Don't get rid of Fallback Avatars in favor of Imposters | Voters

Don't get rid of Fallback Avatars in favor of Imposters

ThePiedRat

Please don't do that. Imposters are nice, but a lot of us enjoy having the novelty of creating nicer, more professional looking avatars. A lot of us have already spent hours of time making them.

If anything, make it a VRC+ feature, to allow users to upload their own custom "imposter" avatars, aka fallbacks, within performance limitations.

June 2, 2025

KirianVR

I'll add my two cents :
I understand adding impostors for avatars / users that do not have a fallback set. However I don't think there is any reason to get rid of fallbacks.
Fallbacks are already forced to be really optimized and most users that go the extra mile to make/set one would much rather having a complete avatar than a pixelated preview.
At the very least keep the option to let us choose or share the reasoning behind the deprecation of fallbacks. It would be a shame to end up with instances full of pixelated mess rather than minimalist but good looking avatars.

ZidaneTOrnitier

Imposters are absolutely awful, in my opinion as someone who has issues with low resolution things causing eye strain.
Additionally, there are several things an imposter NEEDS before I will EVER consider them good:
Moving fingers, primarily for those who use sign language as the only way to communicate.
Items that are set up as toggles need to have their default states recognized, that way someone doesn't have a maid outfit over top an evening dress and a workout outfit, as well as holding a sword and taking everyone out with it.
Animations need to be recognized, for instances where an FBX like a tail or pair of wings is extended to the fullest inside the Unity editor, but when in game has an animation that makes it so you AREN'T taking out anyone within a 9ft radius every time you turn around.
Physbones/IK need to be included, especially for those like me who like using naga and taur avatars and don't want to take out people every time we turn.
Drop the blocky, pixelated look and instead opt for a heavily texture crunched version, so that people who are particularly susceptible to eye strain, like me, don't have to turn people's otherwise non-eye strain inducing avatars OFF 'cause the imposters are so PHYSICALLY painful to look at.
If you read the above and went "That defeats the purpose of an imposter!", then that's EXACTLY WHY I want FALLBACKS back & imposters to be banished.
I am an avatar creator. My livelihood REQUIRES me to get avatar commissions. If someone CANNOT see my all platform compatible avatars for reasons I am unaware of, and they're interested in a commission, there's a non-zero chance that someone who knows ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about what an imposter means outside of Among Us will take one look at my imposter, go "That avatar is hot garbage, I don't want whatever that person could make me," and just pass on getting a commission from me, meaning I miss out on a potential sale from my stores or a commissioner.
I want imposters gone as of yesterday.
And if anyone says they hate imposters, I'm gonna tell them that that's good, & that they should go yell at VRC staff to bring back fallbacks.
~ Someone angry who made a texture set designed for fallbacks, only to get no sales due to the removal of fallbacks.

Zaxtylol_mk

nah

Ravioli_

yea i dont wanna see this gone too

AWBO

I would genuinely prefer to be a grey robot instead of an imposter. I spent so long making my avatars fallback compatible and have always disabled imposters for everyone. I personally have entirely turned off imposters as I don’t like how they look, and specifically prefer custom fallbacks.

橘花【きつか】

Make imposters work correctly first, deprecate fallbacks later.

maleus

I've personally not had very good experience with imposters, with poor animation quality, missing expressions etc. I would much rather a more traditional LOD system (maybe add the option to auto generate a decimated mesh with low texture resolution etc during the upload process?)

ZidaneTOrnitier

This is actually a good solution, and I'm surprised that that wasn't the first solution instead of the hot garbage we have now.

Salty Tangerine

Not even touching on the subject of non-humanoid body plans, humanoids with wings, etc... 
Even the best impostors look aesthetically awful
 by any measure, rarely reflect the avatar they're mimicking accurately (if they're recognizable at all), and update their motions/angles at a completely different framerate than anything else around them. They look completely out of place in any context, and if preserving immersion is a goal of any priority to the VRChat team, Impostors will only take you further away from this goal.
Fallbacks have none of these problems. 
People using a VRChat default avatar as a fallback are at least using something that has been curated by actual humans who looked at those avatars and said "yes, this fits the VRChat aesthetic", and people who put forth the effort to upload their own custom fallback are (presumably) also actual humans who at least have a sense of "well at least this doesn't look too bad I guess". 
In terms of immersion, fallbacks, regardless of the context in which they are viewed, are still rendered, appear, and move like any other game object in VRChat. The janky appearance and motion of impostors makes them immediately stand out as not-belonging because how they appear and move are completely at odds with everything else around them.
Fallback avatars don't fail at reflecting the user's current avatar because they aren't obligated to; they are, at the very least, intentionally-chosen, separate representations of the user that they have looked at and said "yes, I am okay with this being how people see me". At most, they're a carefully-crafted alternate representation of the user that is just as important to them as their main avatar(s). 
But if you need to justify development hours to the bean-counters, consider instead giving them an entire category on the Marketplace and not just potentially increase revenue, but also increase adoption of the fallback feature itself by making it more accessible to the users of VRChat.
The over-arching reason that Fallback Avatars are something to continue to develop and support going forward is simple. They are a user-experience-focused feature that reinforces one of VRChat's central pillars: the user's ability to choose their own appearance. Avatar Impostors, as a feature, only focus on the avatars they are trying to mimic and not
 the user they should be trying to represent... and this is why it just isn't suited to replace Fallback Avatars at this time.

Butterball Moo

Leaving a comment to agree! For the sake of avatars that don't have humanoid body plans, whether they're whimsical or just straight up realistic animals, please don't get rid of fallback avatars! don't subject others to broken impostors of those avatars!

Pythania

I and many of my friends use avatars that don't follow humanoid body plans. The impostor system does not play nicely with this.

→