Xbox’s new “8 strikes” mod rollout judges hate speech 3x worse than cheating | Hacker News Reader

Xbox’s new “8 strikes” mod rollout judges hate speech 3x worse than cheating

arstechnica.com

47 pointsPaulHoule123 comments

I don’t know who is consulting for these companies but these new reputation systems are almost universally bad.

Another example of this stuff failing: League of Legends, where your teammate will be instantly chat restricted and eventually permanently banned if they repeatedly type “midget” into the chat. Meanwhile, another teammate could be feeding/intentionally losing and no action will be taken.

These sort of punitive measures on non-gameplay related problems do little if anything to correct disruptive behaviour.

Especially when the response from Riot’s support team when you get banned for disruptive behaviour is to simply create a new account and carry on.(????)

I continue to be impressed by community policing (Steam’s Overwatch, Twitter’s community notes) and I wish we could see more of that being implemented in games to curb disruptive behaviour.

I think its easy to see how using an offensive term in a text chat might be easier to detect than someone intentionally loosing? How do you prove someone is intentionally losing? People got mad at me and accused me of doing that when I first tried Dota. It's part of why I didn't play again

I like the good ol games that you played with lan parties, with friends sitting next or across you. We could shit talk and give compliments for all sorts of stuff. And we'd have snackage and was an awesome party.

When's the last game that had a self-hosted server, instead of some company-run (until they don't) server, with some shitty bolted on gambling or hats system?

I want my old Internet and gaming back. Where we ended up is isolating and terrible.

Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, Valheim, Raft, etc. The list is long.

Minecraft really doesn't count because apparently even local/LAN play is Microsoft Safe (TM).

> When's the last game that had a self-hosted server, instead of some company-run (until they don't) server, with some shitty bolted on gambling or hats system?

My best guess is sometime in the last month. Games are made pretty frequently.

You could play quake based games like openarena or xonotic.

I miss the days when servers were run by enthusiasts and the community was responsible for dispensing justice.

What a pathetic place we've come to. Glad I don't game anymore. We are so obsessed with "protecting" people that we've arrived full stop at games we don't own, and servers we don't control.

Hats off to the AAA's. They won the war.

So when I started playing PlayerUnknown's battlegrounds, you started in a lobby, everyone is there and can talk. Almost every time someone would be yelling "Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" endlessly.

It was really nice when the game developer took action to get rid of that. I'm not sure I understand your view that this is a bad thing. There are still games with player run servers that can manage things on their own, but some games, like pubg, can't function that way.

Are you just an awful person that is mad you don't get to be awful any more?

> Are you just an awful person that is mad you don't get to be awful any more?

Since you're being snarky and completely missed my point I'll join you. Are you fundamentally incapable of using a mute button?

Would you rather go to a place with no mosquitos, or go to a place where you're swarmed by mosquitos and have to swat them away?

Would you rather have no pimples, or get constant pimples and have to apply cream to heal them?

Would you rather encounter no people yelling racial slurs, or encounter it every time you game and have to endless mute offenders?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

It's worth reading the first part of the post again. The second part isn't actually meant to be a sensible reply, as far as I can see.

There are people that are intolerant of black people or trans people or whatever, but then there are people that are just plain mean.

I used to play League of Legends and enjoyed the social aspects of unranked play; it would be fun to meet people that would show me things about the world or vice versa, but there was the awful problem that it could take forever to queue because they'd often be people who insisted on playing one particular lane. I learned to jungle early on and to be flexible about roles so I'd be part of the solution instead of the problem.

When I got into ranked though it was just awful, people were always blaming me for the team not winning and for any real or imagined screw-up. I liked to play Sona who is mainly a healer but can sometimes trash the players on the other team really good. If I was being successful at this I'd get bitched out by my bottom because I was depriving them of XP that would help their character scale but, from the viewpoint of the team, if their bottom and support are getting trashed, they're getting trashed. If I was playing well people would bitch me out, if I was playing poorly people bitched me out.

I liked the idea of "finding my level" in ranked but I went back to unranked because I couldn't handle the negativity in ranked.

Eventually I got sick of a game that committed me to 30-50 minutes of paying attention to it and it would be unfair to to other players to bail out because my wife or my son or horse lessoners or the neighbors or someone on the phone needed my attention. But seriously, if you could adjust the dynamics of a game to cultivate positive social interactions that would be a very good thing.

> if you could adjust the dynamics of a game to cultivate positive social interactions that would be a very good thing.

You can't force people to be nice to you. Seeking to control other people is a pointless endeavor. Your problem is completely caused by a company handling censorship and not having community owned servers where bans are handed down near instantaneously. Further, in the defense of the person insulting you, they shouldn't be prevented from playing the game for being a jackass in chat. Chat ban? Sure. Full ban? I wonder how far you could take that in civil court to get your money back.

> Eventually I got sick of a game that committed me to 30-50 minutes of paying attention

This is your actual problem you just may not realize it. When someone is committing 50 minutes of their life to a stupid video game minor infractions like being a new player suddenly become a real problem. You are dragging down the team and you are ruining their experience. That's not your fault, really. Everyone starts out new and it sucks. It's also not their fault for being mean to you for legitimately ruining their game. It's a lot of time spent just to lose everything because one person doesn't know how to play. People aren't in the mindset of "help the noob" when an hours worth of progress gets flushed down the toilet for doing so. Call it the bystander effect, or whatever.

Riot would be better off making servers for more casual play. Most of the so-called "toxic" behavior I have seen in new games is because of long matches, wins and losses being strictly tied to progress, etc. The competitive aspect makes the game worse for everyone who doesn't want to compete.

>It's also not their fault for being mean to you for legitimately ruining their game.

It is 100% their fault. Whatever circumstances befall someone, it doesn't give them the right to act toxically and insult and degrade others. There's a difference between being angry (an emotion), and channeling that anger into a negative interaction. They're perfectly capable of controlling themselves and not throwing a tantrum like a child.

It's not about helping out the noob, it's about being civil.

lol this is a wild accusation you straw-manned his position from "community moderation is good" to "banning people from saying nigger is bad" when no one said that.

even for your complaints about PUBG, i've played a hundred games of PUBG and others where nothing like that ever happened, and when it did we just mute the guy and move on. acually the majority of games i played with mic'd teammates we used it to coordinate and play better as a team.

My experience of community-moderated servers is that someone doing that will be banhammered quickly before they actually ruin the whole session, same with cheaters. The moderation on these larger platforms is shit because it's so slow, even if it does eventually come down. (same as real-world justice: when it's excruciatingly slow people lose faith in it and it arguably fails to do its job). The problem you mention is a problem of global matchmaking being the only option for playing the game and this kind of moderation is the cheapest option when you do it, so while microsoft moderating stuff is better than them not moderating things, the fact is they have removed the tools needed to do much better moderation in the push to remove community servers in the first place.

But have you considered conflating community-moderated servers, with completely unmoderated ones, as many commenters here? Or implying the worst, most unmoderated servers were the only choice, and not a single server could be found where moderators banned people over constant racial slurs?

Because if you did so, then you'd find that handing over all control to multinational conglomerates has been a decided net improvement.

The only problem is toxicity and hate can still be found in real-life pubs and other establishments. Sure, much social interaction has moved online, where it can be sanitized by benevolent corporations, but not all. However, I am confident that as corporate chains replace locally-ran establishments, voice monitoring and a consistently enforced set of rules will stamp it out there as well, holding their patrons accountable for their words.

Slurs are unintelligent, low-hanging attempts at an insult, and a sign of a weak mind. Worst of all, they're completely lacking in imagination.

I get called gay/fag in games often (I'm queer and got a slight gay lisp), but it's not really bothering me. I'm much more bothered by disruptive gaming than bad coms. I can ignore bad coms by muting them.

Honestly, people need to toughen up; letting the lowest hanging fruit (ie slurs) get to them are equally weak-minded as people trying to wield them for offence. I mean, it just gaming shit talking at the end of the day? They'll probably forget about each other by the time the next match ends.

Disrupting/throwing/sabotaging a game is just... Defeating the purpose of a game, no? If they're not going to play, why be there? Better they go do a crossword puzzle, or something.

> much social interaction has moved online, where it can be sanitized by benevolent corporations

Profit-driven corporations "stamping out" any speech that's bad for business? You want this? You want voice monitoring everywhere because someone somewhere might be hateful at some point?

> holding their patrons accountable for their words.

I don't think you have thought beyond the short-term on this one. It starts out, just like in corporations and other places in life, as a good thing. Get the racists out, get the sexists out, whatever. You could even argue $PLACE is better because of it. I think most people would.

The problem is that this isn't the community pushing people out. Meaning, the offender could clean up their act, go somewhere else, and start "fresh". The community can dispense a measured amount of justice (banning from a server/pub/etc) without irreparably damaging someone's life/money/fun. Maybe you just had a really shit day, or you're upset in general about something, and lose your cool online. Now you're banned from a game/pub/etc because The Rules (TM) prescribe a severe punishment for such an infraction. Community enforcement is local and corporation enforcement is global. There is a stark difference.

With a "benevolent" corporation policing speech you end up getting a chilling effect everywhere. It goes from just banning the bad guys to criticism of the company, the political party, the $X is now policed. Suddenly, no one wants to talk anymore. That is, unless they're all smiles for the camera. There are a few games I know of where the mods are so happy to ban people (for even criticizing the company or telling people not to play) that NO ONE talks. They form their own discords for their friends and that's it. Wow, how fun! People like me who have no interest in throwing around slurs anywhere will just go somewhere else. When people are suddenly saccharin due to fear it's even less fun than when someone is throwing a hissy-fit.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, certainly. Private establishments can police them how they want. That doesnt mean it's a good or that we should ignore a trend.

A big nothing. If you don't want to get banned for yelling slurs, don't yell slurs? This isn't a big deal if you aren't a giant asshole.

But gamer culture has always included yelling slurs at each other! You're destroying history! You're erasing our culture!

well per https://www.xbox.com/en-US/legal/community-standards#iv you shouldn't "Post game clips that will offend many others". Also I should "Know the difference between trash talk and harassment". Ah very clear.

Seems pretty clear to me. There is a pretty big cliff between trash talk and harassment.

This is just outright pathetic. This pattern of treating words equally, or even worse than actions is just dystopian. There is way less harm from calling someone mean words/slurs/whatever than from ruining their gameplay by cheating (and they might not even know about it!)...

For fuck's sake, "griefing" and "blocking your teammate" isn't even on the list! That's a way worse offence than swearing in a game, c'mon.....

Cultural revolution, friend.

Is that supposed to be a positive thing?

There is no war in Bao Sing Se!

Dystopian how? And does it become non-dystopian once hate speech is treated harshly but slightly less harsh than non-speech actions? What exactly do you mean?

I mean that it's pretty sad that we went from cheating being basically the worst thing you could do in a game to.... no one caring about cheating, griefing your teammates, being toxic or being disruptive, instead we only care about things like hate speech or profanity. It's not like people don't bully, harass and demean others with "acceptable" words and "acceptable" in-game actions....

Does nobody care about cheating or griefing or toxicity anymore? That doesn't match my experience.

I don't understand why you bring up profanity. I don't understand what you think is dystopian, or why you think it would stop being dystopian if hate speech was treated slightly less seriously than cheating.

It is dystopian because the frog (all of us) is being slowly boiled. We've come to a stage where you start to own nothing anymore, only licence or rent it, your access/licence can be revoked for any reason if you breach their EULA (which they can change at any time) and your rights are shrinking.

Locking people out from their games which they've purchased (even from singleplayer!) for what they said on chat is just pathetic and dystopian. I wouldn't put it past them that the next step would be brain sensors to detect "harmful" thoughts and ban you before you say them.

"Hate speech" is not the same as "swearing".

You are 100% right, although I think "hate speech" is kind of an extension to swearing in this context. After all, what is classified as hate speech is practically insults, just based on protected characteristics instead of something else. The goal is the same - either to take the mickey out of someone or to make them upset. The major difference is the way of doing so and how much it hurts the target. I think it can reasonably be argued that those two are related and comparable things.

"Hate speech" isn't well-defined, which is the core of the problem with any policy trying to censor "hate speech".

Speaking is an action?

Technically yes, but you know what I meant, please argue in good faith. There is a fairly clear dividing line between words and actions, with the only remotely gray areas being incitement for violence or doxxing. That is (rightfully) regarded as something highly condemnable and punishable.

>There is way less harm from calling someone mean words/slurs/whatever than from ruining their gameplay by cheating

Is this just your personal opinion? I'm assuming you're not a member of a group of people that gets called slurs in meatspace with that opinion.

"I'm assuming you're not a member of a group of people that gets called slurs in meatspace with that opinion."

Your assumption is really wrong but I do not wish to talk about it further. Who I am shouldn't matter. What I do should matter instead.

I think their point is that your position appears to be much more common from those who are in the majority (e.g. straight/white/cis/male) than those in one or more minority groups.

Assumedly that’s because people in the majority don’t get harassed to the same degree, or aren’t phased to the same degree as minority members.

This is a pattern that seems to repeat a lot in tech. Majority people design a system with serious safety/harassment issues because no one who has experienced it was consulted, then are surprised when standard harassment techniques are repeated and the designers are taken by surprise that well known abuse patterns exist.

I'm queer/gay and I can't tell you the amount of times people tried to use gay/fag as an insult online.

It might've affected me negatively when I was younger or a teen, but now that I'm grown up, it just seems so... Stupid? Thinking back, I feel stupid for ever letting such unsophisticated attempts of a primitive world view ever even remotely affect me.

These day, at worst if they're irritating I just mute them. At best, it's an invitation for free trolling (making jokes about their dad on Grindr, telling them their dirty talk is giving me a distracting boner or "flirting" with them, saying they sound like a used-up twice-divorced wife, etc; it's easy to push these people's buttons).

Them throwing my game is much more annoying than them projecting their insecurities in voice chat, and sometimes it's hard to counter a disruptive player (sometimes you can work around them, but the game is much more challenging for the wrong reason).

> It might've affected me negatively when I was younger or a teen

Isn't this the point, though? Considering how online gaming is generally focused more on younger demographics, being harsh on hateful speech is likely to improve the experience of those who are vulnerable to it.

Detecting hate speech is much easier compared to intentional feeding or throwing.

You can mute people who slur, you can't "mute" cheaters.

In the context of video games the distinction between words and actions seems very mucky. For example, is it an action to in a competitive team game (say Dota) to get on the mike and just keep talking so you drown out everyone else? Why is that less of an action than instructing your computer to say something to a sever so that it registers an action that you didn’t take? Normally we might distinguish actions from speech by saying actions effect the world, but “actions” like grefing don’t impact the world either.

I was on and developed mods for a Minecraft server (https://www.civcraft.co/) as a teen where moderation except for cheating was self policing. I think there was a news story that I can’t find now talking about how some Jewish kid had been majorly harassed in a very antisemitic way, but I actually think the severs behavior there was fine. They wanted to provide tools for the community to police itself and I think that’s a cool and worthwhile experiment, but also it’s totally fine and maybe reasonable for Microsoft to decide that hate speech is more important to them than someone just cheating. Hate speech can at the extreme end have much more impact in the real world

Why they don't just disable chat/voice for an account for profanity and hate speech? You culd be a questionable person (in case of hate speech), but doesn't mean you're a bad gamer like if you are cheating

Microsoft does this as a warning example to other players.

It seems to make sense. One is harmful to the game experience and the other is harmful to people.

what happened to "sticks and stones..." ? it seems to me that we've gone from "being lynched randomly is harmful to people" into "someone being a moron calling slurs is harmful".

Imagine how terrible it will be for those who are so shielded in their safespace, the day they meet someone that actually is out to harm them.

Do you truly think someone needs some losers in a video game to toughen them up for losers in the real world? Do you think the groups of people who have slurs said to them don’t already experience it often in their real lives? Do you not think maybe they don’t want to deal with said losers during their recreational time?

Growing up in the intense, unfettered gaming world of competitive vidya was incredible, especially with FPS's. It temporarily gave us back something that the rest of modernity had taken away - a kind of Fight Club.

It was like a Fight Club where we could project our primal selves, like a primal urge to just fight and shittalk and rage, and that probably sounds nasty to a domesticated modern, but it really was A Good Thing. It's really just good fun at the end of the day, but even further, it's almost therapeutic, whereas we all have to wear our masks throughout our day, but then we got to be the competitive, shittalking, carousing, brawling cavemen that live in all of us.

Fight Clubs are for practicing taking hits as much as dishing them out. You practice giving your utmost brutality, your meanest, your dirtiest, and you also practice taking others' nastiest, because the world can be mean and nasty, and playing at that is one way to explore just how nasty it can be. When we play-fight in peacetime, it hardens us, prepares us for wartime.

If you're only ever exposed to people at their best, how will you know how to deal with them at their worst?

It's unfortunate to see these Fight Clubs disappearing at an increasing rate, with the advent of so many safe spaces. We need the opposite of safe spaces.

Kids have gotten way more into other forms of bullying AFAICT.

I'm dating a middle school teacher right now. And she tries so hard to stop bullying, constantly trying to show videos and have discussions about how "words matter!!!! Choose your words carefully!!" On and on.

I told her.. why don't you teach kids the truth.. the words don't matter. If a someone calls you stupid, and you aren't, who cares? If a bum calls me a loser, do I get upset? I move on. Only if someone you respect has a critique of you should you even pause for a split second and think about the critique.

If some dude calls you fat, personally I would think "what kind of wierdo harps on someone's weight.. there must be something wrong with him. Thus, I don't care what he even says."

But we instead teach kids "words matter!" So when they do get teased and bullied, they take the words to heart. So stupid.

Most people don't have the ability to choose what affects us emotionally. We can learn to build resilience and get less reactive, but we can't just turn off our emotional reactions completely.

If you can do that, it sounds great. For most people, they cannot do this and cannot be taught to.

I disagree. It's not easy to choose, but it very much is possible, they can do it, and they get much can be taught to do so.

If a homeless person said "you're a loser and a failure! You disgust me!", would you really care? I think not.

Apply that to every other idiot.

Unless what they're saying is actually true, well then that's up to you. I've been a bit fat before. A few people, friends and my mother, called me out on it. It was a helpful reminder that other people see it too. Now I'm not longer fat. Now, if they kept saying it to me daily... I'd think "ok these people are just being mean spirited.. that's not a good person.. and I don't care what mean spirited people have to say because they'll always find something."

I think it's a skill worth learning, instead of reminding both victims and their abusers that the words do matter. It hurts the victims more and empowers the abusers.

You do realize that both things are possible, right? You can recognize what people say to you isn’t worth reacting to and that you can choose your words to better respect others.

Who do you want to spend your time on? The abusers in hopes of teaching them "your words matter, you're so powerful, so be nice" or spend your time teaching the nice kids "don't listen to the mean people, they are weak and stupid"?

I think it's better to help the nicer kids.

You do both. Lots of people are abusive because they were abused. We should help them break the cycle.

Bingo. I was bullied in school and that's how I mentally dealt with it - why do I care what some knucklehead thinks or says about me? And the fact that he or she is saying mean things to me indicate I specifically should not care about what they say.

Words only have power over you if you let them. Otherwise they are meaningless.

In game? Like what?

> We need the opposite of safe spaces

We need the option to not deal with scumbags or become one with them. Playing a game you like shouldn’t be tied to a lobby full of red-bull fueled monkeys if you don’t want to.

Ironically after reading Microsoft’s guidelines I’m not sure you could get away with calling other players “monkeys.”

Damn, probably deserves a ban.

The speech police types rarely imagine they can get hit by their own medicine. Or self-reflect about possibility of being hypocritical.

My #1 complaint about Mastodon is the people who call almost anybody a fascist, including:

* Donald Trump (Ok, there was Jan 6)

* The neighbors of the homeless colony that are worried about the explosion that killed somebody (really!)

* The police that are investigating the murder of a resident of the homeless colony and who have just cracked the case of the manager of a homeless shelter who was killed decades ago

* The 80% of the population that is concerned about transgender athletes in woman's sports (see Q33 in https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/...) even though about 81% of people agree with the recent Supreme Court decision to outlaw workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people (see Table 12 https://law.marquette.edu/poll/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/ML...)

Frankly that talk bugs me out, it's the kind of othering and dehumanization that fascists were famous for. There are a lot of other words you can use for authoritarians, assholes, etc. Some of them will argue to no end that the left is always right and how it's completely wrong to apply universal standards to everyone's behavior.

I could tell them their behavior causes problems for my (now known) neurodivergence and that they shouldn't be so ableist but they keep arguing and I don't have the energy for it. I used to block those people on sight, then I realized I could be proactive and use keyword filters, it's really good for my piece of mind and I get to enjoy all the nice people on Mastodon.

You have the option. Don't play the game if you don't like how people who play the game act. Or you mute them. But don't ruin it for everyone that likes it.

Or play on servers with stricter moderation. Why should there be only one level of moderation/surveillance not for just an entire game, but for every game on a console?

It is ironic the GP demands an "option", while advocating for an approach that takes away every option but one from everyone.

I wonder if you're aware you'd probably be instantly banned for daring to compare humans to monkeys if dang followed that logic.

A bunch of socially inept nerds hurling insults and derogatory shit at each other isn’t something to be romanticized or nostalgic for.

Even if it were, it’s laughable to compare it to any kind of physical fighting club. Your post is so absurd it reads like satire almost, so sorry if that went over my head.

https://img.ifunny.co/images/83c1579a4a697acc558a1d2ee26528c...

People really didn't understand the message and themes of Fight Club, did they? The irony that a movie about the failures of modernity and toxic masculinity has become a beacon for people who missed that fact... it's such a strange and twisted world.

It feels like anonymous imageboards are the only remaining examples of such places.

Bullshit. I grew up in these spaces too. I remember people spamming the n-word, harassing women until they quit the game, and spraying goatse and CSAM on the wall. It was, in retrospect, a disgusting pigsty. The only reprieve was community servers where assholes were not tolerated, but it was an endless battle against the rising tide.

Are there actually clear guidelines of what constitutes hate speech, or does it also include expressing opinions the mods don't like?

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/legal/community-standards#iv

So not clear at all, thanks.

I think Reddit modding has thoroughly answered that questions of nuance and context doesn't really matter. Internet modding typically has zero transparency or recourse when mods consistently get it wrong / abuse power.

I'd be surprised if Xbox is any different.

Once upon a time my Xbox Live profile said something like "Linux, DOS, Windows: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." Some asshole at Microsoft got butthurt and replaced it with "Code of Conduct" (which I never bothered to change). I believe that answers the question.

Sure. Gaming used to be fun. Logging on to CS surf maps full of hackers wallclipping and spamming myg0t clips was hilarious. But things have gotten dark. Modern "gamer culture" is a rotten festering corpse of what it was 20 years ago. The toxicity is so unbearable I don't even bother with multiplayer anymore.

Theory: gaming has turned from plaything to a sport. Most people don't play online games purely for the sake of fun or "killing" spare time, but with a desire to become better, to become more like the youtubers and e-sport players they follow.

I recently went back to CSGO after 5 years break. I'm terrible at it and I'm "stuck" in Silver II rank (second lowest out of 18), but I'm having the best time I ever had with this game. Just keep laughing when your teammates scream at each other in various Central & Eastern European languages and you will be fine.

> Just keep laughing when your teammates scream at each other in various Central & Eastern European languages and you will be fine.

The people who want these rules are completely incapable of separating casual epithet throwing in a public lobby from assaults on their direct person. It's an extension of the "speech is violence" culture that pervades the west. It's cool to be not cool with people being assholes in game. You don't need Big Brother (TM) to police it. The community did just fine. I was called all manner of things playing CS 1.6. The things the internet claimed to have done with my mother was a quite extensive list. I never took any of it personally and half the time it was hilarious. The only difference now is I guess people are doxxing each other which is something I never experienced growing up. But then again, back then you didn't have some sort of narcissistic personality disorder driving you to keep your real life linked inextricably to your online one.

I loved the shittalking in gaming. I got called every slur in the book constantly and it was so much fun laughing at people who were getting incredibly angry that I didn't give a shit.

So no one else should be able to choose anything different?

You can choose to not hear it by muting other people. I can choose to hear it and laugh.

Maximum choice for all involved.

Being forced to hear it until you smash mute is not a choice.

Having to hear it should be opt-in.

The deep, deep irony of the parent poster applauding platform-wide policing of language that offers no choice to opt out and at the same time attempting to cast aspersions on others about not wanting to allow choice should not be lost on us.

Global ranked matchmaking is a cursed concept in videogames. I don't think it can be made non-toxic, TBH. You take basically everyone playing the game, for whatever reason they enjoy playing it (at any given time), and you chuck them all into a blender where the only metric is on average how good they are at winning the objective. On top of this, you're basically never going to be matched with the same people again, and no-one can really choose who they're matched with (blizzard has the concept but for some reason limits how many people you can avoid matching! And there's no 'match with this person again'). So you completely obliterate any idea of community or community norms around playing the game or acting, and chuck people wanting a serious game with lots of teamwork in with people who just want to fool around and not even play the objective, as well as people who just want to piss others off and will see basically no concequences for it. Even if you remove the really obviously bad actors who yell slurs and abuse at everyone it's not a recipe for people having a good time, because there's so many other ways you can get pissed off by someone else, and they might not even be in the wrong, they just want to play a different version of the game to you.

How so? How is it so much more toxic? I’m thinking that you’re just envisioning the good ole days.

Nice to see a little sanity in these comments.

The only multiplayer I’ve played in the last 15+ years is some Nintendo stuff like Splatoon/Mario Kart or Fall Guys, where there is no voice chat or text chat. The one exception was Destiny, where there was no voice chat by default or I had turned it off. Don’t remember which.

Random internet people are a disaster. MS has a brand to keep up, they don’t want to be known for the kind of trash that make up the loudest segment of online gaming.

Good for them. This seems like the right decision to me.

Don’t like the XBLA policies? Don’t play online on the Xbox.

> Nice to see a little sanity in these comments.

Seriously. I used to be much more of a free speech absolutist, but I have to admit the experiment has failed. The unmoderated Internet is a cesspool, and unmoderated game chat is a sewer within a cesspool. People are just sick of it. Whenever you see someone set up "The Free Speech Version Of Site XYZ" (where XYZ can be Reddit, Twitter, anything really) it almost inevitably fills itself up with trash. Show me an unmoderated site that isn't entirely spam and sewage.

I say run an experiment: Set up some moderated servers and unmoderated servers, and let people vote with their controllers. Normal people don't want to join a game or website where the lobby is full of 14 year olds shouting N--ger N--ger N--ger N--ger over and over.

> I say run an experiment: Set up some moderated servers and unmoderated servers, and let people vote with their controller.

That's what we had with community servers. And you could generally find one which meshed with your skill level, gameplay style, and tolerance for abuse. I would quite like that back, TBH, so yes, let's have that experiment! (but like, have the moderation in that community as well, not imposed by a corporation. Apart from you can have different standards in different places it's also generally more effective. A bad actor (cheating or abuse) in most of these lobbies will still ruin the whole game, because they don't get banned for a while. I'd say that's ineffective moderation, regardless of the accuracy of the decisions).

Really depends on the game. I'm sure in Rust most people would go to the "unmoderated" server.

I don't know what you mean by toxicity, but "back in the day" as you mention, you'd get called an n-word 5 times a match. Nowadays that doesn't happen in most games because they ban you if you do so.

I remember when voice chat first became available in multiplayer shooters (outside of addons) and became aware almost everyone else was a male adolescent, knew my mother, and all of them were cursing up a storm like South Park characters. It was pretty disappointing and I turned it off after a few matches on different servers.

And those who weren't male adolescents simply kept their mouths shut.

I'm just surprised there are apparently that many people who are (a) running around yelling racial slurs (b) as if it is a routine thing people do and (c) equating yelling hate speech as "swearing".

I mean, I grew up with goatse. I'm not a wilting flower. But I don't know anyone who regularly uses racial hate speech and the rate of gender, sexuality, and nationality hate speech I hear is ... single percentages of what it was. And that's a good thing. I'm having a hard time understanding that a private company cultivating a welcoming environment to the people who pay its bills is a bad thing.

The thing is, with stuff like this, it doesn't really need to be many people. This applies online and IRL. Even if <1% of people are unhinged enough to be shouting abuse at a particular group (or just at anyone in general) whenever they see one of them online or in public, members of that group will regularly experience that abuse, because in public or in online gameplay you interact with quite a lot of different people.

Oh absolutely, but I'm sort of sampling from the group on this thread. There's a surprising amount of "just mute it" as if the burden of not hearing slurs should fall on the hearer. Purely as a practical matter, a private company competing in many lucrative and sensitive markets isn't going to tolerate diluting its goodwill by becoming known as the place where hate speech is accepted. One user managed to scare TWO advertisers off "X". That's without even reaching the morality issue.

(Lots of folks also equating profanity with hate speech, which is bizarre. If I were in a PUBG lobby and someone called me a mfer, I would laugh. If they called me a <n-word> <f-word> <k-word>, I would leave and never come back.)

I don't own an Xbox, but do they not have a mute button on the player level? On PlayStation if someone has no inner monologue, annoys me, or whatever, I just mute them or don't friend them so they can't hear me. Problem solved. I sure don't need an authoritarian telling me what I can or cannot say to MY peers, and resent anyone who gets between me and my friends' communication. Of course they have to worry about liability, but a better solution would simply be to age gate the kids so they can't chat and let the adults grow up or use the mute button. And for the record, in my experience it's been the children that do most of the smack talk and use racial or ethnic slurs as a natural part of growing up. I believe that's what the book Antifragile is all about.

As a person that regularly plays competitive games, I can tolerate some cheaters from time to time, but my tolerance on stupid people is absolute cero. Everything is muted.

Both a cheater and someone yelling hate speech should be banned on the spot, no strikes, but whatever.

I had Xbox Live since day one. I have the t shirt. But as the years went on multiplayer gaming across all platforms has degraded. During the Master Chief Collection launch where the game was almost unplayable one player was yelling at everyone and I just deleted my account. I've been in and out over the years but now that I'm back full time I've found that there are only two types of multiplayer gamers left, the belligerent and the silent.

If it wasn't for Gamepass I wouldn't pay for the online anymore. Slowly I'm picking up games that are on Gamepass on deep discounts and Im planing to drop it if it stopps being a value.

Im perfectly happy to be a single player gamer for the rest of my life. The headset though is not without value. Being able to get completely immersed is more valuable than ever having to talk.

Really rolling the dice here... My speech has been less suppressed on XBL than here. And it was much more warranted when I was struck there than any sort of retribution/slowmod'd here.

Just offering that up for the free speech absolutionists (lol) here.

Meanwhile Steam probably launched 4 indie games today about killing minorities.

Valve/Steam is proof that the push against hate speech is not driven by investor/consumer demand but by employee activism and unionization.

Yet another reason to unionize.

Unpopular opinion, but Microsoft should not be making the ban decisions. If I paid $80 to buy a game, then paid additional $60 to Microsoft to be able to play multiplayer games, I am sorry but it’s up to the games to enforce any rules they want. Some game lobbies are inherently toxic and if I get banned for profanities from all games, then that’s complete bs.

It’s like your ISP disconnecting your internet because your were in an argument on Facebook.

The complications here is that all voice, messages, and identities are going through the Xbox live servers.

Facebook is a bad example. Facebook has many games on their platform. Getting banned from Facebook would ban you from all those games.

The question is not whether getting banned on Xbox would ban you from all the games or not, the question is whether Xbox should be able to ban you entirely.

It is their platform. Xbox has no legal or even moral obligation to provide services for people who cannot maintain the basic standards of civilized behaviour.

Have you ever talked to a teenager? Also, if you’ve ever used Xbox, you’d know that their moderation at best is bad. People using literal slurs don’t get punished, while dropping an f bomb at no one in particular can get you banned.

> It is their platform.

That's the problem. They shouldn't be able to own the platform. There should be no platform for them to own to begin with. They shouldn't have the power to ban anyone nor should there be any place to be banned from.

You're gonna speak of moral obligations while defending DRM'd platforms owned by copyright monopolists? You gotta be kidding me.

True. And they should refund your money after they ban you.

You didn't buy the game. You licensed it. They're merely allowing you to play the game. Aren't they generous? They reserve the right to revoke that authorization for any reason at all including no reason so better not piss them off if you don't want to watch your money evaporate.

Lots of comments here talking about general „gamer culture“, while this seems to be much more region-specific to me. For example Turkish servers/players are insanely toxic in my experience, while Japanese are not. Especially Japan-exclusive communities are very different from what’s described here.

Perhaps not among themselves but, at least in the community I'm familiar with, there was noticeable griefing against openly non-Japanese players attempting to play on Japanese-specific server shards.

Because hate speech __is__ worse than cheating in games. It boggles my mind that anyone thinks otherwise.

Is there forgivnance builtin? If someone starts gaming online at 18, andives to 72, they could only afford a strike every 7.7 years. It seems all to common with online systems to have no strikes forgiven, to be hanging forever in the danger zone. As far as I can tell HN itself is largely that way with warnings & rate limiting. Nothing is earned by good behavior.

If you’re 18 and can’t take without shouting the N word or telling gay people to kill themselves… whether or not their strikes expire is not the most important issue.

MS is trying to sell systems to 6+ year olds.

For some reason parents, as a whole, tend to dislike their kids learning the latest slurs and how to properly suggest people consider suicide. Or hearing any of that directed at little Tommy.

It seems unlikely to be that strikes will be entirely blameful & clear cut in all cases. If anything I expect the regulation of speech by corporate bodies will intensify.

Picking obvious to condemn cases to justify demonizing someone is an easy case to build, is building the biggest target you can. It seems deeply simplistic to me to assume that the situation will today be simple, and more so, that it won't complexity over time.

I'd note that in most government systems, punishments are not eternal. Points against your driver's license eventually go away. Most crimes arent back to back to back life sentencew without hope of parole. The stakes are lower, but this current online paradigm of almost all warnings/strikes/punishments lasting forever seems like a much stricter/harsher world than is civil.

Private companies doing their own laws violating your rights

9 strikes and you have to drink a verification can

Good

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