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[Poetic.Injustice]

In recent weeks, Microsoft has briefly discussed a coming overhaul of the Xbox Live reputation system on the Xbox One. The aim, the company says, is to segregate the worst griefers and antisocial players from those who know how not to be jerks.

It’s a great concept, but the devil is always in the details when you’re trying to create a largely automated system to pick out bad apples ruining an online community. With that in mind, we talked to Micheal Dunn, senior program manager of Microsoft SmartMatch, to get the details on just how the Xbox One will determine who is worthy of a bad reputation.

The Xbox 360’s matchmaking service tries to match you with people of a similar reputation, but if it can’t find any, it will still pair you up with the miscreants. “It basically said, ‘At least you’re playing with somebody,’” as Dunn put it. That won’t be how it works on Xbox One. Instead, the SmartMatch system will try to “make sure you’re playing with people you can have a conversation with... that’s where reputation comes in.”

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/microsoft-gives-a-damn-bout-your-bad-reputation-on-xbox-one/

 

[MoeB]

We'll see how much they care during execution.

 

[GregLombardi]

Whoever resolves this problem will have the largest network of gamers on the planet.

Who knows who it will be though. I thought maybe It'd be Valve, or even Blizzard. But those hopes have fallen by the wayside.

 

[Soulflarz]

Isnt this old? Like reaalyy old?
Edit: oh, more info on previous topic

 

[Sub_Level]

Isnt this old? Like reaalyy old?

The news of the reputation system surfaced early this month but the article itself is new and has some new tidbits such as specifically addressing how MS officials will try to not bag on people who are actually not dbags and other specifics like the fact that it's a 1 to 100 system.

 

[Arkos]

Whoever resolves this problem will have the largest network of gamers on the planet.

Yep. When this gets tame enough to be "normal" for people to hop on and gamechat it'll be pretty big.

Funny thing, I feel like in game communication used to be better, and then the FPS explosion really killed it, and now we have to work to make it a regular thing again

 

[scoobs]

So whats stopping the griefers, or as i call them "douchebags", from just downvoting everyone after every game and thus ruining the system

 

[jaypah]

So whats stopping the griefers, or as i call them "douchebags", from just downvoting everyone after every game and thus ruining the system

It's in the article.

 

[Arkos]

So whats stopping the griefers, or as i call them "douchebags", from just downvoting everyone after every game and thus ruining the system

If you figure that out, tell us (I'm sure that is what is supposedly advanced about their new system; they think they have a way to weed shit like that out)

Edit: or also you can ^^^^ but it's not required

 

[Pyronite]

Joan Jett! \m/

 

[Odrion]

But what about my brad reputation?

 

[Sub_Level]

So whats stopping the griefers, or as i call them "douchebags", from just downvoting everyone after every game and thus ruining the system

Complaints obviously bring a reputation down, but it takes a critical mass of issues to land a player in the “avoid me” zone. “The theme is it really takes hundreds or thousands of people across the community to affect your rep as a new player,” Dunn said. “One or two pieces of bad feedback from a week’s worth of play or something—that’s not really going to affect you very much. Everyone has an accident, everyone has a bad match, someone they didn’t get along with. But if you’re consistently, across the community, a person people say they don’t like, that’s what’s going to affect you.”

also

Not all feedback is created equal, either. Players who the system identifies as having “better judgment” will have their complaints given more weight over time, Dunn said. If a certain player consistently complains only about people who eventually end up in the “avoid me” bucket, for instance, the algorithm can be relatively sure that person’s complaints have some merit. On the flip side, players who throw around tons of complaints that are rarely corroborated by others might see their complaints counting for less.

 

[LeeFowler.CU]

I'm really going to enjoy next gen Xbox Live. Sounds great.

 

[LevityNYC]

You're living in the past it's a new generation.

 

[Arkos]

Joan Jett! m/

But what about my brad reputation?

Let's keep it srs, srs ppl. Srs is srs.

 

[Amneisac]

Yep. When this gets tame enough to be "normal" for people to hop on and gamechat it'll be pretty big.

Funny thing, I feel like in game communication used to be better, and then the FPS explosion really killed it, and now we have to work to make it a regular thing again

I was on Xbox Live the first night it went live. Playing the Moto GP demo. It was shit from day one. The only thing that got better was they removed the annoying voice filters.

 

[Arkos]

I was on Xbox Live the first night it went live. Playing the Moto GP demo. It was shit from day one. The only thing that got better was they removed the annoying voice filters.

Ehh I was able and given the opportunity to communicate a lot more in Halo 2 than since, at least me. I haven't played a custom game seriously since Halo 2, and it was pretty regular back then.

Also, it's not just console based, trolling wasn't always a thing period. Or at least not as prevalent or popular a thing.

Edit: of course it's never been exactly an ideal forum for the exchange of ideas lol, but I do feel like the recent "boom" has had a negative effect on the quality of communications (not complaining about the consoles making money though)

 

[scoobs]

It's in the article.

ya i read it but still... u know theres gonna be a bunch of immature kids on there downvoting people out of spite or out of pure boredom, and it wont just be a few itll be thousands that do it. I dont think it'll be a big deal but if this is an attempt to get a better community on xbl than im not sure it will make much of a difference

 

[Sloane_Ranger]

We'll see how much they care during execution.

Perfect.

 

[Orayn]

Complaints obviously bring a reputation down, but it takes a critical mass of issues to land a player in the “avoid me” zone. “The theme is it really takes hundreds or thousands of people across the community to affect your rep as a new player,” Dunn said. “One or two pieces of bad feedback from a week’s worth of play or something—that’s not really going to affect you very much. Everyone has an accident, everyone has a bad match, someone they didn’t get along with. But if you’re consistently, across the community, a person people say they don’t like, that’s what’s going to affect you.”

also

Not all feedback is created equal, either. Players who the system identifies as having “better judgment” will have their complaints given more weight over time, Dunn said. If a certain player consistently complains only about people who eventually end up in the “avoid me” bucket, for instance, the algorithm can be relatively sure that person’s complaints have some merit. On the flip side, players who throw around tons of complaints that are rarely corroborated by others might see their complaints counting for less.

Yeah, pretty much this. I remember another GAFer giving a rather interesting explanation of how these systems work; something about how it assumes a certain portion of the community are always unpleasant, and how you can base the system around both outgoing and incoming ratings to figure out who's "bad" and who isn't. It's a very cool combination of sociology and game theory.

ya i read it but still... u know theres gonna be a bunch of immature kids on there downvoting people out of spite or out of pure boredom, and it wont just be a few itll be thousands that do it. I dont think it'll be a big deal but if this is an attempt to get a better community on xbl than im not sure it will make much of a difference

It's not just based on how many downvotes you get.

 

[jaypah]

ya i read it but still... u know theres gonna be a bunch of immature kids on there downvoting people out of spite or out of pure boredom, and it wont just be a few itll be thousands that do it. I dont think it'll be a big deal but if this is an attempt to get a better community on xbl than im not sure it will make much of a difference

That won't matter. If a bunch of punk kids downvote random people it'll look to see if others have downvoted the same people over time. If not then your rep stays high.

 

[Latvian Hitman]

Might work well in games like COD that have hundreds of thousands of players on at a given time, but what about less popular MP games like Halo? If I'm in a playlist with 400 people in it, most of which are already in games when I start my search, "reputation matching" is likely going to result in me sitting and waiting a lot longer to match up with other players.

 

[RuinerEraser]

I approve this effort. That being said, gaming is rarely if ever a serious thing and people being idiots can sometimes break up the everyday thing with some comedy I also don't mind that.

My dreams of turning pro gamer died with my dreams of being a pro skater and an astronaut.

 

[flyinpiranha]

I was on Xbox Live the first night it went live. Playing the Moto GP demo. It was shit from day one. The only thing that got better was they removed the annoying voice filters.

Meh, I was playing Crimson Skies, PGR2, and MechAssault (and others) and it was great in the OG Xbox days, you still had some shit to deal with, but it got worse over time (like any growing community IMO).

Same with WoW, in the beginning it was easy enough to /ignore ____ a few players and BAM your chatlog was clear, but then it got worse and worse because of the "me too's" that plague those communities.

I'm all for a fix, going on Live got tiresome and for the most part ANY gaming community did because there is almost absolutely no recourse. But you throw a ton of idiots yelling at each other into the same room while others play elsewhere? I like that. It will definitely take some time to filter through though.

 

[The Crimson Kid]

This sounds an awful lot like the wonderful set of ideas when they were launching it on 360. Unfortunately the way it was implemented on 360 ensured that it meant jack squat.

Everyone on XBL has a 5-star rep except for brand new members and I have often been rematched with players I submitted negative feedback on to avoid. I have found that neither of these features have had any impact on online play due to the thresholds that govern them. It is way too easy to get 5-star rep and much too difficult to get that rep to drop. This renders the reputation system effectively useless.

It seems like the thresholds for what constitutes enough negative feedback to have any negative effect on a griefer's profile is far too high to affect most people that create negative online experiences.

Seeing this article say that hundreds or thousands of pieces of feedback need to be submitted before action is taken is concerning because that negative player will impact the experiences of far more players than will submit feedback, so this negative player will impact thousands of experiences before any kind of action is taken. I've found that plenty of negative players don't really play all that often, so based on what they've said so far, those players wouldn't get caught for years if ever.

It's a tough problem to solve for sure, but it seems so far from what they have said that this system will be any more effective than the current system. It seems like they will be able to deal with the worst of the worst effectively enough, but that also happens on XBL now as well as PSN and Steam.

 

[LiveFromKyoto]

So whats stopping the griefers, or as i call them "douchebags", from just downvoting everyone after every game and thus ruining the system

The stars are just for show. It's going to match everyone with their NSA profile on the backend. Everything's going to be fine.

 

[dan2026]

Oh Microsoft

 

[NullPointer]

I'd like to see how this actually works in practice.

I remember the whole Gamer Zone thing being talked about just as much before the 360 came out. Look how well that turned out.

But like their previous ideas, it sounds good in theory. Here's hoping they actually get it working and continue to optimize it.

 

[GrotesqueBeauty]

My quest to truly understand my own nature has been an arduous lifetime endeavor fraught with false starts and ever deepening mystery. Thank God Microsoft is working on an algorithm that will finally figure out who I really am!

 

[wildfire]

If you ruin your reputation and then scrap your Xbox Live account and try to start over on the same device, for instance, “we can start noticing those kinds of things, and those are the kind of people who are going to start with a low number,” Dunn said.

Predictable fail safe when you have an account system. Hopefully more companies outside of Xbox One's account infrastructure implement this in their own.

The more matches someone goes through without drawing a negative report from another player (or from the game itself—see sidebar), the more that player’s reputation will rise.

This addresses a complaint someone had about a similar idea I proposed today. Allowing your score to recover over time based on multiplayer games you play is a decent idea. The only thing I would consider is having this only apply to people who randomly grouped up in matchmaking. Premade groups are established friendships or affiliations and they shouldn't have an influence on a system meant for chance encounters.

Complaints obviously bring a reputation down, but it takes a critical mass of issues to land a player in the “avoid me” zone.

I want to expand on this train of thought further and talk about the abuse issue some people talk about with clans and forums targeted people for laughs. If you take premade players out of the equation this doesn't become a problem. Your ability to randomly find the same person to abuse for laughs is improbable.

The only time it's remotely practical is during off hours and the random targets play a bunch of games in the fraction of time it normally takes to play.

Don’t worry about an arch enemy griefer, or even a group of the same, flooding you with hundreds of reputation-ruining complaints, either. “If it’s just the same people over and over complaining, we’ll take that feedback, but we’ll err on the side of safety,“

Well they are doing it differently and the only decent reason I think that could allow them to do that are the really big clans that are 1,000+ members strong. Even if they can't target individual people they can organize themselves to leave negative feedback for everyone during a certain time zone and see if that brings those people's average down. I think it's unrealistic scenario because I can't imagine the largest entities being nothing but assholes but I could be wrong.

Not all feedback is created equal, either. Players who the system identifies as having “better judgment” will have their complaints given more weight over time, Dunn said. If a certain player consistently complains only about people who eventually end up in the “avoid me” bucket, for instance, the algorithm can be relatively sure that person’s complaints have some merit. On the flip side, players who throw around tons of complaints that are rarely corroborated by others might see their complaints counting for less.

Excellent.

You can eventually work your way back into the general population, but only by playing through a lot of matches without drawing a legitimate complaint.

I have a problem with this because eventually the overwhelming majority of players will be the fuckwads. Since anyone labelled as "Avoid Me" can only play with people with the scarlet label you will have period of times where people trying to redeem themselves will be stuck for much longer than intended because the other fuckwads are reporting them. They won't be able to escape until the population reaches a critical mass of redeemers in the "Avoid Me" concentration camp.

 

[wildfire]

Seeing this article say that hundreds or thousands of pieces of feedback need to be submitted before action is taken is concerning because that negative player will impact the experiences of far more players than will submit feedback, so this negative player will impact thousands of experiences before any kind of action is taken. I've found that plenty of negative players don't really play all that often, so based on what they've said so far, those players wouldn't get caught for years if ever.

It's a tough problem to solve for sure, but it seems so far from what they have said that this system will be any more effective than the current system. It seems like they will be able to deal with the worst of the worst effectively enough, but that also happens on XBL now as well as PSN and Steam.

Yeah the thousands part was ridiculous. That may make sense in a game with a pop over 500k but for smaller online communities there needs to be a sliding scale of what's a good percentage.

Let's for every 100,000 unique accounts 100 reports are acceptable.

 

[Diablohead]

One time I won a race in PGR3 online, a guy screamed at me and gave me bad rep lol

 

[sixteen-bit]

One time I won a race in PGR3 online, a guy screamed at me and gave me bad rep lol

Beat anyone in a fighting game and watch your rep score fucking tank.

 

[Persona7]

One time I won a race in PGR3 online, a guy screamed at me and gave me bad rep lol

Same here except it was multiple people. They gave me bad feedback on "quit early" and one for foul language or something like that. I was hoping they would wipe the slate for the new xbox but I guess not.

 

[Dio]

Yeah the thousands part was ridiculous. That may make sense in a game with a pop over 500k but for smaller online communities there needs to be a sliding scale of what's a good percentage.

Let's for every 100,000 unique accounts 100 reports are acceptable.

I suppose it depends. I have never griefed before and apparently a lot of people on XBLA were mad about me and how I played? Maybe it was because I goofed off a lot in SSF4 and got hate mail from Ken players.

 

[op_ivy]

hope it works as they say, but i'm not holding my breath. i have a terrible reputation on live, mostly for foul language, which is hilarious sense i never game with a mic. people are sore losers if you do better then them in competitive games.

 

[Chuggernaut]

Might work well in games like COD that have hundreds of thousands of players on at a given time, but what about less popular MP games like Halo? If I'm in a playlist with 400 people in it, most of which are already in games when I start my search, "reputation matching" is likely going to result in me sitting and waiting a lot longer to match up with other players.

I think this answers your question. "balance between forced reputational compatibility and matchmaking flexibility, offering different modes for players who care more or less about having a precise reputation match"

In reading the article it sounds like there will only be a certain that will be "avoid me". As if someone's a super asshole, but because there are too many amazingly super assholes, they just "need work".

 

[farisr]

Oh great, glad that I decided to abandon multiplayer on xbox live.

I don't want to get matched up with the legitimately immature idiots, because some other immature idiots can't stand losing and gave me bad rep as a result.

 

[Amir0x]

Oh great, glad that I decided to abandon multiplayer on xbox live.

I don't want to get matched up with the legitimately immature idiots, because some other immature idiots can't stand losing and gave me bad rep as a result.

According to the article, it would take hundreds or thousands of immature idiots reporting you before that happened.

 

[model13]

The stars are just for show. It's going to match everyone with their NSA profile on the backend. Everything's going to be fine.

Finally a great reason to include Kinect in every box!

 

[Miles X]

So whats stopping the griefers, or as i call them "douchebags", from just downvoting everyone after every game and thus ruining the system

My current reputation for trash talking on Xbox Live is 66%, I barely play multiplayer and when I do, I don't use a headset, and when I do, I never trashtalk.

 

[xenist]

According to the article, it would take hundreds or thousands of immature idiots reporting you before that happened.

I foresee a fun new hobby for 4chan.

 

[milsorgen]

the SmartMatch system will try to “make sure you’re playing with people you can have a conversation with... that’s where reputation comes in.”

I don't know man, I don't play games to chat with people. I find it infinitely distracting even among good friends, PTFO or get out is the way I see it.


I can't be the only one who feels this way.

 

[Treemonkeys]

According to the article, it would take hundreds or thousands of immature idiots reporting you before that happened.

So it also takes hundreds of thousands of people reporting legitimate assholes, that isn't going to work.

 

[farisr]

According to the article, it would take hundreds or thousands of immature idiots reporting you before that happened.

Suppose it could still be a problem for exceptionally good players with games like Street Fighter. I'm not even exceptionally, or even average good and I still got a good amount of bad rep from players who lost to me (no mic, no trash talk messages after match, no turtling, no throwing, no taunts, no "annoying" character like Blanka or Dan, and still)

Anyways, still not gonna effect me. Decided my money was better spent on PS+.

 

[op_ivy]

So it also takes hundreds of thousands of people reporting legitimate assholes, that isn't going to work.

hundreds OR thousands... but yeah, that still may be too many

 

[Dongs Macabre]

People are just going to give bad rep to everyone they see. I have, like, 66% bad rep on Xbox Live.

Also, how do the stars on your profile work, anyway? I have 66% bad rep, but 5 stars.

 

[GillianSeed79]

Don't people abuse the reputation system? In a perfect world it would be used to weed out the annoying, obnoxious, racist people on Live, but most of the time I see people giving people bad reputations simply if they lose in an online match.

 

[Trogdor1123]

Im waiting to see how this is abused and more so how it gets monitized.

 

[Marvel]

I'm 89% avoided... I have no mic and I never talk trash be it with one or text messages. This system is flawed on 360 and will be even worse with the new X1 matchmaking.

Jealous idiots ruin it for others.