Exploring

My entry point: pretty much just opening my Worlds menu as a first-time player!

One of my earliest ways I sought after exploration-motivated players was to tail posts I ran into online that called for “adventurers” to join them... At this point it's led into several branches and continues to baffle me!

• First, there’s a group led by a filmmaker-type that seems to maybe somewhat overlap the Avatar PvP domain, maybe just be about world exploring, and/or maybe have a focus on more JRPG-system creations like Luxerion World?... Could possibly be that the flexibility is a choice made deliberately to deflate what might incite drama in other more standardized communities.

• However, trying to follow other groups that don’t come from that angle seems to suggest they do things differently, e.g. potentially focusing on exchanging merit badges for achievements?

• The first group’s filmmaker leader fella also alluded to at least one other EN group as well as a possible group over on the JP community side of things they’d term “an adventuring group.”

• I think my personal need for curious closure is working against me to a comedic degree here…

Kadaflix & xChill: weird out-of-body train in shiny land, scaling Cave Story’s great “Outer Wall” climb

ORB: amazing to see the lengths to which a shitpost can become its own event and fan following. Also made me realize VRChat is a lot bigger on the inside than outside when it comes to its six degrees of separation: we went to a fancy wall walking world called The Sphere and I was amused at the long time players who didn't get anything out of the name whereas I saw it and immediately was sweating having seen CyanLaser all up and down the tech side of VRC by that point... crazy was going to result, and, yes. 🙂 Shockingly it might still not have been the craziest world that night, albeit by a thin margin! Because [this one] was truly something else.

Had recent need to collect big categories like that Safari server's image above: Google spreadsheet result.

Creating an ever-WIP personal hubworld to catalog some important memories

Joining the Explore VRChat community

Creating a tour to show Discord friends why someone might fall so deeply into VRChat

Helping lead a "guild" that explores "adventure worlds" (anything too long for a typical worldhop!)

Focused exploration on puzzle worlds, possible blog angle of the different vibes you get from involving others vs. soloing them + experiences with successive generations of hint-givers adjusting how cryptic they are

I'm generally breaking up my worldhopping into things I encountered through gatherings, cozy hangouts, and game activities. Then I have this for what I encounter by myself with a corresponding backlog!

I've found that I like to hop avatar worlds primarily when I can show up to an event with a themed avatar, and sometimes it's fun to find an on-theme world or worlds for say a watch party to worldhop to afterwards!

But it's also recently been a fun way to engage with avatar worlds by finding those that indicate a community of their users to learn more about, e.g. your Booth avatars (with their subsets like Rusks, Rindos, Kons), furry avatars (e.g. these, or JP-style kemono ones) Hoppou avatars -- I've seen some creators even have meetups for users of their avatars!

Worldhopping methods I like: offering to worldhop for hangers-on after an event has wrapped up and we're all just standing around, or setting up a Group instance as another event lets out (latter works best if you're in a Group whose community you've all friended each other, as can help them then see you in their sidebar's Friend Locations). Sometimes the latter can be further aided by broadcasting you've set up a Group instance as you're going worldhopping, too!