Ubisoft will beef up its ban system in Rainbow Six Siege next week, targeting players using racial and homophobic slurs or hate speech in-game, it has announced. The company will ban players for either two, seven, or 15 days depending on severity, and will permaban the worst offenders, it said in a Reddit post.
It will look at each incident on a "case-by-case" basis, and it sounds like the new system will be able to identify hate speech automatically: when asked whether this was the case, a Ubisoft representative said the system will not be "reliant on user reports".
Those reports will, however, often "lead to a faster resolution", and Ubisoft said it will be "helpful" if players send in any evidence of toxic behaviour that they've seen in the past. So, retroactive bans are possible. Players will be able to appeal bans, as they would normally.
The company's code of conduct forbids “any language or content deemed illegal, dangerous, threatening, abusive, obscene, vulgar, defamatory, hateful, racist, sexist, ethically offensive or constituting harassment”.
Ubisoft stressed that the system will not target simple trash talk. "We understand that it is a competitive game and there will be some degree of trash talking/'swear words' used. We are expecting people not to take it too far with slurs and hate speech. We're really focusing on slurs, homophobic language, and similarly offensive toxicity," it said.
It all seems fair and reasonable, and I think it'd be great if we had more systems like this in other competitive online games.
