Xbox Live has been an inhospitable place for over a decade. One minute you’re enjoying an amazing moment, the next you’re the butt of a dozen ‘yo mama’ jokes. As much as that’s been long considered a part of the full XBL experience, its nature could soon change if Microsoft succeeds with its proposed solution on Xbox One.
Speaking to The Official Xbox Magazine, Microsoft’s senior product manager Mike Lavin expressed the company’s desire to isolate bad-mannered players by driving reputation for each player. Those who behave respectfully will go up in rank while those who like to let off some steam will quickly fall into a bracket of similar individuals. Lavin explained it as the following:
Ultimately, if there’s a few per cent of our population that are causing the rest of the population to have a miserable time, we should be able to identify those folk… There’ll be very good things that happen to people that just play their games are good participants. And you’ll start to see some effects if you continue to play bad or harass other people en masse. You’ll probably end up starting to play more with other people that are more similar to you.
What does Microsoft classify as toxic? Here’s what Lavin said:
If we see consistently that people, for instance, don’t like playing with you, that you’re consistently blocked, that you’re the subject of enforcement actions because you’re sending naked pictures of yourself to people that don’t want naked pictures of you… Blatant things like that have the ability to quickly reduce your Reputation score.
It’ll be interesting to see what the low reputation bracket, which is sure to turn into an insane asylum of sorts, will be like. If it really is full of the more less-restrained of the XBL community then it’s sure to be a place that invokes nightmares.
