Xbox Introduces New Strike System To Curtail Bad Behavior (theverge.com) 73
A new strike-based enforcement program is coming to Xbox today. The system is meant to clear up confusion regarding how Xbox enforces its community standards and help players keep track of enforcement actions made on their accounts. The Verge: In an interview with The Verge, Xbox player services corporate vice president Dave McCarthy explained the new enforcement system and its place in Xbox's overall community management strategy. "This is all about player transparency," McCarthy said. "We didn't have a way to show our players what their standing was in our community. And this makes it completely clear." In the new system, if a player violates the Xbox community standards, they'll receive a strike. The severity of the violation determines the number of strikes and the length of the punishment. If a player receives a total of eight strikes, their account will be banned from using Xbox services like voice chat or multiplayer for a year. The strike program starts today with everyone on the platform getting a clean strike-less slate.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems to me that "8 strikes you're out" is a pretty good blocker against arbitrary accusations. Somebody can argue against one strike fairly reasonably... but at 8, they may have to consider that they might, in fact, be the problem.
Get fucked. (Score:1, Insightful)
There are mute buttons. Self-censor if you're too thin skinned to handle whatever you find offensive this week - the rest of us can handle it, thanks.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Generally, generally, the type of people who you have to mute due to language or behavior are not valuable members of the wider community.
Plus that person who is "getting under everyone's skin" is just generally making the whole experience worse for everyone else involved. Why should we just tolerate that? If this is wider society the 1 person out of 50 who can't live amicably with everyone else is a pariah, in the past they could be cast out because well, you live in society and there are norms we adhere
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I'll go for 8 strikes your out as soon as they add 5 more bases.
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Isn't that Blurnsball?
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As much as I agree with everything you wrote, your mother handles more sausages than a butcher.
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See that's what I am talking about, good old fashioned fun online.
People imagine that's the type of talk what catches bans when, really, it's far far more egregious.
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I also heard your Mum likes to put Five Guys [fiveguys.com] in her mouth, grab the buns, and taste the special sauce.
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Well at least my mum can afford Five Guys. Your mum so poor, burglars break in her house and leave money.
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Love it!
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all fine and dandy, right up until someone gets targeted. and there is absolutely no reason at all to think that gaming community members would want to target each other...
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I would agree, the devil is in the details, like all online moderation I think leaving things entirely up to algorithms is a bad design, at some point in the process a human with context needs to step in.
There are some basic steps that can filter out these things ahead of time, for a majority of multiplayer games there is a "match" component to it so it'd be pretty easy to say "one strike per match" so a team can't just rack up 5 strikes a time against someone.
Also there would need to be some type of strike
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The article indicates strikes "decay." It would clearly be untenable if they were permanent. There also seems to be a review systems, so hopefully false positives will be minimal, but we'll see. It's important to make sure these sorts of systems can't be weaponized. Overall, seems reasonable.
The only WTF I immediately noticed is that cheating only merited one strike, same as swearing, while hate speech got you three strikes. Seems like cheating should be at least three strikes. Why so lenient on that?
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I didn't see that but good catch. It should absolutely be the reverse, nothing corrodes a community like cheaters, especially in competitive games. I wonder if it's just due to having way less cheaters on XBox itself compared to PC, or cheating has so much more to do with the developers of the game itself versus the XBox Live services end of things?
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all fine and dandy, right up until someone gets targeted. and there is absolutely no reason at all to think that gaming community members would want to target each other...
That definitely needs to be accounted for. Pretty easy to require reports from people that actually were in a game with said person, and find what accounts are affiliated with what other accounts to identify a harassment campaign. At the end of the day a human needs to review the evidence. It's not exactly rocket surgery.
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If someone is being a gigantic arsehole, they'll drive others away from giving Microsoft money which would be bad (for Microsoft) so they're going to be the ones getting banned, presumably.
Like you, I have been gaming online for a long time, and I think we both recognize the type of person who uses terms like "Self-censor if you're too thin skinn
Re:Get fucked. (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome to a society. If you don't want to be civil, don't engage. You have a right to be every bit the prick you wish to be. The group has the right to punt you for it.
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The issue is how they handle mistakes. In the past bans from XBL have been permanent, registered against the console itself so that nobody else can use it, and impossible to appeal. Your only recourse was to return the console to the retailer and maybe do a chargeback.
I had an issue with my Nintendo Switch where they sent me a nastygram about some allegedly unkind comment. I didn't post any unkind comments, and when I complained and it was investigated they eventually decided that the comment was fine and i
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Run your own voice chat system if you want to use that policy.
It's Microsoft's system, and Microsoft can decide that my kid doesn't have to listen to your toxic bullshit if it wants to.
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That's the beauty of random matchmaking, you don't get to choose who to play with.
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Sweety, more likely than not, your kid is the one spewing the toxic bullshit.
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First, no.
Second, then they deserve what they get. My solution is not that other people should mute their audio. Is yours?
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My solution is I don't play with kids or other people who can't hear a FUCK without having a heart attack.
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So it is your solution.
Well, prepare to be a dissatisfied customer. I'll hoist a beer for your sorrows.
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I'm actually pretty satisfied.
Granted, I'm not a console customer. Maybe that's why I'm satisfied.
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But it applies to Xbox community servives (including PC games), and let's face it, if it doesn't affect you or your satisfaction, then why are you commenting at all?
Old man yelling at someone else's clouds?
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Because it does. More and more games are cross-platform and these kiddies with their aimbots (sorry, "aim assist") are muscling in.
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My solution is I don't play with kids or other people who can't resist using aimbots. To quote OP, "Self-censor if you're too thin skinned to handle whatever you find offensive this week - the rest of us can handle it, thanks."
*snark*
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My solution is I don't play with kids or other people who can't hear a FUCK without having a heart attack.
Lol, if this is what you imagine the problematic behavior is actually like, you're dreaming. You've got to ramp it up by 100x or so. Racist slurs, homophobic rants, constant insults and trolling, deliberately interfering with your own team's play. I don't know too many people who get all that upset about a random cuss word.
Do you play any online games? Without moderation of some sort, it can quickly get incredibly toxic. There are too many people who can't resist taking advantage of a no-consequence en
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I used to. I stopped for that very reason.
If you play with random strangers, you will be treated like a random stranger. No "consequences" you could come up with will change that.
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..the rest of us can handle it, thanks.
What group are you speaking for? I assume it's those folks who known deep down that they're the target.
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..the rest of us can handle it, thanks.
What group are you speaking for? I assume it's those folks who known deep down that they're the target.
Exactly, the entitled to scream at people I don't know without repercussions group.
Flipping off random people in traffic is cool until someone follows you all the way to your office, because you work together.
Re: Get fucked. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Toxic people like yourself may not have a problem with toxicity, but normal people just want to game without worrying about death threats, rape threats, slurs and harassment.
And for Microsoft, there's little money in appeasing toxic people, so they'd rather create a welcoming space for everyone to have fun.
moding 8 stikes for useing an standard NVMe SSD (Score:2)
modding 8 strikes for useing an standard NVMe SSD
Re: Ah, "Community Standards"... (Score:3)
Even the a violation could enact a variable number of strikes. So they are leaving an escape clause to ban someone after one offense if âoetheyâ, whoever âoetheyâ are, deem it offensive enough. How has anything changed at all?
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1 strike, 2 strikes, 8 or 100, this is the internet we're talking about here. All it changes is how often I have to report you and how many accounts I need to use.
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My assumption is that accounts aren't free. And I also assume that the whole process probably has a manual step pre-ban. I'll bet the signal-to-noise on this one is pretty good. Most bans will probably be earned.
If they trace all 8 bans back to a single source, and then banned all 8 of those... that might be a reasonable action. But the number of people willing to obfuscate themselves that much and spend the money is going to be vanishly small.
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This here is Pete. Pete is a Twitch streamer who makes his revenue by having his viewers vote on who gets shafted this time around. He sells that privilege for a couple bucks, so he can afford a couple dozen accounts because and enjoys, as much as his watchers, to see people lose their valuable accounts...
Sorry, but there are just way too many assholes with way too much money they'd be willingly spend on pissing in someone else's corn flakes.
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Maybe, but "somebody might abuse a rule, so there shouldn't be any rules" isn't reasonable. I don't think the scenario you describe is statistically significant.
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It's never statistically significant until you become the unfortunate statistics.
The point isn't to have no rules, the point is to think rules through before spewing them out half-assed.
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Are you advocating "the perfect rule or no rule at all"?
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No, I'm advocating thinking about implementing a rule instead of just throwing out a rule as some activist "we do something" bullshit.
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Then what does a better rule look like?
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So he can continue being a toxic asshole without consequence.
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You need two things: First, a rule that is not arbitrary (i.e. no "I know it when I see it" bullshit) but wide enough that you can't game it. Because "offensive" is like "porn". Very subjective. And since the old saying "offense is taken, not given" is actually true in the sense that what is considered offensive by one person isn't necessarily so for someone else, you need to define it well enough that it is actually possible to heed the rule. A rule you cannot heed properly is worthless. If I cannot heed a
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No, this [slashdot.org].
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So you'd develop a set of rules so detailed and specific that you also, in effect, provide a perfect blueprint for dancing in their margins. You miss the goal of the whole process, which is to tone down the bullshit, and make the community less toxic. The types of rules you are suggesting only serve to protect the jackasses. They don't improve the community experience.
This isn't a "better than 50 guilty go free than one innocent man be jailed" argument. You can lose a few innocents, no problem. Sucks to be
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We are not talking about a homogenous group of people. If I say to a friend "don't be an ass", he'll know exactly what I mean, since what "being an ass" means is pretty well defined among us, because we know each other, because we share a culture, because we share a history even.
Now, my guess would be that this is pretty much the general goal here, i.e. that people are not being asses. The key problem here is that there is no established rule what "not being an ass" actually means. And while I can already h
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Imagine living in 2020 and still believing this digital old wives tale. and the Russians used a penicl!
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The very thing the internet was designed to recognize as damage and route around.
Who decides what represents, "Community Standards"? Bear in mind that in places like Michigan, (and Virginia Beach, of all places!), swearing in public is actually illegal. Bear in mind that Republicans would like to legislate "Community Standards", and have started to do so in places like Florida.
That is flat wrong.
BBSes were moderated, email lists were moderated, IRC channels and servers were moderated. Send too much junk mail from your IP, your ISP shut you down. Say something naughty in a chat room and you got TOSed from AOL. That was the norm.
Bad behavior got you booted from any of those, no differently than standing on your table at McDonalds and swearing at the customers. The entire reason Slashdot exists, as I understand it, is because the creators wanted to get rid of dedicated moderation li
New revenue stream (Score:1)
They know who you are. You attach payment methods to your account.
So they get you banned, so you can re-buy all your games to play multiplayer again. And banning is soon to be done via your console and your headset listening to you at all times, trying to look for trigger words, something Microsoft has been pushing for since the Kinect days.
Smart. Good money to be made from pay piggies who consent to being "in the ecosystem".
Re: (Score:1)
1) It's not a permanent ban. It depends on the severity of the violation.
2) You could just be banned from voice chat, not multiplayer entirely.
3) They're previewing a system that allows other players to submit voice chat for review.
It sounds a lot like what's already in place, but they've made their rules more transparent by publishing them.
The severity of the violation determines the number of strikes and the length of the punishment. If a player receives a total of eight strikes, their account will be banned from using Xbox services like voice chat or multiplayer for a year.
Re: (Score:2)
>1) It's not a permanent ban. It depends on the severity of the violation.
Red herring. Ban is about as long as a typical console shooter release cycle.
Random gaslighter
>2) You could just be banned from voice chat, not multiplayer entirely.
vs Xbox player services corporate vice president Dave McCarthy
> If a player receives a total of eight strikes, their account will be banned from using Xbox services like voice chat or multiplayer for a year.
>3) They're previewing a system that allows other play
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So ... it's a bit like Reddit, just with AI lashing out randomly rather than mods?
Finally (Score:2)
Some incentive to break out of that corporate walled garden that is XBox services.
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Full disclosure, I don't know for sure. I am kinda wary of systems where you pay for the game, and then pay a rent for the privilege to play it.
Especially if you could essentially have the same, or rather, due to superior controls, better, experience on a PC without paying rent.
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shakey legal grounds here, consequences (Score:2)
Their system has essentially no arbitration and generally doesn't even allow a player to request a review.
Considering that these games are purchased and the service is purchased, the lack of arbitration and the eventuality of being banned from a service that is the only way to utilize a purchase is troubling. I can see banning a user that continously violates the terms of service, but because there is money involve there needs to be a transparent arbitration process. These people that complain about a cur
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Unfortunately it's the bullies's playground. There isn't really much you can do about bullies with mod menus in CoD and GTA that can just click on someone in their game session and choose to have them banned. As much as Microsoft denies such things exist, they do exist, and they are well documented with photos and screenshots all over places like Reddit.
If you ever get game invites from people you've never heard of, especially if they're repeat invites with lots of begging and pleading, just ignore them bec
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Perhaps these new rules will give these game playing LUSERS are reason to get off the sofa and go out to the real world and pursue a REAL LIFE.
Like posting to Slashdot as a Coward? I see what you did there, but I'm not sure why.
Graduated system... (Score:1)
One strike - 24hr ban.
Two strikes - 48hr ban.
Three - 1 week.
Four - Two weeks.
Five - Month.
Six - Two months.
Seven - Six months.
Eight - Year
Strikes stay on your record for six months. If you get eight strikes in a six month period - you've got some serious problems.
What's a strike?
In-game someone calls an 'audible' on someone else in an arena. Everyone else playing in that arena votes up/down (you have a few min to vote). If the majority down-vote your behavior that's a warning. Three warnings in the same
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McCarthy you must be new here (Score:3)
McCarthy, you must be new here. Don't you remember the Xbox 360 Blades? It had player 'zones' like Recreation, Pro, Family and Underground, which were displayed next to... a five star ranking of your player reputation.
https://xbox.fandom.com/wiki/G... [fandom.com]
Dedicated servers (Score:2)