Look, Louis C.K. taught me that the word fag has nothing to do with gay and how it is actually an awesome insult that means like asshole or something. The whole suck a dick thing is totally not a gay slur either.
To think otherwise just means you are being way to PC … or something.
MAC addresses do not travel over routers and are only used at a switch level. Also you can change your mac address on windows fairly easily:
And let’s not forget C.K.'s bit on sucking a bag of dicks:
Because they make money for the service. The multiplayer services exist to generate revenue which, like spam emails, rely on some small fraction of a percentage of their marks (players, in this case) generating money through their scam (microtransactions, in this case).
The costs for running a multiplayer service are: Dev Costs + Hosting Costs*time. The revenue from running a multiplayer service can be represented as Number of Users * fraction who spend money * decreasing function of time.
With a large enough “Number of Users”, you can handle a really small “fraction who spend money” and a really sharply-declining “decreasing function of time” to cover ever-increasing “Dev Costs”.
tll;dr - The services are disincentivized to decrease the size of their communities. It would take some heavy proof that non-toxic communities outsize (or at least outspend or outlast) toxic communities to change the existing equation. And even then, AAA Gaming is one of the most risk-adverse industries in software (and, yes, I’m including IBM), so I wouldn’t expect them to ever voluntarily police the community that lays the golden egg.
So either prepare a market force or a legislative force that will require them to change, or do as I do and don’t play multiplayer games except with friends.
(( Okay, that’s a little doom-and-gloom. Let’s keep upbeat: there’s a chance that communities can self-police. Using mechanisms the developers may or may not have intended for the purpose, you and like-minded others can blacklist/shun/devalue toxic players until they leave on their own. This requires a grassroots movement emphasizing civility over toxicity, and is much more possible than you think ))
Because generally on a console you’re paying Microsoft or Sony for the privilege of playing online, and if they banned all the arseholes, they’d make less money.
tl/dr $$$
I know you can spoof your windows MAC, but I don’t think you can do that on a console game. Maybe you can.
For some reason, I thought they recorded that when you connected. I’d think at the least they would have your serial, though.
I looked on the MS Xbox site and they say they can and will block devices for breaking the conduct rules.
Not sure how often they do that, though…
Yea, I get that, but either you have code of conduct rules or you don’t -
I used to get this all the time, and I never understood it.
When I was a lot younger, I liked to fight and was good at it. Dumb guys (almost always drunk) were always trying to pick a fight (I’m 6’3, 250 lbs, and at the time was working as a roofer and had muscles from hard work and about 2% body fat.) It was almost always over with about one punch. And it was always guys who had no chance… 5’8, 220, fat, slow, big spare tire, and drunk besides.
Then I joined the Navy, and found out there are a lot of guys who are good at it, and some who were better than me. I lost my taste for it. 
Good point. They very well could use the mac address or other ID and have the system send it on connection with the server using a protocol higher up the stack. I’m really not sure what info MS collects in that regard.
Usually the companies running these services don’t have enough staff - they can’t have someone sitting there and listening to every game in progress. Also many just don’t care unless it is something that could bring them legal liability (like someone making death threats).
Same for PC server owners. Unless there is an admin logged on and playing (and actually caring), nothing will happen. Heck, even outright cheaters often don’t get banned and you want that someone actually polices verbal abuse?
The various “Report abuse” buttons don’t really work because someone has to review the behaviour, determine whether or not it breaks some rule and then punish the player. And this queue is often flooded by whiners who complain that everyone who happens to be better than them has to be cheater, people wanting to take revenge on others by falsely reporting them, various trolls and griefers who just want to wreak havoc, etc.
It is a complex and messy problem and probably as old as online communities. If you are playing with people physically close to you, you usually keep your mouth in check or you could get a black eye or a broken nose. However, the anonymity of Internet and the physical distance empowers many of these cowards to do things they wouldn’t dare to do in reality. Just look at the entire disgusting GamerGate story or the abuse (including death threats) people get on Twitter. It is exactly the same issue. Before Twitter it was on forums, even before that Usenet or BBSes …
Well, that too, but I think it simply comes down to resources.
In order to police verbal abuse someone has to actually listen to the game in progress. It is not something that can be automated, like common scanning for cheats. Can you imagine the amount of extra staff that would be needed for this? And in how many languages? People can abuse you in Russian or French as well, or call you Jude (Jew) in German.
Offline policing with the “report abuse” buttons still requires someone to actually review the issue and the voice chat is usually not even recorded in the first place (tons of space would be required).
It doesn’t have to be live. Record all audio into a ringbuffer about, say, 180s long. When you hit “Report Abuse”, dump the buffer to a file and open up the bugreporter.
Hell, the PS4 has a full video+audio ringbuffer baked-in for social media. Leverage that and you’re solid.
Mix in some machine learning for autotranscription and correlating text streams with known toxic speech and you have an excellent first-pass filter.
A pity Google’s not interested in the space. They have the data, the money, the know-how, and the platform to semi-automate this thing.
Should work about as well as YouTube take downs.
For all it’s faults, the Soviet state was far in advance of the US when it came to women’s rights.
That is a point, Xbox likely has at least a serial number that it sends to Microsoft and they can probably ID specific consoles.
Interestingly, that’s a more difficult problem that they’re trying to solve there, but yeah. Google (or at least YouTube) hasn’t exactly shown themselves capable of building human systems around their machine learning.
Welp, so much for that idea.
Yeah, I started thinking about back years back with the realization “you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy” aptly describes Xbox Live on a Saturday night Call of Duty game.
Cynically, yup, there is the money angle. That’s valid.
Also, even setting aside MAC addresses, once you start banning people the company creates a sort of meta-game. The Sims Online tried to moderate behavoir with a ‘karma’ score - which wound up creating what one article refered to as The Dollhouse Mafia ( Building Web Reputation Systems: The Blog: The Dollhouse Mafia, or "Don't Display Negative Karma" ) wherein players would be shaken down for in game currency or be reported. I’m not saying better systems couldn’t exist or shouldn’t be pursued but simple concepts can be difficult to execute as planned.
Then there’s the positive reinforcement to consider, if I’m getting my Skinner lingo correct. I love playing games with and against friends and friendly strangers, but repeatedly zotting someone’s avatar or winning a race/game/etc as they’re midway through some hateful screed** and hearing them get increasingly worked up provides a very different level of reward. It’s crossed my mind that games might be using a subset of players who are prone to inappropriate behavior to make gameplay more satisfying for others.
…Usually when I start thinking this I stop playing whatever that game is. I’m either overthinking or I’m right, and neither conclusion feels good. 
** I’d like to be clear that I’m addressing these people in the context of a game we’re playing by mutual choice, not engaging them verbally. ( I’m too conflict adverse )
Which is a big reason I don’t play… and never considered purchasing the game.
I have always been amazed at how quiet the official Valve TF2 servers are. Even most of the community servers are quiet other than heads up to things happening in game. Also Valve is quick with the boothammer to that kind of behavior from what I have noticed. I have no clue about CSGo though it seemed more chatty when the kid was playing that for a bit.
You would still have to have a human in the loop to actually review this. The recording is the easy part.
Google will not want to touch something like that - first, there is no actual money in it, second, the speech recognition technology is far from reliable, especially when trying to recognize various accents, mixed languages, slang and swearing. 10% or more false positives are common. When dictating a question to Siri or Android Now it doesn’t really matter, but imagine the uproar if people started to get randomly banned only because some algorithm mistook “pucker” for “fucker”. And when it comes to recognizing the actual context in which the word was uttered, the situation is even bleaker - “fag” could also mean a cigarette, for example … Such thing could pretty much kill the company that was so foolish as to field something like that.
