Anyone who’s played even a single round of Halo or Call of Duty over Xbox Live is already familiar with the childish banter that permeates so many online games. Unfortunately, those with less than stellar personalities soon realized that playing games online is almost as anonymous as a message board, so it didn’t take long for these jerks to start spewing nonsense in nearly every online game.

This is why, when I play games online, I am always in a party. With the Xbox One, Microsoft is taking steps to remedy this. More after the break.

With the Xbox One, they’re introducing something called the Reputation system. Essentially what it does is go a few steps further than the Xbox 360’s current five-star rating system by monitoring how often a player is muted, reported, blocked, etc., and once a pattern is recognized, that person will be placed with people more like themselves.

Basically, it isolates trolls and matches them with players who are also troll-like, leaving the rest of us to play with decent human beings.

“If people are in your friends list, we’re not touching that, we’re just making it easier for you to come together,” senior product manager Mike Lavin told OXM. “It’s really the anonymous side of things where we’re making these investments. Ultimately if there’s a few percent of our population that are causing the rest of the population to have a miserable time, we should be able to identify those folks.”

“It’s very much over a period of time — if we see consistently that people, for instance, don’t like playing with you, that you’re consistently blocked, that you’re the subject of enforcement actions because you’re sending naked pictures of yourself to people that don’t want naked pictures of you… Blatant things like that have the ability to quickly reduce your Reputation score.” he continued.

Sounds fantastic. Now, all Microsoft needs to do is bundle a mic with every Xbox One so I don’t have to hear everything it picks up in each player’s room. Once that’s fixed, I’ll consider leaving the relative peace and quiet of a party.

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