Seriously, stay away from Oculus. I know they currently have the most versatile/best value headset in the Quest 2, but needing to have a FB account linked to it should be a deal-breaker for anyone who doesn't already have an active FB account (and perhaps even those who do). It isn't just an auth system shared by multiple products. It's Facebook, and the ban-hammer can come down swiftly, especially if, like the author, you are just creating an account to link to your Quest. I'm also not confident, as of right now, that FB is gonna fix this in a meaningful way.

Insightful comment from the thread:

Yeah, I think part of the problem is that Facebook has never had an actual product which people pay for and expect to work. Their whole culture and set of priorities are counter to this.

I'm very excited about VR. I bought the GearVR, then the first Oculus Rift, and most recently the Quest 1.

Now, instead of buying the Quest 2 (which is unquestionably the best-value headset available today) I'm waiting for a competitor to enter the space.

Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform. If you decide to leave that platform, or if that platform decides you aren't providing enough invasive information about yourself and decides to leave you, you've got an expensive paperweight. No warning or recourse. No thank you.

Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.

As well as the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" bullshit. For every ban they should be required to issue a very specific clarification on why exactly were you banned and let you to speak to a real person.

Wow, thought I'd be one of the few struggling with this.

Bought the device with the hope that I could register an account for the first time in years, but similar to others, my account was instantly banned with no explanation other than "violating community guidelines."

One of Facebook's arguments against anti-trust accusations has been to point to the lack of consumer harm. This is fairly obvious evidence of material harm to consumers who just bought $500 paperweights.

Facebook bans accounts fairly regularly for hate speech, which pretty much means whatever they want. It seems ludicrous to me that an edgy teenager can have their headset bricked because they posted some spicy political memes.

It seems like unfortunate timing - Facebook's cracking down on fake accounts before the election right as the Quest 2 launches. I'd guess that a lot of the people signing up for Facebook just for the Quest don't follow the same patterns as a typical user, so the algorithm flags them and removes them. I'm sure they'll get reinstated once Facebook manually reviews, but it's definitely a major annoyance.

Sidenote, I got my quest 2 yesterday and from a hardware standpoint, it's blown me away coming from PSVR. Too bad the Facebook nonsense keeps it from being a must have product.

My Facebook account was banned multiple times during an 8-year period when it was 100% inactive. Each time they demanded more invasive forms of verification. First, verify a phone number. Then, upload a picture of my driver's license. Finally, I had to upload a picture of my driver's license AND a secondary photo of myself that was supposed to be taken right then for that purpose.

I will never consider using any service that requires a Facebook account, nor should anyone else.

It seems to me that the U.S. is ripe for an updating of its consumer protection laws. Particularly w.r.t. shrink-wrap license and other attempts to impose unwelcome terms that the buyer didn't know about at the time of the sale.

I imagine our existing consumer-protection laws were passed over the opposition of monied interests. If so, I wonder how close we are to having the political will do to do that again.

Today my OQ2 arrived. I created an account just for the purpose of pairing the device. I used my real credentials and a gmail email address. I got banned immediately by FB, and cannot init the device. FU FB.

I had a similar experience with Facebook and a business-related thing last summer.

The company I'm working for has a Facebook account that is more or less "broken" — managed by email addresses that no longer work for the company, unmanaged profile page, etc. I also don’t have a personal Facebook account, so I went ahead and created one and then started to clean up the mess.

Immediately my account was deactivated. I went through a process of offering a phone number and countless CAPTCHA's, which would result in my account being reactivated but then deactivated again upon the next login. Eventually I got the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" ban-hammer.

I'm sort of beyond outrage or even annoyance at this point… it's all just kind of funny and stupid. When I try to figure out a way out of this pickle, the best idea I can come up with is making a bot that logs in to Facebook, wanders around "Liking" q-anon posts, and then I'd have an account that Facebook would accept as a real human being for when I need to get actual work done with their platform.

The idea that I could have an account with hundreds of games I purchased be taken away from me without reason, or without recourse is absurd. Facebook, or really anything holding licensed content needs to be regulated.

I feel incredible dissonance about John Carmack working for Oculus and by extension, Facebook. Especially when things like this come to light.

As much as I love VR (I even backed the Oculus kickstarter at the time), I can't justify spending money developing for a system that can brick the devices of my users on a whim.

They shot themselves in the foot by having this FB account requirement.

I too have the Quest 1, absolutely love it, and would have immediately purchased the Quest 2 if FB had not gone back on their explicit promise to never require an FB account.

Someone PLEASE make a privacy-first (i.e. "NORMAL") headset with similar specs to the Quest 2 - you can charge more for all I care.

This is what scares me most about google products. If I lost my gmail account, I would be totally screwed. More surface area across google products just gives me more of a chance to get banned by some false positive somewhere, with no recourse because none of these big companies seem to care about the human. So I try to avoid google products.

There parallels with any of these giant single user account companies.

I think this business model where someone buying purchasing a physical product must register their data with manufacturer or 3rd party service and be constantly online should be made illegal. There is no business need for this apart from spying on people and gathering data to improve manipulation of messages to trick people into buying more into the manufacturer ecosystem. We need to stop this.

One change I implore Facebook/Oculus to make in light of the Facebook account requirement for these devices: Allow enabling of dev mode and APK sideloading, offline, from within the device settings without the dev account requirement. That way these devices can be more than just bricks for people who get locked out by the system.

I wonder if there are any statistics around e-waste for devices that are "bricked" due to an account lockout.

To play devil's advocate: historically, VR apps like VRChat have had an absolutely massive "4chan" problem. Harassment, bullying, vulgarity, NSFW/NSFL content, viral memes, brigading, etc. The gender disparity is also alarming (like 90%+ men!). Many feel unwelcome.

I think Facebook wants to make VR fun and appropriate for everyone. One way to do that is to tie in people's real identities. Facebook threads aren't great, but they are better than twitter threads, and A LOT better than interactions in VRChat.

And to think Facebook wants to get into cryptocurrency and payments/wallets. You'd have to be really stupid to trust them with that especially after this fine demonstration.

Many Quest buyers reporting similar problems:

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb5z4i/i_dont_under... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb86d1/facebook_del... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb701s/guys_i_reall... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb5wrs/my_facebook_... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jannlj/facebook_req... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jaq477/facebook_scr... https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/jawv6g/how_sho...

Facebook is easily the worst company in big tech, with zero regard whatsoever for privacy or consumers. I can no longer support Oculus since it requires FB authentication.

I recommend creating a separate account if you have no other options.

This seems to be an algorithmic implementation of cancel culture. Due to human nature, it can't be not buggy.

Don’t keep anything on social media you can’t lose. Assume the account can get deleted at anytime.

Maintain your own private site of family and friends pictures that you own and share around with people you care about. It’s not that hard and replicates most of the real value of a social network for most people.

Anyone know what Facebook’s benefit is from the mandatory linking? At this point pretty much anyone who wants a facebook account, has one. And the quest is niche. They don’t need it to drive facebook usage.

Is it data? If so what’s the expected value of data they’d get from quest linkage?

I had the same problem. Created new fb account, linked to Oculus, bought couple of things, got banned. Asked for review, solved within 2 working days. Not even my real name.

Good thing, it's a "soft" ban. They do not allow to log in, but if you are logged in, it's fine. So i could use my bought items even though I could not log in in browser. But if I would have logged out from Oculus, I wouldn't be able to use them.

So another example of "if this gets big, suddenly facebook will care, and it'll become quiet."

Staying away from anything facebook related.

Pardon my ignorance, what did he do wrong to provoke the ban-hammer? Is is prohibited to mix products across Facebook properties?

Best quest 2 alternatives ?

Not being able to create a burner account is a deal breaker

Sue in Small Claims Court. The Oculus terms of service permit that. Your problem will be resolved, one way or another.

Are there any alternative OS options brewing? Its mostly just an Android device. It can't be that hard to root.

I tried to do the math on the Quest 2 hardware, and they definitely cut corners to bring the cost down, but not to the point where I think they have an attractive margin. (On the $300 headset, but the accessories/storage increase definitely have a decent margin). They’ll also get some margin on software sales presumably.

That’s important because I believe the revenue generating model is entirely from data. Even if I’m wrong, it’s Facebook, so we know they’re after data for profit.

And consider the kind of data that VR is capable of collecting. It’s biometric data at its core. If you take the data involved in VR, tie it to a person under the real-name policy, and give it to some crafty software engineers, you can get some crazy intimate results.

Was looking at buying the quest 2 today and decided to wait until the weekend to see how the launch would go and then I saw this. I won't buy a quest 2 unless the account requirement is removed

I’ve absolutely stopped recommending it. I won’t link my Facebook account so will use it until it’s disabled. Looking forward to supporting their competitors. It’s a shame, I enjoy the device.

Lmao thats fucking hilarious. Facebook is one of the worst companies there is and you have to be stupid to buy anything from them

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Unpopular opinion: although I hate how oculus sold out to Facebook (possibly backstab of the decade, after the initial crowdfunding), and although I’m a strong advocate of leaving Facebook regardless of their VR BS, there’s really nothing wrong with them requiring a Facebook account to use it. I have no idea how much the manufacturing/R&D costs of Quest are, but I doubt it makes sense for Facebook to sell it this cheap without requiring users to link/create a Facebook account. Don’t expect stuff to be free/cheap for no reason.

My point is that regulating this space of tech will only lead to less innovation. There’s an extremely easy solution that every single one of us can do: don’t buy it, don’t be tempted by the cheap price Facebook is offering. I closed my Fb account ~5 years ago now (after being on it for about 10 years) and I’m very tempted to buy Quest 2, but I won’t. If enough people do this, what ever scummy plan Facebook is weaving will fail, but even if it doesn’t, you’d be out of it.

Oculus rift is Westworld for facebook

Alright, so he bought it 4 years ago. Bu in the EU you have 2 years to start an RMA if a product is not working as expected under normal use. I reckon one would be able to turn it in to their retailer to get a new Oculus.

I got so excited by the news about Quest 2, I was certain would by it, until I learned that "Quest headsets best accommodate IPDs between 56 and 70 mm, or about 95% of adults". My IPD is 74 - no luck this time.

For PC VR you can find used VIVE sets cheap, and remember that with steamVR you can mix and match hardware. The full Valve index kits are on delay but individual parts are faster.

VIVE Cosmos Valve Index HP Reverb G2

The day I read the news about Oculus requiring a FB account in the future, that sucker fell right off my shopping list. It's sad because it seems like a really solid piece of hardware.

A bit out of the loop on this, anyone know Carmack's stance on this? Seems like a huge step in the direction of what we afraid of when Fb acquired Oculus.

We now live in world where if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t like your Facebook posts, he (or some nameless flunky) will delete all your video games.

If I need to create a FB account to use an Oculus, I'm not using it. They are not the only option and I'm not bending.

I guess that old saying has now turned into "even if you are paying for it, you are still the product being sold."

I bought an oculus go for my son 2 Christmases ago - he has no Facebook, I have no Facebook - what to do what to do

Don't worry, you will get bored with your Oculus Quest after a month anyways. Me and my kids were using our Oculus a lot at the beginning, having great fun. Now it just sits there, although we could use it any time and even have a few great games on it.

Anyways, this has nothing to do with your issue. Facebook should be ashamed for treating paying customers like this.

They should contact their congress person and/or Senators.

I bought a Go years ago and recently I got a screen locking the entire device until I logged into Oculus. I selected the option to not connect my Facebook account, but continue to use my Oculus account. There was a sunset date on this option.

I've never bought anything from the Oculus store. I honestly only use VR for Skybox and movies I download to a file server.

Are there any alternative OSes for the GO? Honestly I'd rather just get off the stock OS if I just had a way to play my movies.

The only way this set of rules should be legal is if Facebook is required to refund the money for the headset if they decide to ban you.

Facebook is evil, plain and simple. They hurt societies, democracies, and individuals alike. Nothing good there. Fuck Facebook! They need to vanish, hopefully soon.

VR sucks. The end. See you in 5-10 years when its practical and enjoyable.

I don't get it. He contacted Oculus support, Oculus support asked if he had followed these 4 steps for reactivating his account, and then... what? At that point gave up and posted on Reddit to complain?

Yeah, this sucks. But mistaken account deactivations probably happen a lot - how to handle them is one of the FAQ questions on Oculus. It happened to me with my PlayStation 4 account too; someone in Germany mistakenly signed up using my email address somehow and in the resulting confusion I got locked out of my PlayStation games for a bit. It sucks but support will eventually fix it.