There are a lot of new features that have been discussed with both of the next-generation consoles – Sony’s PS4 and Xbox One from Microsoft – that have grabbed our attention in the recent months. While we have missed out on a few in the process, there’s something new that’s set to arrive with Xbox One.
As reported, Microsoft’s next generation Xbox One is set to utilize the new reputation system for online play. The new feature also marks a complete overhaul of Xbox Live, setting it up for the next-gen future.
The idea here is simple. The previous Xbox 360's simple five-star rating system will be upgraded to an advanced learning curve which will track malicious players with behavioral issues and effectively create a similar community, where all these likeminded players will meet up (and probably abuse each other to oblivion), and safeguarding the ones who just enjoy playing, keeping all the rotten eggs in one basket, and the good ones separate.
OXM recently scripted down the Microsoft’s senior product manager Mike Lavin’s entire speech discussing how the new reputation system will work out in the future. Lavin stated that the key aim here is to see that players don’t get matched with someone who has a long running history of being rude to other players.
“There's a lot of folks, a lot of our core consumers who just want to basically kick back and stay in touch with some of their old college buddies," Lavin stated. "That's cool, and Party Chat today and our Party system is leaps and bounds ahead of competitors, from the standpoint of just being able to isolate yourself and cross-game chat.”
“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.” It’s just that Microsoft wants everybody to communicate with other, 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.”
Lavin added that while the company is looking ahead to create a very robust system around reputation and match-making, it doesn’t mean that the company will also start removing players from a certain user’s friends list. It’s just that Microsoft is trying to make “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.”
With similar reputations taken into account, the matchmaking system from Microsoft will make sure good things happen to people who just come over to play their titles. “And you’ll start to see some effects if you continue to play bad or, or harass other people en masse. You’ll probably end up starting to play more with other people that are more similar to you.”
As far as malicious players being able to reduce someone else’s reputation on purpose is concerned, Lavin said: “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.”
The Xbox One is currently set for a fall 2013 release.