In recent weeks, Microsoft has briefly discussed
a coming overhaul of the Xbox Live reputation system on the Xbox One. The aim, the company says, is to segregate the worst griefers and antisocial players from those who know how not to be jerks.
It’s a great concept, but the devil is always in the details when you’re trying to create a largely automated system to pick out bad apples ruining an online community. With that in mind, we talked to Micheal Dunn, senior program manager of Microsoft SmartMatch, to get the details on just how the Xbox One will determine who is worthy of a bad reputation.
The Xbox 360 already has a reputation system, but Dunn noted that it was created back in the pre-Facebook world of 2005, when Microsoft had less experience handling the complex relationships in an online community of millions. “It was a system where you had a reputation and stars from users and things like that, but it wasn’t necessarily targeted toward having a really hard barrier between people who have a low reputation and people who have a high reputation. It was more of a soft barrier.”
