Rainbow Six Siege combating toxicity with bans

I just saw this pop up on my news feed and holy wow... the current overall games social climate seems so fucked.. the twitter responses to Ubisoft are just mind blowing. Is the games community really this awful or this a group of assholes assualting the thread?

https://www.pcgamer.com/rainbow-six-toxicity-ban/

You best be joking if you think I'm going to waste time going to twitter to search for people saying stupid shit. Although, you don't need much time to do that.

All popular 'e-sports' games attract shitty people. I personally love what Ubisoft has been doing with R6. Seeing ban-waves pop off as I play is good fun. I'm sure people will quickly find ways around the word filter though.

@mobiusfun: I meant the specific tweet that was in the article, the responses are overwhelmingly negative(which is an understatement) in a way I personally never saw with CSGO and that community was fucking awful.

@mobiusfun: Searching Twitter for stupid shit is like searching a beach for sand.

I haven’t looked at Twitter (I respect myself too much to go back to that cess pool), but I’m guessing it’s a bunch of people confusing Ubisoft for the federal government of the USA and clamoring on about their first amendment rights being trampled.

Regulating language is a slippery slope, but an entertainment company not wanting to host racism, homophobia, and general hate is hardly surprising and totally justified.

Isn't this more targeted against hate speech, such as homophobia and racism?

I didn't hear about them banning trash talk and bad sportsmanship.

You can also report people for saying stuff, so if someone says "@$$" instead of "ass" (merely an example, you won't get banned for saying "ass") you can still report them and they'll still eventually get banned for it.

OP: I don't think CSGO has ever had a banwave focused on getting rid of toxic people, though. I imagine if it did, the response would be much the same. In R6 Siege's case, everyone playing the game gets a notification when someone gets hit with the banhammer and it happens in the same info feed where you see who killed who. So you might see "this guy killed that guy" followed by "xXx420BlAzEiTxXx" was banned for toxic behavior".

In any case, Siege's community is kind of like any other multiplayer game community - there are a lot of decent people playing, but there's also no shortage of vocal shitbags. The vast majority of them are in text chat, though, and you can turn that off. I'd recommend not turning off voice chat, as communication between teammates is key to winning in that game and filling up voice chat with stupid insults is a great way to get kicked out of a game. I've been playing Siege a lot and it is a hell of a lot of fun, though I do suggest playing it with your friends instead of solo queueing, and I strongly suggest starting it with someone who knows his way around the game. There are a lot of classes and the interplay between classes can be kind of confusing at first.

For me, personally, I do leave text chat on. I've always left it on in multiplayer games - sometimes useful or funny things are said in chat and toxic comments tend to just bounce right off of me.

Good. More multiplayer games should perma ban use of hateful slurs.

Anecdotally, today I saw a person in the game use a homophobic slur. I reported them, and after 3 seconds he was kicked from the match, and then after another 10, a game-wide message about them being banned. Pretty efficient :V

I'm sure that there are some borderline cases that get caught up in these sorts of ban waves, but in general, I find that most of the people that complain about getting suspended/banned in an online game are genuinely very toxic and deserved the ban.

There are plenty of examples of people on Twitch that constantly demonstrate toxic behavior in R6: Siege, Overwatch, etc. that then act surprised and outraged when they finally get a ban. If they can complain that much when there's publicly available video evidence of their bad manners, I imagine many of the non-streamer complaints are even more ludicrous.

Almost of every online game community has a ton of toxic people in it, sadly. Well done Ubisoft, that's really awesome! This sort of system should be in every game! And don't you dare use that stupid excuse of "oh it's just banter". Homophobic, racial, sexist etc. slurs is not banter. The sooner the gaming community gets rid of assholes like that the better!

Nothing makes me happier than seeing communities be culled of the worst offenders. Smells like sweet sweet justice.

@chaser324: I remember back when Bungie was riding high with Halo 3, folks complaining about being falsely ban-hammered for cheating.

Bungie kept all these crazy metrics with all the game data and would basically just show exactly where the cheating happened. It was pretty cool (assuming you trusted the data).

You're surprised at gamers reacting this way to getting banned because they cant be assholes?

Gamers have literally ruined peoples careers recently. Real-life harassment. Doxxing. Direct, personal threats of violence against people they've never met.

The gaming community is extremely toxic. And the worst offenders are going to drag their feet and try to victimize themselves when called out on it. Because they're assholes.

I think these bans just have to happens more often, that will teach people faster. That way people just get used to not being shitty on reflex, is to get caught and punished immediately. I think R6 and some other games have been pretty good about banning people, but it must come in waves instead of just being constant and reinforcing. You can't have rules without consequences, and only real consequences -that sting- will get some people to 'understand' there are rules.

Ironically, I think things like Alexa, Bixby, Siri are pushing technology that WILL BE really good for online gaming chat. Once the voice data sent for chat can get analyzed on the fly fairly cheaply, I think people will zip their mouths closed very fast. Moreover, I think we will have companies like Discord, Mumble, and Teamspeak will be implementing this tech first, so any of these bozos with'salty mouths' that arethinking, "Well, I just use another program...they can't catch me!" will be very sad.

at this point im ready for zero tolerance across the board as a general policy. There may be rare exceptions, but im just tired of all of it.

From what I hear, the filter is overly strict and a lot of people are reporting false positives. It makes me think about Monster Hunter Tri and Dark Souls 2, where you couldn't type "after" or anything with the string "ead" in it without getting censored. But now, instead of a simple censor, it's preventing you from even playing the game. I'd be angry too.

Yes, 100%. Enough trying to be nice. It's pretty clear at this point that anytime an inch is given to these people in terms of flexibility with what they say, they try and take a mile, and almost always they ruin the experiences of everyone else in the process of doing so. If they can't be decent to other people while being online, then they shouldn't get the privilege of being able to play with other people.

It all comes back to the golden rule of "Don't be a jerk".

Well back in my day it wasn't a big deal, because you had servers you always played on regularly, with people you knew, with admins who administrated accordingly. Players policed themselves (or not, but you weren't forced to hang out with them).

I might need to reinstall R6 again. Good on Ubisoft. In my 150+ hours of playing Siege I ran into fewer toxicity issues than some other games, but boy - when some jackasses didn't think you could play your class.....

I don't think "overly strict" is how I'd describe it.

"Poorly implemented", however, is a better thing to say.

Someone out there is going to think that I'm "one of those assholes", the kind of person who is angry and critical because this affects me. It doesn't. I never type stuff like this in chat. However, this is a "three strikes and you're out of the game permanently" rule. If you're going to implement something like that, your system ought to be robust and you ought to have something in place to handle false positives. They don't seem to, really, which is unfortunate because there are a bunch of legitimate words you can type in that can get you banned. "Raccoon", for instance, seems to be one of them. If you're typing in Spanish and you need to say "Black Ice" (the name of the first expansion for Siege), you're going to get banned.

They've implemented something that can get a person permanently banned from their game and it's no more robust or complex than a word filter in an old chat room. They haven't even published a list of words and variations you can't say, which would help a whole hell of a lot.

I think being permabanned for toxic language ought to be reserved for more extreme cases. You could do a lot of other things that don't involve restricting access to your product. You could implement an individual mute system for text chat instead of just for voice chat. You could force a text chat filter on someone so that any post with toxic language doesn't actually get posted. You could simply ban someone from text chat altogether. Anyone who is damn determined to use toxic language will find a way, and after being reported over and over, they should be banned. But it ought to be a recurring thing, not "three times and goodbye, sorry if you spent $60 on the game at launch and $30 every year since for the season pass".

At some point, I can't help but feel like Ubisoft implemented this quick-and-dirty thing just to get some brownie points and pat themselves on the back for being progressive or something without really doing it properly. I am all for something like this, and I am all for being strict and firm with it, but this is a bad implementation of a system that needs to be much better.

Finally, I must anecdotally mention that in all my time playing Siege - which is basically "since the beginning of this year" - I haven't seen all that much toxic language posted. Siege is a game where any information you can share about the map can win or lose the game for your team and if you're polluting text chat and voice chat with toxic language, you're drowning out people who might actually be helping. As a result, toxic language doesn't happen as often in text chat as you'd think. It does happen, I'm not contradicting what I said earlier in the thread, but it's not as bad as it can be in some other multiplayer games. I don't recall ever hearing it in voice chat, though such toxic language tends to bounce off of me, so someone more sensitive to it might remember it happening more often. But if you can have some fun in CS:GO or in Overwatch or Team Fortress 2, you can certainly have some fun in R6 Siege without being worried about assholes being assholes.

Honest questions:

How is the report verified? How does it prevent someone simply banning another player by lying? How is this more effective than just a simple mute?

@indure: I mean it's a filter list its not a vindictive players case. It seems like if you are being a trash person in chat the chat will then punch you in the nose shortly after.

As to why not a mute.... that's not a punishment. A mute hides their bad behavior but does nothing to indicate that there is an actual consequence.

You type a sequence of letters that are on the ban list (the unpublished ban list) and a minute or so later, you're removed from the match and told the length of time for which you will be banned from Siege. I say "a sequence of letters" and not "a word" because some innocent words (like "raccoon", which I mentioned above) will get you banned. I do not know for sure if there's an actual human at a Ubisoft office reviewing these chat filter bans or not.

Since it's all done by a computer, there's no lying to be done. It's all computer logic, all automated.

As @efesell said above, a simple mute isn't a punishment. Beyond that, it places the onus on the player to block unsavory things, which interrupts the match and the player's fun. That's not ideal. However, I do think player-specific text mutes should be a thing. In addition to that, I think that chats which include a sequence of letters on the ban list simply shouldn't go through. That's a way for an automatic mute to happen that doesn't involve the player and that doesn't punish someone who may have written something on accident (what if you miss the r in "frag grenade"?). Repeat offenders can get a closer look (you don't mistype "frag grenade" five times in a row) so that punishments and bans still happen.

As someone with over 800 hours in Siege, and still going strong, I'm happy.

This is a step in the right direction, however in a game where friendly fire is a thing, I still find players killing each other for dumb reasons. I think ubi should lower friendly fire damage when playing casual but not for ranked.

Last night I had a dumb incident where one person used a rook bag as bait and we got c4ed. Our team lasted 10 seconds before everyone turned each other and got 1 person kicked. Also I won 2 rounds because the enemy murdered themselves with the chain being started with someone called "Will.Not.TK". A few more incidents ensued but not as severe.

I will say as someone playing for over 200 hours that was the worst session for intentional team killing I've encountered thus far.

Siege is one of the worst gaming communities I've seen in a really long time. So seeing Ubisoft try to clean it up with harsh punishments is something I support 100%. I felt like I was on xbox live again with the N word being tossed around, 4-man groups kicking their random out only after tormenting them with team kills and slurs.

I can tell these new measures have been working too since the amount of trash talk seems to be pretty low lately.

As I get older, there's just less and less that I'm willing to put up with after working and coming home to game for a bit. I imagine most that are working or in school feel the same way too.

So seeing this ban wave that just takes one report filed is great since it works fast and it sends a message to the rest of the assholes out there.