It’s pretty well known that the communities that surround the MOBA genre, whether it be the original DOTA or the newer incarnations such as DOTA2, League of Legends or Heroes of Newerth, are spectacularly hostile. Indeed in the beginning when DOTA was just a custom application many people relied on 3rd party ban services, many of which relied on user generated lists to filter out bad people. Of course these being user generated led to a lovely hate cycle where people would simply ban whoever they felt like. Once you were past that barrier it didn’t get much better with any requests for help or misunderstanding of certain mechanics usually earning you a place on those lists. It was for this reason that many of us just stopped playing the original DOTA, the community around it was just horrifically toxic.
There was hope that the newer entries into the MOBA scene would help to alleviate this somewhat as a fresh platform would give the community a chance to reinvent itself. Unfortunately, at least in my experience on HoN (I only played 3~4 games of LoL), the same toxic community sprouted once again and I found myself wondering why I was bothering. DOTA2 started out the same way with my first few games being marred by similar experiences but there was enough to the game that kept me coming back and something strange started to happen: the people I was playing with were becoming infinitely better. Not just in terms of skill but in terms of being productive players, those with an active interest in helping everyone out and giving solid criticism on improving their play.
Initially most of that was due to me moving up the skill brackets however there was still a noticeable amount of toxicity even at the highest skill levels. What really made the change however was the introduction of communication bans, a soft ban mechanism that prevents a player from communicating directly with their team, limiting them to canned responses and map pings. Whilst the first week or two were marred with issues surrounding the system, although I do bet a few “issues” were people thinking they were in the right for abusing everyone, soon after the quality of my in game experience improved dramatically. It’s even got to the point where I’ve had people apologize for losing their cool when it’s pointed out to them something which has just never happened to me before in an online game.
It was then interesting to read about Microsoft’s new reputation system that they’ll be introducing with the Xbox One. Essentially there’s 3 levels of reputation: “good players” which compromise most of the gaming community, “needs attention” a kind of warning zone that tells you that you’re not the saint your mother says you are and finally “avoid me” which is pretty self explanatory. It’s driven by an underlying score that centers on community feedback so a group of jerks can’t instantly drop you to avoid me nor can you simply avoid a game for a couple months and have it reset on you. Additionally there’s a kind of credibility score attached to each player so those who report well are given more weight than those who report anyone and everyone who looks at them the wrong way.
Considering my experience with the similar system in DOTA2 I have pretty high hopes for the Xbox One’s reputation system to go a fair way to improving the online experience on Xbox Live. Sure it won’t be perfect, no system ever is, but you’d be surprised how quickly people will change their behavior when they get hit with something that marks them as being a negative impact on the community. There will always be those who enjoy nothing more than making everyone else’s online life miserable but at least they’ll quickly descend into an area where they can play with like minded individuals. That avoid me hell, akin to low priority in DOTA2, is a place that no one likes to be in for long and many are happy to pay the price of being a nice person in order to get out of it.
