Ubisoft Rolling Out New Tools to Fight Toxicity

Ubisoft has gone on-record saying that they plan on being more aggressive when it comes to fighting toxicity in their games, and in March, they even detailed the kind of punishments you could suffer if you found yourself on the receiving end of the banhammer. And now, they’re following up on those changes with some extra features and plans that will be implemented in order to vastly improve the gaming experience for everyone involved. Everyone except griefers, that is. Those guys are hopefully gonna stop catching so many breaks.

The first feature is perhaps the most obvious: you can now mute specific players in a match. This is something you’d think they’d have added sooner but better late than never. The second is an automatic filter – while that itself isn’t too strange, this one will actually warn the users that they’re being censored, and tell them why that is. An interesting way to shift responsibility to be sure. The third and final change will be monitoring how often users deploy certain slurs and dishing out bans to people who just use these terms too many times. Bans can range from two days to “forever,” if you manage to really piss people off.

You can expect a ban for:

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

It’s not an uncommon tool in games, but unfortunately, swearing is far from the only way people have to grief in this game where friendly fire is a given. And while Ubisoft has acknowledged that was a problem that they were going to tackle, they also said they’d be keeping tight-lipped about their plans for now.

I can see why. Figuring out algorithms to tell apart a legitimate missed shot to a deliberate attempt to troll can be tricky. But I hope they come out with a solution soon…