Microsoft reveals information about Xbox One's Reputation system

Microsoft will be taking the Xbox One’s Reputation system a step further. Senior Product Manager Mike Lavin has revealed plans to punish griefers and reward good gamers in an interview with OXM. Players generally considered to have bad behaviour, like griefers and trolls, will have a high-profile reputation score, which will be “just as visible” as your Gamerscore.

“You need a community of folks that aren’t screaming vulgarities every ten seconds, or the griefers or the harassers,” Lavin told OXM. “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.”

The Xbox One’s Reputation system will make it so that when someone repeatedly griefs or trolls, they will eventually be pooled in with other griefers and trolls, essentially seperating them from the more behaved players. The company will also be rewarding players who are well behaved. However, the details of how it plans to do so are still being planned out.

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Xbox One’s online systems will be much better than the 360’s

The Reputation system in the Xbox One will be a bit like the Achievement system. Your Reputation score will go up the more you behave in multiplayer games, and there will even be some community programmes that boost the reputation even further.

For bad players, “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.

“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.”

This is definitely a step in the right direction for Microsoft. Xbox Live on the Xbox 360 is well-known to be a highly undesirable place because of the high number of trolls and griefers there. This is especially noticeable in online matches of Call of Duty or Halo games.

The Xbox One is set to hit stores later this year, but India will only be seeing it in 2014.