Rainbow Six Siege is overhauling its multiplayer experience to filter out players who are known for hate speech. A new banning system will be rolled out to instantly ban players who give off hate speech, according to PC gamer. First time offenders will be banned from all aspects of Siege for a duration fo 30 minutes, the second and third time offenders who don’t get the message will be banned for two hours.

The Rainbow Six Siege Code of Conduct says that players who persist with toxic behavior could be banned permanently, invoking an official ‘investigation’ by the Ubisoft theme. “Fighting against toxicity and cleaning up the Siege environment is a very real and important issue,” reads Ubisoft’s Twitter post.

Acknowledging that its ban system still has issues and imperfections, the studio says that their new policy is working in the majority of the cases that they’ve been seeing. “We will continue to make changes and expansions as needed.”

Say no to Toxicity

The Rainbow Six Siege development team says in their message that their goal is three pronged:

• To track negative player behavior
• To manage those that behave poorly
• To implement features that will encourage players to improve their behavior

The auto-ban system in the game is automated and replaced words that Ubisoft deems to be offensive. This is part of their efforts on anti-toxicity.

Ubisoft is not alone in its efforts to weed out toxic players, other high profile games that want to purge hate speech include Blizzard’s Overwatch, and has already taken a few steps to fight bullying. According to Overwatch game director, Jeff Kaplan, the studio will experiment with machine learning to try making the Overwatch community a more ‘wholesome and welcome place for player’.

Their approach is similar to Ubisoft’s, in that, they will be implementing an auto-detect ban mechanism that will act much faster than players sending manual reports when they come across questionable behavior.

A number of players have already began to complain about getting banned after they used homophobic and racial slurs in chat. Many players took to the official Rainbow Six Siege Twitter account to voice their concerns. The majority of the outcry was focused on the fact that developers implemented a spontaneous ban-system with little to no banning. 

There is also a lot of ambiguity in what is considered to be ‘toxic’ and ‘hate speech’. The automatic system has reportedly created a new kind of toxicity when players trick each other into saying the offensive words and then get instantly banned.

Ubisoft has taken a similar approach to hackers who manage to intercept their servers and disrupt regular gameplay every now and then. Ubisoft’s blog post says that they have increased their ‘internal penetration testing efforts’ to discover weak points and correct them before cheat makers could exploit them.

It is true that online gaming, hacking and toxicity have become synonymous. It still remains to be seen what developers are going to do about it.