Rainbow Six Siege Is Getting New Ways to Fight Toxicity

Ubisoft is continuing the battle against toxicity by implementing some new measures in Rainbow Six Siege that include the option to mute text chat and a crackdown on team killing.

In an announcement on the Ubisoft blogs for Rainbow Six Siege, the game’s team announced their intentions to combat the negative player that’s frequently found in Siege.

“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,” the announcement said. “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.”

Ubisoft then outlined all of the changes that’ll be implemented throughout this year’s Rainbow Six Siege seasons that start with Chat Monitoring as explained below.

Chat Monitoring

Unless players get creative with their in-game griefing or start killing off their teammates, the chat feature in Rainbow Six Siege and other games is where much of the toxicity will come from. To combat that, Ubisoft is monitoring the chat for offensive language that could be considered illegal, threatening, abusive, obscene, or any of the other descriptors that violate the Code of Conduct that’s already in place.

“We are currently tracking the frequency at which racial or homophobic slurs are used by individual players, and will be applying bans with increasing severity on a case-by-case basis,” the update continued.

Ubisoft added that the following types of bans can be levied against players but stressed that the list is not a strict progression of bans and that more severe cases can warrant harsher punishments or permanent bans.

• 2 Days
• 7 Days
• 15 Days
• Permanent

MUTE TEXT CHAT FUNCTION

But even if Ubisoft is monitoring the chat for offensive language, it can still only be acted on after the fact when players have already been subjected to the toxicity. To help prevent players from having to deal with others who are constantly flaming through chat, Ubisoft is also planning on adding a Mute Text Chat Function that’ll allow players to customize their mute preferences.

“We want to put more power in our player’s hands to manage their own online experience. As such, giving you direct control over communication channels is important. We are working on allowing players to mute players individually for each player in the game. For example, you can mute the text chat of player A, the voice chat of player B, text and voice for player C, and neither for player D.”

An estimated release timeframe for this feature is sometime during Season 3, though that’s subject to change.

CHAT FILTERING

Another anti-toxicity chat feature that’s planned for a Season 3 release is a Chat Filtering system that’ll monitors chat and automatically censors offensive words or phrases.

“Our team is working on the creation of an automated system that will censor text chat in game based on a chat filter list. This will replace words that have been identified as offensive and provide players with a notification that their language was found to be unacceptable. We will also be tracking the number of times players trigger this filter and will take action as necessary for players that are intentionally having a negative impact on other player’s gaming experience.”

Like other games’ chat filters, these types of defenses can still be circumnavigated by purposefully misspelling words or getting creative with your insults, but that’s when you’ll be thankful for the Mute Text Chat Function that’s also expected to release in Season 3.

Team Killing

And finally, there’s Team Killing, a problem that many games face but one that’s particularly prevalent in Rainbow Six Siege.

Keeping in line with the realistic firefights where one or two well-placed bullets can easily put down an enemy, friendly fire has been kept in place to further bolster the realistic gameplay. While Ubisoft is remaining tight-lipped about the details of how the system will work so as to avoid players outsmarting the system, Team Killing improvements are coming with an ETA of Season 2.

“Intentional team killing is an issue in Rainbow Six, and our current method of addressing it is being improved. The goal is to track long term offenders across multiple games and sessions that slip through the cracks of our current team kill detection system. We cannot provide too many details on this, as it will lead to exploiting.”

As these changes roll out, Ubisoft stressed that the Siege team is committed to combating the toxicity in the game and will continuously explore more changes. In the meantime, player feedback is welcome to add to and adjust the list of anti-toxicity measures.