Worlds, Players, Avatars, Files, Permissions, and more. For example language_swe defines that you have the language Swedish on your profile, and system_supporter that you have VRC+. Automatically given tags are prefixed with system_, admin-related tags with admin_, language tags with language_, and so on.

Trust Ranks are prefixed with system_trust_, and the higher ones all have an offset by one for the actual in-game role, so Known User is system_trust_trusted, and Trusted User is system_trust_veteran.

The Veteran User trust rank was later removed in the later revision; the role was hidden in game, and Yellow became the color for Friends. But it is still available and can be achieved by looking at the API. This information is then displayed in 3rd party applications such as VRCX.

The mysterious Legendary Rank

Although the complete Trust rank doesn't stop at Veteran. In addition to the "Official" rank there is also "VRChat Staff", a title they can toggle in-game, and "Nuisance/Troll", people who have bad enough reputation and will have their Microphone and Avatar turned off by default for everyone.

We finally come to the "Legendary User" rank, which is defined by the mysterious system_legend tag, and completes the chart of the current public understanding of the Trust Hierarchy.

Chapter 2: Discovery

The issue that broke the glass

It is now 2021, and the understanding of "Legendary User" as a rank has now stood its time for several years. It all came crashing down recently with an Bug report to the VRCX project ("Legendary User rank issues and a possible suggestion") where abbeybabbey had a friend that was Legendary but not Veteran. The user had the system_legend tag but was missing the system_trust_legend tag.

This first anomaly was a living proof that suggested what we believed to be "Legendary Users" is in fact not linearly after Veteran and Trusted. We started looking if we could find more of these examples, and it all went downhill from there.

First off, BR3UKER. This person has the system_legend tag yet is still only Known User in-game and on the website, missing both system_trust_legend and system_trust_veteran.

"tags":[
    "system_avatar_access",
    "system_world_access",
    "system_legend",
    "system_trust_basic"
],

After finding a few Trusted users, a very interesting person found was "DAZZA_OWN_U", who is only New User yet still have the system_legend tag. This was a major revelation and ultimately proved that the current understanding had to change.

The major problem here is if you assume system_legend to linearly be a rank, and then simply display the highest rank they have, then DAZZA would show up as "Legendary" in VRCX yet only as New User in-game. There would be no easy way to see their real Trust-level without having to go digging in the JSON, so this is a critical information gone missing.

An alternative approach could be to look for a continuous chain of trust ranks starting from the bottom and take the highest one before it breaks, but we also found lots of people who are normal Trusted Users but are for some reason missing the New User rank. Not everyone seems to be missing it, and we aren't sure why this is the case on some people, so this theory is also in the bin.

Where did the name Legendary come from?

A rumor is contagious like a virus, entertaining like a drug, and eventually can get a life of its own. In the absence of information, and secrecy about the system, we scour for the crumbs, jumping on any detail as a foundation to build further information upon until we eventually build up an information space that we are content with and can accept as plausible. From data we extract an idea, from an idea we extract a theory, and once that theory is believed by enough amount of people it is regarded as truth.

The first ever mention of the system_legend tag in the VRChat Discord occurs on the 14th of June 2018, in the #french channel by Slaynash II, 3 months before the Trust system is introduced:

Au fait @Ruuubick j'aurais une question concernant l'API:
Je comprend à quoi servent les tags "system_avatar_access", "system_world_access" et "system_trust_basic", mais je ne vois pas ce que sont les tags "system_legend", "admin_avatar_access" et "admin_world_access" 🤔
(et "system_feedback_access" non plus d'ailleurs)

🇫🇷➡️🇬🇧 Translated:

By the way @Ruuubick I have a question regarding the API:
I understand what the "system_avatar_access", "system_world_access" and "system_trust_basic" tags are for, but I don't see what the "system_legend", "admin_avatar_access" and "admin_world_access" tags are: thinking:
(and "system_feedback_access" either for that matter)

Also immediately noticeable is that the tag does not follow the same pattern as the other system_trust_ tags. There are early mentions of system_legend being referred to as Legacy User, and the first ever mention of "Legendary" in the VRCAPI project was apparently made by me back in April. In that commit I used VRCX as source; and looking at the commit history of VRCX there are no mentions of when Legendary was first introduced, it simply existed since day one.

Extrapolating from the naming scheme, how system_trust_veteran is Trusted User, and system_trust_legend is Veteran User, it is logical by the 1-offset how the next rank in the hierarchy would then naturally be called Legendary User, which is the most likely source I could find.

What could system_legend then mean?

Several people made speculations that the system_legend tag was granted to people who uploaded content before the Trust System was introduced.

After lots of discussion I was ready to write this write-up with the conclusion that this is the actual meaning of the tag, until someone last-second mentioned me and told me of a Steam user who also has the system_legend tag. WHAT?!

"tags":[
    "system_legend",
    "show_social_rank",
    "system_world_access",
    "system_avatar_access",
    "system_trust_basic",
    "system_feedback_access",
    "system_trust_known",
    "system_trust_trusted",
    "system_trust_veteran",
    "system_trust_legend"
],

Even proudly boosting about it in their Bio (and rightly so!!), H3aven is a Steam account who again defies all expectations. As there has never been an option in the SDK to log in with Steam and attempting to use an Auth Token derived from a Steam Session Ticket outside of the game results in a Using a client-derived token outside of client Error, this makes it impossible for them to have uploaded content, therefore discarding that theory as well. 🗑️🚮

Chapter 3: Conclusion

Where does that bring us today?

This has been a long post, but I wanted to properly explain the history and the findings made during what was originally a small bug report but grew into a much bigger and obsessive project which has consumed several days of my time now.

We know less of this tag today than we thought we did. Its real purpose, and at what exact date people stopped receiving it is something which has yet to be researched.

The only unproven theory remaining alive is the belief that this tag can no longer be acquired, so the people who have it are the only ones who will ever have it.

Time for a change, Goodbye Legendary, Hello Legend

No matter what its real purpose is, the accounts found above once and for all disproves the old conjecture, that having "Legendary User" rank does not implicitly imply that user is also Veteran and Trusted. It is time to discard the notion of "Legendary" as a rank. The possession of this tag is seemingly detached from a user's Trust Rank and should therefore not be considered as something part of the modern Trust System.

The best current representation is that of similar status to system_early_supporter, a tag given to people who bought VRC+ in the first month of release. It is a tag seemingly given to Experienced players who were playing before the Summer of 2018 (see Update 1 at the bottom after reading this). It is not given to all accounts before this date; but given to players who were active and had done stuff in the game at point of introduction, with the exact requirements remaining unknown.

While those people might indeed be considered "Legendary" in the historic term of how long they have played, it is not something which should shadow their current Trust rank. A better name might therefore be Long-term User, OG User, Early Access User or simply Legend, and is something which best should be displayed as a separate badge similarly to VRC+.

I therefore with this Merge Request propose to partially revert my previous commit, by removing mentions of Legendary User and moving the tag from the "Trust Levels" table to the normal "Tags" table.

In reflection of this similar changes are planned to be introduced in VRCX as well and is currently under testing.

---

UPDATE 1: With an informal comment from Tupper: (emphasis mine)

It doesn't do anything and it was a rank that we originally were going to have, but changed our minds. Some people have it because they were present and logged on during the time that we were implementing the Trust Rank system.
It was a pretty small window, maybe a week.

This changes from "before summer of 2018" to rather suggesting the period was only a small window of 1 to a few weeks in the summer of 2018.

[NataIynn]

But what's the point of this if it's hidden by default in the API? Same for veterans rank. Is VRChat considering making this visible for users to see publicly without VRCX or mod clients?

[Katistic]

But what's the point of this if it's hidden by default in the API? Same for veterans rank. Is VRChat considering making this visible for users to see publicly without VRCX or mod clients?

As we aren't part of VRChat team and are entirely community based, we don't know why the VRC team do the things they do haha

[Foorack]

But what's the point of this if it's hidden by default in the API? Same for veterans rank. Is VRChat considering making this visible for users to see publicly without VRCX or mod clients?
@NataIynn

It's not hidden in the API, which is the point. All of this would be easier if they just removed it. It is hidden in the game though, which indeed arguably makes this much less important, although 3rd-party applications such as VRCX and many mods still display this information, so this was an attempt at building community-conscious.

Indeed as @Katistic also mention, we are not VRC-team. We only document what they expose, and this is one of the things they expose. We can't say for sure what they will do in the future, although Tupper has stated on Discord they are continuously working to decreasing the importance of the Trust System altogether, with the change in name plates being a good example of this.

[Foorack]

But what's the point of this
@NataIynn

This whole topic started out with VRCX displaying Legendary on-top of other Trust ranks, as if it was linear, and the problem arose when we started finding people who were only Known User or even New User yet still had the tag, which would have hidden their real role in the software.

The reason I wrote such a long and detailed post was because we knew any change no matter how small to how ranks are displayed will for sure enrage some users. Removing Veteran and Legendary completely would have caused an absolute uproar. Therefore the most logical solution would be to consider the legend tag as an "Early Access" tag, similar to the "Early Supporter" for VRC+, which is what VRCX now has implemented. (Although even that apparently made some people angry...)