Microsoft's new online rules give cheaters and trolls 7 second chances before banning them for a year
It's like the old saying goes: Fool me once, shame on me, fool me a subsequent six times, also shame on me, but if you fool me an eighth and final time then, frankly, you're bang out of order and it's really time we did something about it. This, I assume, was the guiding mantra behind the Xbox enforcement strike system, a just-announced policy from Microsoft that aims to make the company's punishment mechanism a little clearer for players on the receiving end of it.
The new system is already in place, and Microsoft likens the way it works to «demerit strikes used in driver's license systems in many countries.» In essence, it's an 'eight strikes and you're out' system, with each new strike tier netting you a longer suspension until your eighth offence sees Microsoft boot you out of services like «messaging, parties and party chat, multiplayer and others» for a full year. There's even a handy enforcement history tracker so you can see how many strikes you've chalked up at any time.
But some offences are greater than others, so particular instances of bad behaviour will net you multiple strikes at once. Profanity and cheating, for instance, will only cost you one strike (and a consequent one-day suspension), while hate speech will instantly hit you with three strikes and a three-day suspension, which honestly seems a little low given the nature of the offence.
Your strikes all hang around for six months before expiring and can, naturally, be appealed, so you won't have to endure a strike on your record for the rest of your life just because you dropped an F-bomb in a round of Halo: Infinite one time.
Microsoft has even ginned up a little «Enforcement stacking user journey» image—which is quite a funny way to describe a
Read more on pcgamer.com
