Your Xbox Live reputation now includes more than just negative reports

The stereotypical Xbox Live experience is where you boot up a Mature-rated shooter like Call of Duty and end up matched against a team of racist, homophobic 12-year-old boys who don’t have parents. But Microsoft has developed ways of dealing with that, and it’s revealing how those systems work.

Xbox Live has a reputation system where repeat offenders can end up with penalties that should improve the quality of life for everyone else on the service, and Microsoft only partially determines that reputation based on negative reports from people you’ve annoyed. Instead, Xbox Live uses an algorithm that looks at data from the games themselves and even how often you end up muted relative to the rest of the online population. If you are constantly spamming “Cotton Eye Joe” by the Rednex over the voiceline, and everyone you play with mutes you every single match, Xbox Live can see that behavior and punish you for it.