Xbox One 'employs advanced troll detection'

The Xbox One will have a number of new measures designed to ensure that anyone cheating or being abusive online won't ruin things for those playing fairly.

In an interview with Official Xbox Magazine, Microsoft's senior product manager Mike Lavin explained how a new reputation system and cloud support will both work together to ensure those who play by the rules will have a better experience.

While Party Chat will remain an option in Xbox One, Lavin says that Microsoft hopes more people will want to play online games while communicating with strangers, and that "in order to do that, you need a community of folks that aren't screaming vulgarities every ten seconds, or the griefers or the harassers, those types of folks."




According to Lavin, the new reputation system, which replaces the five-star system currently used on Xbox 360, means that "ultimately if there's a few per cent of our population that are causing the rest of the population to have a miserable time, we should be able to identify those folks."

He went on to suggest that players with similar reputations will be more likely to face each other during matchmaking.

"So there'll be very good things that happen to people that just play their games and are good participants. And you'll start to see some effects if you continue to play bad or, or harass other people en masse. You'll probably end up starting to play more with other people that are more similar to you."

Lavin was also quick to make it clear that players won't be able to deliberately reduce someone's reputation by getting a group of friends to give them negative feedback all at once.

"Let's just be clear, there is no way at all that a conglomerate of people can conspire to sink your Reputation on the system," he said.

"The way that it's built fundamentally stops that. 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."

The new reputation system aside, Lavin also claimed the Xbox 360's cloud support will also help prevent some players from cheating during games, since it will enable more developers to run their games from a dedicated server instead of resorting to direct player-to-player connections.

"I've read on forums that there a lot of assumptions that people are screwing around with their routers for some games and trying to gain unfair advantages," he explained. "We are dead set against cheating in every capacity, and we continue to make investments to root those folks out.

"Because we're offering all of this free compute power to Xbox One game creators, we're really advocating for server-based hosting. You're going to see a lot of that in Forza - Forza Motorsport 5 is server-based, so it kind of eliminates the ability to screw with your router and give the other person an unfair advantage.

"We believe that en masse, as people take advantage of our cloud compute offerings, that we should start to see a major drop in that problem, with player-hosted multiplayer."




Respawn Entertainment recently spoke about the benefits of cloud-based servers, with studio engineer John Shiring saying the cloud means cheaper dedicated servers for Titanfall.

The Xbox One will not come with a headset like the Xbox 360 did. Instead, Microsoft is saying Kinect should be a suitable alternative to a headset. For gamers who disagree, headsets will be sold separately. Current Xbox 360 headsets will be incompatible with Xbox One.