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Ubisoft is cracking down on "Toxic Players" in the game "Rainbow Six: Siege". I was somewhat surprised to see that they hadn't implemented a mute option to begin with as well.
Players will also soon have the ability to mute either or both of the text and voice chat for other players in their matches, giving more "direct control over communication channels."
I left the world of FPS Multiplayer games nearly 10 years ago, because of the toxic environment. Then again, that may have mostly just been staying away from certain games (Call of Duty) that appealed to the demographic (10 year old kids who can more or less say whatever they feel like) I didn't want to associate with. It's one thing to have the occasional being "cursed at" by a teenager / adult, because something went belly up for them. It's another to have a string of profanity that you've never heard the like being uttered by a 10 year old kid as a standard part of the game.
Apparently their parents don't know where they are / what they're doing, don't believe in parenting, don't think that verbal abuse is a thing, or some various mixture thereof. I'm not generally in favor of censorship, but at some point someone needs to step-in. At one point that was the parents, but that doesn't seem to be happening nearly as much as it used to.
The core of the changes centers around players using "racial or homophobic slurs, or hate speech," defined by the game's Code of Conduct as language that's "illegal, dangerous, threatening, abusive, obscene, vulgar, defamatory, hateful, racist, sexist, ethically offensive, or constituting harassment."
TL;DR
Game company banning toxic players. It's about time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @05:19PM
That is quite a stretch. FB is under scrutiny for violating public trust and privacy, this in no way compares to bad language in games. I can see the tenuous connection, but gaming companies have been implementing such measures for a very long time because it is good PR. The only true connection I can imagine is that Ubisoft noticed the growing trend for tech companies to get in trouble, the Wild West of software is gone. So what do they do? Listen to their users and improve their platform. So more of preemptive measures to avoid a bad news article from a journalist who goes "undercover" and records such player harassment. No company wants their name in the same article with the phrases the worst players use.
All that said, I also would like a return to more private game play. Single player and private servers. I recommend Subnautica as a great single player and pretty novel game experience.