Rainbow Six Siege improving chat bans in war on toxicity
Shape up or ship out
In their ongoing mission to make people on the Internet behave, god damn it, just behave for five god damn minutes, Ubisoft this week are overhauling the system which bans players from Rainbow Six Siege for saying terrible things. Ubi already ban players for awfulness, but say this week's improvement "is going to make us significantly more efficient" in cracking down on racial and homophobic slurs and other hate speech.
Depending on how awful they are, players could be banned for two days, one week, fifteen days, or full-on forever. Ubi call this their "first step towards managing toxicity in Rainbow Six Siege", promising more changes to come. So please, just behave.
R6 Siege community developer Craig "Its_Epi" Robinson explained in Friday's Reddit post that they're cracking down on what the game's Code of Conduct already forbids: "any language or content deemed illegal, dangerous, threatening, abusive, obscene, vulgar, defamatory, hateful, racist, sexist, ethically offensive or constituting harassment".
If you're concerned about how this might affect you, consider that you're likely being a dick and making video games worse.
Robinson explains that the system will name and shame players too:
Players that receive a ban for toxicity will receive a pop-up that states their ban was the result of toxic behavior. A global message will also be displayed, similar to the current global broadcasts for cheating. It will read:
"Username has been banned for toxicity."
As for Ubi's other plans to clean up Siege, Robinson says that yes, they do have plans for fighting teamkilling too.
"It is not a low priority," he said in response to a shouty comment. "It is much harder to correct than monitoring chat." He promises more details on that, and other offensives in the war on toxicity, later.
Siege launches its next update, Operation Chimera, at 6pm on Tuesday. It's a biggun. It'll bring new operators and a new cooperative zombie-shooting event mode, along with removing unlock costs from more operators and plenty of other changes.