Xbox One reputation system matches trolls with trolls
Xbox One's reputation system is a brand new beast designed to group people who harass other players into a separate matchmaking layer, where they'll end up playing with others who can give as good as they get. Players who consistently get banned or reported for griefing will find themselves in games with players who do the same things, Microsoft Senior Product Manager Mike Lavin tells OXM.
"There'll be very good things that happen to people that just play their games and are good participants," Lavin says. "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."
It won't be so easy to sink a specific, innocent player's reputation score in the new system, since the calculations are taken over time, Lavin says.
"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," Lavin continues.
This tactic is similar to the Cheaters Pool in Max Payne 3, where players confirmed to have modded games or hacked saves are thrown into an online matchmaking system together, where they play only with other cheaters.
Microsoft's version – the Griefers Pool, maybe – won't impact people's friends lists, but is designed to facilitate anonymous matchmaking based on compatible reputation scores.
"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 folks," Lavin says.
