Earlier this summer, Ubisoft implemented an autoban system in Rainbow Six Siege that hit players with an automatic timeout (or permanent ban for repeat offenders) for dropping racist or homophobic slurs in chat. Brand director Alexandre Remy said a couple of months later that Ubi had "no regrets" about banning toxic players, but added that the feature would "evolve … to be a little more flexible" in the future.
In a blog post released today, Ubisoft laid out the next step in that evolution: A chat filter that will flag potentially offending messages for review and prevent them from being broadcast, but will not automatically impose timeouts or permabans.
"Upon review, we found that the automatic ban feature, while effective at curtailing bad behavior, was intrusive to the gameplay of other players not engaging in the inappropriate activity," Ubisoft explained.
"The goal of the chat filter is to encourage players to be vigilant with the language they are using without immediately disrupting other players. While we valued the performance against toxicity that the auto-ban system brought, we also wanted to provide a more transparent feedback system to our players. The chat filter system will not only give direct feedback to players who are using toxic language, but will continue to allow us to provide appropriate sanctions to offending players."
Under the new system, which is set to go live today, players who cross the line will be told, "The following message was not sent and will be review for inappropriate conduct." Ubisoft said that manual reviews for toxicity will continue as they have over the past few years.
