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Xbox One Reputation System Penalizes Gamers Who Behave Badly

Posted by Soulskill on from the good-news-for-everyone's-mothers dept.

New submitter DroidJason1 writes: "Microsoft has added new 'player reputation scores' to each Xbox Live member's Gamercard. The scores are represented by icons consisting of the colors green, yellow, and red. The more hours you play fairly online without being reported as abusive by other players, the better your reputation will be. Good players are given a green color, while those that 'need work' are yellow and those that need to be avoided are red. Microsoft says, '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.' They add that the system will adjust for false reports."

19 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Bullying by ruir · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A new form of teen bullying, giving bad scores to the classmate you do not like...

    1. Re:Bullying by Swistak · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I see this point brought up every time I discuss the reputation system. There's quite a bit of game theory behind it but it can be done. And actually there are systems that implement it (LoL for example, Stack Overflow, Quora - in non-gaming world).

      When creating these systems you don't simply ban someone after one or few reports. The way most of them work are: Calculate a trust in player reporting T. New players have this set very low, later the more acurate reports were the higher the trust, addintionally usually the more reports user sends the less they "weight" (this basically makes assholes who report for "feeding" everyone with negative k/d ratio meaningless and is a reason i was never banned ;))
      Once the number of reports * trust outweight player karma (which he usually collects by small amount for each game where he's not reported, and for each accurate report he makes), then he gets banned.
      That's a bit simplified and in reality you build a neural network with feedback (that's how most of these systems are implemented), initially you hire people to "teach" a network, eliminate initial threat, and build "trust" on group of players. After you have big enough group of trusted players, they themselves are used to further train the network and detect new usefull players and ban bad ones. A lot depends on the initial training phase, but I've personally seen one Community Manager turn her community into self-moderating machine, after a year she didn't even had to do much banning herself, each message that didn't conform to standards was almost immidietly met with polite response that explained why it's inapropriate and request not to continue the topic! By users tehmselves!
      So yes, these systems do work (At least good ones), and no reports do not become your personal moderation/harrasment tool, smart people already thought of that

    2. Re:Bullying by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You mean like on reddit? Downvote people or opinions you don't like?

      You mean like on slashdot?

    3. Re:Bullying by pehrs · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Having been involved of the design of a similar system a few years back, I found this remarkably easy to handle.

      What you do is that you cluster people based on their opinions, and add a fading of old opinions. People who share good opinion about each other are in the same cluster. People who dislike each other are in different clusters. So, what happens in the end is that the "nice" people end up in a few big "nice people" clusters, and you get lots of small clusters of jerks. In the system we designed we actually provided individualised feedback to the users, as in "From the perspective of your cluster, this person has good/neutral/bad standing". In practice it didn't take long before people with good behaviour were efficiently separated from the rest.

      Giving bad score to lots of people needlessly quickly gets you kicked out of the "good people" cluster. Congratulations, you now get to play with the rest of bullies.

      Of course, this is just basic computer science and statistics...

    4. Re:Bullying by Swistak · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'd like to extend above answer a little. The systems in games like Smite and Lol actually got so good that amount of false negatives are so low that they are almost non-existent and can be handled throughly on case-by-case basis. I play Smite a lot in my free time, and I see how the system works from outside, I cannot count how many times I was thretened to be reported, and even if half of these threats were followed through I probably earened over 100 "Intentional feeding" reports by now, and I'm still playing without even one temporary ban. At the same time I've seen number of players disapear from leaderboard after I've reported them for harrasment (there was actuall harrasment, mother calling, death threats even), it didn't happen after my report, but few days later after few more matches all of haters sooner or later got permaban.

      So the reputation systems came a long long way from where they used to be, false positives are no longer big problem, the biggest issue is now reaction time (time between player starting spewin vitriol to the moment he's prevented from playing), ideally it should not be few days (as it's now in most cases), someone having bad day shouldn't mean a bad day to all person he's teamed up with

      One of the solutions might be "incremental" baning, by disabling some of the futures - which some games already do (and Microsoft is doing in this case). One of better examples is voice chat muting, I cannot recall which game id doing it. They way it works is the more people mute asshole, the more likelly he is to start muted in first place, his teammates might decide to unmute him, but there's no longer risk of "Beter not fuck up morons i need this win" welcoming you to the match.

      I'm looking forward to further advancements in these systems, as playing team games on internet is still quite annoying these days, especially since you often get matched with people who don't speak english and/or you cannot just smack for beeing an idiot like you'd if you played football together.

  2. OMG FAG LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And not to mention anyone who beats you in-game is CLEARLY cheating.

    Have you seen any alternatives to moderation/meta-moderation schemes that exclude this? It seems like the only real alternatives to actual dilligent curation (which works but is labor intensive) is either living with bullying and chilling effects ala reddit or accepting that the SNR is higher from trolls ala 4chan.

    How do you overcome this for an automated service? Is this like asking "How do you cure cancer?"

    1. Re:OMG FAG LOL by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not too worried about trolls, but I've seen plenty of abuse and accusations of cheating hurled at "skillers", in games like BF4. All to easy to hit the "report" button in frustration after the same guy headshoots you for the 6th time in a round. And the crowdsourcing effect will not work here to filter out abuse; I expect strong players to consistently attract such reports against them in online games.

      One way to counter this to some degree is to spot-check reports, and apply heavy penalties to players making false accusations. It still is a lot of work, and I doubt whether an operator could make the distinction between a rage-report and an inaccurate report made in good faith.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    2. Re:OMG FAG LOL by Sneftel · · Score: 5, Informative

      They're not basing the reputation system on reports of cheating, though. As you pointed out, it's difficult, and hopelessly subjective, to tell the difference between a really good player and a cheater, so expert oversight is necessary to interpret those flags. (The good news is, automated analytics are getting remarkably good at telling the difference. It's an arms race, of course, but not as lopsided as it once was.) Rather, this system is for tagging griefers.

      --
      The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
    3. Re:OMG FAG LOL by Frobnicator · · Score: 4, Informative

      The system is not about cheating. The system is primarily about profanity and abuse.

      They have been tinkering with it since it came out.

      Also they haven't released what specific metrics they are using, but they have already mentioned factors: account playing statistics, complaints per hour played, positive feedback messages, friend requests, negative feedback messages, "Avoid This Player" marks, gamercard mutes, gamercard blocked communications, and filed complaints and reports. Couple all of them together and you will likely see some patterns quickly. They also mention that it will have human involvement and you will not be dinged for being skilled, nor will you be dinged for people targeting you. The last two seem to imply some human involvement.

      My guess is that they start with simple statistical analysis to identify players trending downward with a steady stream of "block communications", "avoid this player", and "mute" flags. All of these are specifically mentioned on their site. After algorithmic identification, I'm guessing one of their army of community managers (real live human beings who are employed to listen to the vitriol and enforce the rules) would probably get a notice to monitor the chat when the player starts play. If they hear a profanity stream click the check box marked "profanity". If they hear taunting, harassment, or other abuse, pick the check box that corresponds. With a real live human involved they can nicely handle people who were wrongly accused.

      --
      //TODO: Think of witty sig statement
    4. Re:OMG FAG LOL by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's even simpler than that. All you need to to separate them by age. Put all the 13-years-olds on their own server (separated from the under 20s and over-20s servers).

      --
      No sig today...
    5. Re:OMG FAG LOL by DaHat · · Score: 4, Informative

      You don't care much for facts, do you?

      There was a story in a news a while back about an autistic kid who was banned because he "cheated" by loading his friend's save game to unlock stuff he couldn't access.

      Doing so violates the xbox terms of service, what exactly is your beef?

      His mother contacted Microsoft but they told her to fuck off and buy a new console.

      You forgot to mention her also going to the press to try to make it sound like Microsoft was punishing her son for being too good... though in the end, Microsoft showed her evidence of his cheating and even later admitted knowing about it.

      http://www.gameinformer.com/b/...

      --
      Help Brendan pay off his student loans
  3. Re:Obligatory.. by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    -1

    (just because I can...)

    --
    No sig today...
  4. Re:No way soar losers will abuse his... by captainpanic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Also: I get the feeling that European English speaking people swear a lot more than in the USA, and I wonder if this will be reflected in the moderation.

  5. Re:No way soar losers will abuse his... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm guessing it stems from the absence of bleeps whenever someone on TV refers to a body part or a vaguely defined swear word, Europeans just aren't that afraid of bodily functions or the full range of the language. How's that for grand sweeping generalization?

  6. Re:No way soar losers will abuse his... by korbulon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Soar losers won't give a flying fuck.

  7. It's about time... by egarland · · Score: 4, Insightful

    XBox has long been known as the most potent example of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Adding a bit of accountability for being a horrible person is overdue.

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    set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
  8. compared to forums by kevlar_rat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is fascinating. I run a website that applies a user reputation system to Usenet - a medium notorius for flame-wars (it's where the words 'troll' and 'flame' come from, after all) - so I'm aware of some of the theory, but it seems games have gone further than forums.
    The algorithm I use is much simpler, the 'trust' metric is identical to the user Karma, presuming that users who act sensibly will also moderate sensibly. It works very well and filters out >95% of flames and trolls.
    To those who ask how to stop reporting being abused, it's actually simple:
    * weight reports by the number of reports. If a user only reports one other person per thousand the reports carry more weight than if they report every other user.
    * as you said, have a 'trust' factor that weights the reports. In the case of my site, this is just their Karma score - if they get reported a lot as an arse, they are more likely to be an arse in the way they themselves report.
    * Make reporting really easy. The more data you have from legit users, the more your algorithm can work on.

    --
    Moderated Usenet
  9. Re:No way soar losers will abuse his... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Funny

    I was playing Phantasy Star years ago and chatting away, eating from crisps (potato chips in American). Someone asked me what all the noise was and I said I was masticating. The guy went ape-shit, ranting on about how children play the game and so forth. I had to call him a wanker and mute him after that.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  10. Giving "The Bully" Another Tool by EXTomar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It is all well and good to give users com controls to their com features but trying to enforce a reputation system like this is just another tool for bad guys to behave like bad guys. If a group of 4 bullies wants to make someone's day miserable, they form up and join a game and focus on one player using all tools available where a reputation system like this is just the thing they need: One player getting 4 warnings is more serious than 4 different players getting warnings from one player.

    What they and successful systems do instead is establish a "trust relation". If you are matched in a team with some complete stranger, then neither of you have "trust" and neither should do "trusted" actions with each other. If you form a party, you automatically trust them more than a stranger and access more "trusted" features. If another player is in your "friends" list and formed a party with you then you have a high level of "trust" with that player and should be allowed a lot of "trusted" features with them.

    There does need to be moderation tools and they should be as automatic as possible but "reputation" systems seem to be built upon a flawed premise that complete strangers can judge each other fairly when it turns out there is little reason to trust what either have them have to say about the other.