Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Rainbow Six, Rianbow Six Siege, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege, ubisoft

Rainbow Six Siege Combating Toxic Community with Chat Improvements

Rainbow Six Siege has come back strong from a pretty lackluster launch in 2015, but despite the improvements, the game still suffers from the usual toxic elements that plague every major multiplayer game. Ubisoft plans to change that, however, as they'll be cracking down on problematic player behavior.

Ubisoft made the announcement on the Rainbow Six dev blog today, saying "Our end goal is to track negative player behavior, manage those that behave poorly, and eventually implement features that will encourage players to improve their behavior." They'll be implementing three chat improvements to make sure this happens, specifically they're adding the ability to mute chat from any individual player, an automatic filter that will censor certain words, and a chat monitoring system.

The mute function will work on both text and voice chat, and will allow you to target only the specific players you don't want to hear from. So you can absolutely silence the griefers, the profanity fountains, and the people who don't understand how to properly use a mic (I don't need to hear your roommates talking in the background my friend).

The chat censor is pretty much exactly what you'd expect it to be, it'll "replace" any words that have been programmed into the game's profanity filter and then notify the player that their choice of language is offensive. Personally, I don't see this one changing the behavior of problematic players, and I really only see it as a bit of a pain. Then again, I've got a bit of a foul mouth myself.

The chat monitoring system is really the interesting one, as the other two features are a pretty common sight in multiplayer games and have been for about a decade. Ubisoft will be monitoring how often some players use certain slurs, and apply bans to players who use them frequently.

As they detail on the dev blog:

We are currently tracking the frequency at which racial or homophobic slurs are used by individual players, and will be applying bans with increasing severity on a case-by-case basis.

This is clearly outlined in the following section of the Code of Conduct:

"Any language or content deemed illegal, dangerous, threatening, abusive, obscene, vulgar, defamatory, hateful, racist, sexist, ethically offensive or constituting harassment is forbidden."

The bans for this will fall within the following durations, depending on severity:

• 2 Days
• 7 Days
• 15 Days
• Permanent

*Please note that this is not a strict progression of bans. Particularly egregious offenders can be permanently banned without a warning, 2, 7, or 15 day ban being applied beforehand.

Honestly, this is the most important of the three features, so its definitely the one to pay attention to.

In addition to the chat updates, Ubisoft also acknowledged that theam-killing is an issue and so is working on a way to deal with it. Details are short however, because Ubisoft fears that providing too many details on the their anti-team-killing measures "will lead to exploiting."

And if you were worried this wasn't enough, Ubisoft is serious about tackling the problem of players having negative experiences in Siege, and will be working on even more ways to make the game as pleasant of an experience as possible. "We are interested in hearing your thoughts, and gathering your feedback! Please jump into the discussion on the subreddit and let us know what you think."

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