Ubisoft has been pushing through some pretty strong banning procedures in an attempt to curb toxicity in their highly popular multiplayer game, Rainbow Six Siege.
Moderators were pursuing some targeted bans back in April, targeting hate speech and various slurs of the sort. This new wave of bans has been confirmed to be an auto-ban system.
The Rainbow Six Siege code of conduct has been updated with the new system:
AUTOMATED TEMPORARY BANNING SYSTEM:
In the idea to make the Rainbow Six Siege a welcoming community space for challenges, Ubisoft has decided to launch an automated temporary banning system in respect to Offensive Language or Behavior, Threats and Harassment.
This system will automatically temporary ban players from the Game when they use abusive words in the in-Game chat.
These temporary bans will be implemented as follows:
- First offense: 30 minutes temporary ban
- Second offense: 2 hours temporary ban
- Third Offense: 2 hours temporary ban
After three offenses: an investigation will be conducted and may lead to a permanent ban (maximum penalty)
It gives offenders a few tries to curb the behavior, it’s not till after the third offense that this could lead to a permanent ban. Supposedly this auto ban system is only looking for racial slurs at the moment. As of yet, this only refers to the text chat option in the PC version of Siege. No reports of auto bans resulting in voice chat, which would be pretty crazy to find out they had the technology to do that- but still just saying.
Will this new system curb toxic behavior? There are plenty of things to type that aren’t specifically a slur, but are still considered toxic. The bigger question is do we really care about toxic behavior? Gamers are going to run their mouths and that is part of the fun of the game, cracking down super hard on what people are allowed to say, kind of ruins that.
What do you think? Should gamers have free reign to say what they please, or should Ubisoft be cracking down as they are?