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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 12 2018, @12:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the swearing-like-drunken-sailors dept.

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.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/04/ubisoft-cracking-down-on-hate-speech-team-killing-in-rainbow-six-siege

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday April 12 2018, @06:44PM

    by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Thursday April 12 2018, @06:44PM (#666099)

    I'm not a free market fan. I expect Ubisoft to do lots of things gamers don't like when they think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. I just think it's misleading or at best uninformed to label those acts as censorship.

    I think a comparison between multiplayer games and social media on one side and street corners doesn't work because in the digital world you have infinite street corners. Ubisoft or Facebook or Soylentnews don't have to allow any particular topic - if they ban Antifa or KKK topics, those groups can communicate elsewhere or create their own dedicated discussion site.

      I suppose it's possible Ubisoft leaders were motivated by the current attention to social media, but I suspect it's just business sense. I'm sure there is a demographic of multiplayer customers that love to scream and insult and troll other players, and Ubisoft makes some profit by catering to what they want. "I was going to play this Bioware game, but in this Ubisoft game I can scream insults non-stop at real human beings. I'll go with Ubisoft." But I'm also sure there's a larger demographic of multiplayer customers that would prefer the ability to mute, ban, or otherwise not deal with people who prefer that play style. "That's the fifth round today with some ten year old calling me a pig-fucker when I killed him. It's getting old, I'm going to go play PvZ: GW2." Ubisoft probably did a cost-benefit analysis and realized they were losing more money catering to the jerks than they were gaining by being a jerk paradise, so they're tweaking the game.

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