Microsoft: Muting non-friends has little impact on Xbox One’s Reputation system

Clarifying yesterday's post about the Xbox One's new reputation system, Microsoft has explained that muting random strangers you play with will result in "a minimal amount of feedback" in the system designed to help you avoid the "cheats or jerks."

As someone who enjoys online play, but seldom the voices that come along with it, muting is my good friend on Xbox 360. But with the Xbox One's new reputation system, which takes "feedback from a player’s online flow," there was some concern that muting someone could hurt their rep. Turns out that's not the case.

"Depending on the situation, manually muting a non-friend player may result in a minimal amount of feedback, but not at the same rate as reports of cheating or blocking a player," Microsoft clarified.

"Each feedback type in the reputation system is weighted differently based on a number of factors including the frequency with which the player has received the feedback. Muting a player has the least amount of feedback weight in the system.

"For example muting and unmuting the same person over and over will not affect a person's reputation, but if thousands of users across Xbox Live are muting a player in every game then that feedback would affect their reputation. And of course muting a friend has no impact on the friend's reputation," the company explained.

Microsoft also explained that there are other ways to control who you want to chat with on Xbox LIVE, like turning in-game chat off completely through the system's Settings. Or you can choose to chat with only friends through the Xbox One's Party system.

"Smart Match's new advanced Party system with Xbox One helps with communication by allowing parties (and members) to move in and out of game chat as desired as easily as a quick click," Microsoft reiterated.

My big concern with the new system isn't necessarily muting, but the trolls that could take advantage of such a system by just going around reporting people. But I suppose if this system is as smart as Microsoft is making it, the algorithm will recognize a player who does such things and will lower the weight of their feedback.

[Eurogamer]