Mike Lavin, Microsoft's senior product manager, in an interview conducted with The Official Xbox Magazine, explained a handful of the design facets for the Xbox One's reputation system and how it will differ from the current reputation system on Xbox 360.
He admits that most people nowadays exclusively use Party Chat with their friends, effectively silencing any communication from other people, though the problem he sees is that "this fragments voice communication within games… because if you're isolated in Party Chat, you're leaving everybody else behind." Lavin believes that if the Reputation system removed all the harassers and trashtalkers, more players would be willing to play a multiplayer match without segmenting themselves into specific groups:
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 folk… There'll be very good things that happen to people that just play their games are good participants. And you'll start to see some effects if you continue to play bad or harass other people en masse. You'll probably end up starting to play more with other poeple that are more similar to you.
To prevent exploitation of the system, your reputation score will only sink if you're being a prick 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.
Hopefully, this means that their security for accounts is raised for the Xbox One, particularly in an age with people's accounts are hacked on a regular basis. Microsoft also isn't sure whether this new Reputation system will be represented by numbers or stars or what have you.
That said, the system looks to be stronger than the current system in which my reputation is apparently 25% Disruptive, 25% Aggressive, and 25% Unsporting. And I don't even play multiplayer games at all, really. (Or maybe I should wear that as a badge of honor as a writer for Game Revolution.)
