Like to Grief People on Xbox Live? Well not with the Xbox One

Microsoft is changing the way people are matched up socially in Xbox Live. Currently the reputation system on Xbox Live consist of just a five star rating that really no one pays attention to. This system will become of a thing of the past when the Microsoft Xbox One launches later this year. The goal of the overhauled Xbox Live reputation system is to separate out the griefers and anti-social from the people that just want to play and be relaxed, so basically if you like calling people out you are going to get pooled with the same kind of people depending on your social reputation in Xbox Live.

How will Xbox Live do this?

The just of how the new system will work is going to be an upside down pyramid like the one below and three categories. You will have good behavior players, needs improvment, and he lower rung of avoid me.

Mark Lavin, senior product manager for Microsoft, had to say this in an interview with OXM.

But the problem we see is that this fragments voice communication within games. It’s very difficult, because if you’re isolated in Party Chat, you’re leaving everybody else behind.” Microsoft wants everybody to communicate, ideally, and “in order to do that, you need a community of folks that aren’t screaming vulgarities every ten seconds, or the griefers or the harassers, those types of folks.

“What we’re looking at doing is creating a very robust system around reputation and match-making,” he continued. “If people are in your friends list, we’re not touching that, we’re just making it easier for you to come together. It’s really the anonymous side of things where we’re making these investments. 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.

I can see some people being mad about this since it could be construed as something else but it sounds like a good idea. They stated multiple times that people in a party will not be affected by this to play with their friends although it would be interesting to see a “good” player and an “avoid me” player in the same party and see who they get matched up against. Mark Lavin also went on to talk about how if you have friends like mine and they like to mess with your reputation for the fun of it then it will not adversely affect you. Your reputation on Xbox Live will be determined over a period of time so it won’t be an automatic thing, only if it is consistently.

Let’s just be clear, there is no way at all that a conglomerate of people can conspire to sink your Reputation on the system. The way that it’s built fundamentally stops that. It’s very much over a period of time – 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.

So if you haven’t come to this conclusion, Microsoft is basically trying to make Xbox Live a friendly place for those casual gamers.  One website’s analogy of getting reputation up is, “Players will be able to increase their reputation on Xbox One by going for long stretches without negative reports from other players, similar to the more hours you drive without an accident, the better your driving record and insurance rates will be.” Microsoft still have a few issues to work out on Xbox Live reputation system before the Xbox One actually launches but overall its a done deal. If you like to use foul language, call people out, or overall be a griefer on Xbox Live then your reputation will reflect that assuming the community actually does their job and reports individual players as such or as good. I personally only reported people on the current system if they did something really dumb like my own teammates killing me for no reason.

Let us know what you think about the new system!
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