Ubisoft beta-testing reputation social credit system | Hacker News Reader

Ubisoft beta-testing reputation social credit system

ubisoft.com

10 pointsnobodyCloak15 comments

I know the HN reaction on this will likely be negative, but Rainbow Six Siege has a very real toxicity problem and I don't mean "people told me I suck".

I was playing with my girlfriend and the mere action of talking got her team killed almost every other game in casual. People would get around the reverse friendly fire by taking turn killing her.

It got to a point were I actually put in the work of recording and submitting reports because it was way beyond what I would have considered acceptable, and I'm the kind of person that likes the trash talking of MW2 and the overall insanity of things like gmod.

Maybe this isn't "the" solution, but she paid for the game and she should get to play it for fun without getting an insane amount of abuse just because she makes callouts and sounds like a girl.

Wow, that's nuts. I thought DotA was bad

Please use the original title, do not editorialize.

Original title: Reputation System Beta: Reputation Standing & Fair Play Program Beta

That title is longer than the limit. The shortened title fairly reflects the contents of the article. What does your judgment say is wrong about the revised title?

The words “social” and “credit” appear nowhere in the article. I find it hard to believe those words weren’t intentionally used to evoke the sentiments of the PRC’s Social Credit System[1].

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

I kind of like this idea? There's too much toxicity in online gaming these days and yes I know it's always been around I'm old and have played online since Halo 2 but it seems like people get more tilted and angry these days than I remember.

I mainly play TFT now as I enjoy the strategy and RNG aspects of the game but even there you run into people who get mad at others for playing to win.

I usually gg at the end but half the time people will curse me out if I won or just say "ez" if they beat me.

The problem is, they are planning to hand their toxic playerbase a tool which will let them inflict actual consequences on another player, where previously they could just say mean words and get muted.

I guarantee less skilled players will have dirt-low ratings.

Are they? The page says "The reputation system tracks a variety of in-game actions that can be positive or negative, assigns a score to them, and applies effects to players' accounts".

It's not obvious to me that this involves discretionary player input at all. Like, you don't need player input to look for insults in chat, or quitting in the middle of a match, or firing on one's own team.

>The reputation system tracks a variety of in-game actions that can be positive or negative

Hope you don't do anything creative or interesting that could be misinterpreted as your not playing to win. Hope you don't go off meta too much. There is no chance they could create a system that will account for player creativity without punishing particularly creative players for it.

I think those are potentially legitimate issues, but they're very different than "bad gamer actors will use this to penalize those they don't like."

I don't play this game or know how they handle this, but in lots of games there are different player pools with different levels of competition. If you want to explore the engine and be creative, good on you, but you also should not be teamed up with people who are looking for a hardcore competitive gaming experience.

That also seems like a mostly orthogonal problem to encouraging good behavior like being nice and trying to win and discouraging antisocial behavior like insulting your fellow players or shooting your own teammates to be a troll.

How can people game this system, if it is the game capturing the metrics? This isn't users up or down voting other players

Or the reporting tool could do something like submit replays and recordings to people who are doling out the ratings. Fake reports may also lower your rating. Who knows how it works but it's better than doing nothing.

Somewhat depressing that the "how we'll actually tell if you're good or bad" is the shortest paragraph in the whole thing. And while it stresses the need for transparency, it's actually incredibly opaque and provides no details.

I understand that there's something of a challenge here to not give away details that allow people to circumvent the system, it's also very hypocritical to not just say that.

I'm basically reading this as: "We do some magic and give you a score".

Some of the actions they call out are very hard to attribute correctly, eg. disconnecting/rage quitting. During COVID and having to work from home I discovered that Spectrum drops my connection on average 3 times a day, and it takes about 5 minutes for the cable modem to detect the drop and reconnect. If I played heavily that's going to penalize me. Maybe they'd target extremes of people who drop some large percentage of games they're not winning, but in general it's hard to seriously attribute all their categories.

--- HOW YOUR STANDING IS ATTRIBUTED

The reputation system tracks a variety of in-game actions that can be positive or negative, assigns a score to them, and applies effects to players' accounts. This generates the Reputation Standing, a rating given to each person that shows how their in-game actions are perceived. The system must be understandable and trustworthy so that everyone can understand how their actions affect their Standing, and how to change it. The goal is to provide feedback to our players and to promote healthy interactions while discouraging toxicity. With this system, we seek to encourage positivity, inclusion, and engagement in the game. ---

I see no problem in penalizing you for a bad connection. Why should your teammates be penalized for your bad connection?

Disconnections might not be your fault, but playing IS your choice and you are expected to behave accordolingly.

CSGO has a similar system (https://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/the-trust-factor/) that only seems to effect matchmaking, I do feel like handing rewards to well behaved players could lead to some perverse incentives.

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