After many hours on High Fidelity, I can no longer recommend the platform in its current state.
If you just want to meet and talk with people, there are plenty of other choices, but to say this platform cannot do it wouldn't be accurate. If you want to dress your avatar up with stuff from the marketplace, it's flimsy, but doable while being at the mercy of content creators.
If you want to create, this is where things fall apart.
If you come from Second Life, be prepared to have your jaw drop on the lack of content protection. I don't mean that it's bad or doesn't work, but that there isn't any at all! Even simple checks to see who is requesting what is not even acknowledged, and this is with High Fidelity's own system (self hosted items are naturally screwed but that's mostly up to the owner to manage anyway). Sure, you can certify your items to prove its authenticity, but without a proper setup, there is no real way to truly enforce this. And there is zero protection for avatars (you know, your identity?), as I just once again tested after reporting this months ago.
Okay, so creating things and avatars isn’t your jam. Maybe you want the build a giant world full of whatever comes to mind. While High Fidelity’s biggest strength is the ability to self host, it’s also its greatest weakness. You have to become a server administrator over night to get your world running and if you are looking for Linux support, I hope you don’t want proper port management unless you build and launch yourself (and it your server isn’t Ubuntu, good luck). Don’t want to run your own heat generating server? You can use a partnership with High Fidelity and Digital Ocean, where they’ll manage updates for you! Now if only I didn’t go through a single day of hearing that idea failing where updates don’t work, which means you can’t access it due to protocol versions and are STILL paying for the server itself while High Fidelity futzes around trying to get it working.
All that, by the way, is ignoring the fact the vulnerability issues on the platform is outstanding. Simple things like certified and uncertified item separation is left to the winds of ignorance and have been demonstrated to be disastrous over a year ago. Today, as of writing, this is still an issue and will only continue to get worse and harder to solve until someone steps in and just fixes it (or just destroys a person’s world, whichever comes first). Their goal was to build a system where everything was based on trust, but back on planet Reality, this doesn’t work. You have to assume the script will do something it says it will and nothing else. A pill that says it will make the world be pretty colors? Better hope it doesn’t log you out instead, even if it appears certified.
That is, if you can prank someone, because the entire system is barren. The only times you see people come in large numbers is when money is involved. Possibility to win a new Vive? Avatar contests worth $10,000? Marketplace bonuses for submissions? Of course money will drag people in, but the amount that stay is low and barely noticeable. Sure, you can host a world that doesn’t show up to others and requires unique knowledge to get in, but even those numbers are low.
High Fidelity had potential, and my earlier, original review reflected it. Even without my rose tinted glasses, I could give High Fidelity some merit in its accomplishments. But after things started to decline, I was neither able to recommend nor dismiss the platform as a whole, and removed my review. With all that said, I asked myself if I would show friends and family this, and I did find myself saying I could. However, when it came to friends I know, who focus on content creation, I cannot recommend it anymore; not until the large number of exploits and content protection concerns are actually addressed.
