Ubisoft Begins Banning Gamers from Rainbow Six Siege for “Toxicity”

By 
·July 18, 2018

Video game company Ubisoft who makes Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, For Honor, The Crew, Skull and Bones, Watch Dogs, Rainbow Six Siege, and more is now banning gamers for what they describe as “toxicity” in Rainbow Six Siege.

The official Rainbox Six Siege Twitter would go on to clarify they are specifically banning people for “toxicity.”

The “toxicity” bot is actually automatically banning players and when asked about it, the official Twitter account pointed to a post on their Developer’s blog from April.

In the blog post, Ubisoft’s development team for Rainbox Six Siege writes:

“Toxicity management is a priority we will be focusing on as a team over the next few years, and we have a few different ways we plan on dealing with it. Our end goal is to track negative player behavior, manage those that behave poorly, and eventually implement features that will encourage players to improve their behavior.”

They revealed they are tracking the frequency of racial and homophobic slurs used by players and announced a ban system that involves four strikes. The first ban gets you 2 days, the second 7 days, the third 15 days, and the fourth is permanent. They did clarify that this isn’t a progression of bans and you can be permanently banned without receiving a warning. They described what constitutes a ban:

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

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Players of the game are not happy with Ubisoft’s deployment of the automatic ban system without an in-game announcement. Many of them questioned why Ubisoft did not reveal a list of banned words and had suggestions for solving the problem instead of insta-banning players.

One user was even banned for referring to another user named ChinkinArmour, as “Chink.‘ All he was doing was trying to determine which users were in his parties.

And another user got banned for referring to himself as “Paki.”

There was at least one person who applauded Ubisoft’s decision:

Like DC Comics Social Media Guideline, Ubisoft’s automatic ban filter seems to be up to the whims of their programmers. They are the ones who will choose what they deem “illegal, dangerous, threatening, abusive, obscene, vulgar, defamatory, hateful, racist, sexist, ethnically offensive or constituting harassment.” If you cursed out of emotion at an opponent after you just got gunned down, can you expect Ubisoft to ban you? If you tell someone, “I’m gonna kill you,” in a game about killing your opponents, will you be banned? Could that be deemed threatening by their bot? How are players supposed to know what exactly will get them banned if they have absolutely no idea.

Not only are their guidelines extremely vague, but they way they rolled out this ban was highly deceptive. Consumers should have known about this option or known it was being developed before they purchased the product. As some of the players and fans above mention, Ubisoft doesn’t care now that you’ve already purchased the game.

What do you think about Ubisoft’s automatic ban policy? Will it prevent you from purchasing future Ubisoft games?

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