Xbox One Reputation System Will Punish Badly Behaved Players

A scoring system for the Xbox One will punish players who behave badly online, and reward well-mannered players.

A "reputation" score will appear as part of players' Xbox Live profile, similar to their Gamerscore, and will fluctuate based on how often they are banned from matches, reported for swearing or cautioned by Xbox administrators.

Repeat offenders will find themselves with a negative reputation score, while players will clean or relatively clean slates, who play without cheating and without giving abuse to other players, will earn a good reputation.

Xbox Live's automatic matchmaking system, which pairs players up in competitive games, will separate well and badly behaved players, meaning that players with low reputations will be pitted against each other, while players with good reputations will be placed with other well behaved players.

Mike Lavin, a senior product manager at Microsoft, explained to Official Xbox Magazine that the reputation score would be just as visible as the existing Gamerscore, allowing players to make quick assessments of each other:

"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.

"You'll start to see some effects if you continue to play bad or harass other people en masse," Lavin continued. "You'll probably end up starting to play more with other people that are more similar to you."

The reputation score will not replace the Gamerscore, but will work similarly to the Xbox Achievements system, awarding players with extra points for consistent good behaviour online.

"Reputation is just like Achievements," Lavin continued. "You want your Reputation score as high as you can get it. There may even be opportunities where if you participate in some of our community programmes, your reputation can even get higher."

Xbox has not outlined yet exactly how the reputation score will look, whether it will be a slider bar or numerical points.