Rainbow Six Ban System Being Weaponized Among Players

Last week, the Rainbow Six: Siege fanbase discovered that the team at Ubisoft had implemented an automatic ban for the use of racial and otherwise hateful slurs. This of course was discovered first-hand through people getting banned for using the language, which says all that needs to be said about why this algorithm was implemented in the first place. But now that the cat is out of the bag, thanks to some cheeky tweets from the game’s official Twitter account, some unexpected and borderline hilarious results have followed.

As reported by Gamezone, certain sects of Rainbow Six: Siege players have started weaponizing the automatic Rainbow Six ban system, by goading and otherwise tricking other players into using slurs in order to trigger the bans. The bans are not permanent at first, scaling up on multiple offenses, so these players feel emboldened to use this tactic against players they’re upset with, or to just be jerks and grief people. This includes of course words that have arguable common usage, such as another word for raccoon that the creators of South Park, for example, have managed to safely use in public. Here’s a quote that says as much, found in the Rainbow Six: Siege Reddit community:

I feel like a dick, but I used this to my advantage earlier today. In a ranked game I typed in chat “don’t be racist”, and an enemy got instantly kicked because I baited him into typing something racist,” and “had someone asking “what is a nickname for raccoons” people are trying to bait hard right now.

This is some wacky stuff, and is even a little funny, but it also shows the inherent flaws is automated moderation. Of course, it’s equally as difficult to manually moderate heavily populated video games as well. It almost makes the whole thing seem like a lose/lose for developers and publishers who don’t want their games bogged down in trolls. We’ll see how Ubisoft chooses to react/respond to this, if at all.

[Source: Gamezone]