I would have liked to begin this article by stating how Xbox LIVE is a cesspool of adolescent kids with nothing better to do than swear like truckers, spouting the most inane racist dribble as they tea bag your corpse over and over again.

However no matter how many times I find myself reminding others about the nature of the human beings that occupy Xbox LIVE the same message is returned to me. Everyone knows how bad Xbox LIVE can be and there are measures to counter it in order to make the service more enjoyable.

Everyone who has played on Xbox LIVE for a while knows the simple solution for players who demonstrate their incredibly low manners and vocabulary is to just simply mute them, block communications and submit an avoid player review. I admit this is a good solution for a short term solution but in the long run is it really doing any good?

Xbox LIVE was launched with the reputation system awarding players a star rating with a possible rating of five out of five stars. In Microsoft’s theory players would interact and give each other positive and negative reviews depending on interaction and gameplay and thus raise or lower this star rating or reputation. In theory it would have worked like Ebay’s rating system allowing users to spot other players who might not be fun to play with.

With the culmination of Xbox LIVE’s service and its evolution into the “Party System” (thanks to Halo 2) it became increasingly harder to avoid players. Players literally jumped into a match with others giving little to no time to see what the star rating was on the other team. Couple this with the popularity of Halo 2 and its millions of users signing up for the first time. Whoever was among the first to give the impression to these new players brought in by Halo 2 that it was acceptable to act so insulting and offensive towards others, I hope bad things happen to you. A lot of these offensive players could not be avoided and many of them brought their friends along with similar attitudes thus resulting in an insane shouting cavalcade after each and every game.

Now returning to Microsoft’s theory about the reputation system, any player who offended another in the above example and ruined their online fun should have a lower star ranking. The only problem is that the star ranking does not lower. Ever. There has been plenty of players who have been banned from Xbox LIVE, the Xbox.com forums and have had multiple “Avoid Player” reviews submitted on them but they still carry five stars. Ever since Halo 2 players submit avoid player reviews and file complaints for fun. While Xbox LIVE and Stepto (Leader of the Xbox LIVE Police) have taken measures against people abusing the complaint system, it is the reputation system that has problems.

To begin, the reputation system is completely broken. Many might say it works, others can claim that you can see your reputation and so can Microsoft but in the end that does not help the players. The reputation system does not accurately allow players to submit helpful reviews on players in order to accurately assess their gaming and social habits. You won’t be able to see if someone on the opposing team is a cheater or a foul mouthed teenager until it is too late. However the reputation system as it is now does not allow players to leave feedback without the potential for abuse.

There is a solution to the current broken reputation system and it requires an entire overhaul. There can be a rating system with numbers, stars or even Master Chief Heads, it doesn’t matter what image it used as long as it can go up or down in definite increments. Players are obsessed with raising rankings and numbers so this new rating system should have a minimum rating of one quarter (for starting players) and a maximum rating of 100% of the system. Therefore it cannot be lowered too much by players trying to abuse the system and it cannot be raised to infinite amounts.

There is a system already in place to discard multiple complaints filed by a player given to another player. The same should work towards player reviews but including the user’s friends list as well. This will prevent players from messaging their friends to try and abuse the reputation system. However the rating system has to be able to be lowered or raised factoring in unique users, number of reviews by those users and time between the reviews submitted. I would also encourage Microsoft to allow a system to comment on other users (similar to Ebay’s reputation system) but without heavy moderation and word censors this would grow out of hand in a matter of days.

If there is ever a change to the reputation system on Xbox LIVE to actually show which players are worth more than gold and which are the scum of the earth then I guarantee there will be an improvement in the overall atmosphere of Xbox LIVE. Players will be concerned about how they are perceived towards others and thus there will actually be some weight behind the decision to act like a complete idiot or to finally play nice with others.

By: Daniel Manella

XBL GT and G3 Community Tag: DSight