If Not, He Wants to Make It Possible Import/Export Banned User Lists to Various Networks
Banning has been basically the last resort to use for people who have been cheating, behaving badly, and various behaviors of that ilk. Sometimes it’s only temporary, and sometimes it’s for much longer. The problem lies in that while that one player may be banned on one console, they can simply move onto another. Phil Spencer, the current head of Xbox, wants to change that.
In speaking with the New York Times, he said that he wanted to someday implement a Cross-Platform banning program. This would ensure that bad actors (as people who behave badly are sometimes called) would not just be banned from one platform, but all of them. And he says it’s not just what he wants, but Microsoft wants as well.
While currently there is a Report a User Button, and an AI that is used to “monitor the sentiment of a conversation” to detect “when a conversation is getting to a destructive point”, it’s not the same as ensuring bans across not just on one platform, but all of them. And while this would be a “hard one” to implement, it doesn’t stop him from wanting to see it someday.
“Something I would love us to be able to do–this is a hard one as an industry–is when somebody gets banned in one of our networks, is there a way for us to ban them across other networks?” Spencer said. But if this was not possible, he would be open to the alternative of importing banned lists from other consoles onto another platform.
“And I’d love to be able to bring them to other networks where I play. So this is the group of people that I choose not to play with. Because I don’t want to have to recreate that in every platform that I play video games on,” said Spencer.
This is a good idea and something that likely players who play multi-platform have wanted for a while. But this would require the cooperation of rival companies working together to ensure this worked, with a ton of communication between them.
Still, there was a time where cross-play was not possible. Now it is, at least with some games. Maybe cross banning can happen too, in the future.