There are a lot of people on Xbox Live. Some of them are cool and do incredible things. Others are jerks who ruin the multiplayer experience for everybody else. New changes coming this month to Microsoft’s online service will soon be doling out penalties and rewards to the trolls or decent people you’re playing with.
A post by Xbox Live Program Manager Micheal Dunn details the incoming consequences of the Reputation system, which will incorporate player feedback about the people they meet in online sessions:
The more hours you play fairly online without being reported as abusive by other players, the better your reputation will be. The algorithm looks to identify players that are repeatedly disruptive across the community on Xbox Live. The vast majority of players do not regularly receive feedback from other players and, thus, will stay at the “Good Player” reputation level.
“Good Players” — The majority of gamers will fall into this level. As we’ve said before, we have plans to introduce rewards for good behaviour and look forward to sharing more in the future!
Warnings for “Needs Work” — Beginning this month, some players will start receiving reputation warnings as their reputations drop due to feedback from the community. The purpose of these communications is to remind players about their effect on the community and encourage them to have more positive interactions. These warnings are based on community feedback collected since Xbox One launched.
Penalties for “Avoid Me” — If players do not heed warnings and continue to have a negative impact on other players and the Xbox Live community, they will begin to experience penalties. For example, people with an “Avoid Me” rating will have reduced matchmaking pairings and may be unable to use certain privileges such as Twitch broadcasting.
That last bit about getting de-prioritised in matchmaking and suspension of broadcasting privileges sounds like just kinds of punishment that will hit online jerks where they live.
Comments
15 responses to “Xbox Live Prepares To Warn And Punish Players With Bad Reputations”
Once this is implemented, Xbox support will have 10x more amount of calls from jerks that complain that they are restricted from matchmaking.
Or from people who arnt that bad of players in the sence they arnt rude. but they are bad players in the fact they suck. Currently on XBL on the 360 when avoiding people it reduces the chance youll get paired up with people. and since we know alot of people suck at games i avoid them to hopefully not get them on my team again.. hence the AVOID. im not avoiding them because they are rude.. im avoiding them because they suck. (an yes i know im not a very great player my self which is why i know they suck)
Ok but what’s to stop the troll clan from spamming reports about someone who isn’t being abusive?
They have mentioned that reports are weighted based on actual match time playing with you.
So a report from a bunch of people who haven’t played with you won’t weigh as much as a report from someone who has recently played a 15minute match with you.
Not perfect but a step in the right direction.
That’s still in the same boat. The reason trolls do that sort of thing is because you often kicked their ass in a match.
At least they specifically say that a handful of false positives won’t really alter your rep so the kind of people who’ve reported me for trash talking despite the fact I don’t have a microphone plugged in won’t screw things up for everyone.
The real issue though is the fact that people tend to ignore the arseholes rather than report them
Yeah. I mute early and forget about them by the time the match is over. I’d actually find filing reports more disruptive to my gaming session than any level of trash talk. One is irritating while the other involves actually stopping the game.
Also since parties were introduced this stuff has really dropped off. Even the jerks are off in their own party chat.
+1. Mute early or party chat ftw. Simple and doesnt step on anyones toes.
Agree
Jerk players will also abuse the system to get Good players downvoted. You don’t even need to look beyond Kotaku for evidence of that.
Must resist urge to downvote this comment as a joke…
Down voted both your comments cause I’m sick of your abuse.
But seriously, it is concerning that it will be that easy to affect someone’s reputation. I’d suggest (or hope they already have in place) an algorithm that assigns less value to a complaint from someone who already has a low reputation, and perhaps gives more weight to gamers who continually report trolls who already have a wide range of complaints against them. Perhaps this system is already in place, and they’re just keeping it under the radar to avoid people attempting to game the system
What would be both good and easy to do is a basic tracking system for device attachment and messaging. False reports of trash talk could very easily eliminated by a check to see if a mic is plugged in and if there was any messages between the reporting and reported accounts within say an hour of the report.
The system knows when a mic is attached since the icon shows up, it’s hardly a privacy violation to tell the server if it’s on or not since it’s already got to know for communication and an automated check for the existence messages doesn’t have to read the content. If there’s no mic connection and no messages, the report could be safely ignored. If someone went to extensive lengths to find details to contact outside XBlive, that’s escalated to harassment and is a different process entirely.
When I played SF4 on my 360, I got repeatedly down-repped for having Australian latency. This will work a treat.
This is why I go to Xbox LANs….
Yeah I can see a team loosing a game and down voting the victors just to be dicks.
Was getting reported for trash talk in Halo 3 and Reach and i don’t own a mic on 360 lol or a Kinect. Still have 70% trash talk to this day lol still there on Xbox one……. still don’t own a Kinect or use a mic. so yeah all these false reports are a joke and the people calling Xbox support about matchmaking will not be jerks or shit players it will be good players who have been reported for no reason.