You get to meet all kinds of new people playing games online, and some of them just want to yell at everyone. Valve has a new system in the works for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that will automatically turn down the noisy players and keep communication less prone to flaming.
Our sister site The Loadout flags a post over at the official Counter-Strike blog that explains the concept behind the forthcoming system. Valve says it plans to implement a targeted system for warning and then penalizing players who receive repeated reports from their teammates.
“We’ve been working on a new system that will work more precisely,” the post reads. “When the new system is fully deployed, players will receive a warning if they receive significantly more abuse reports than other players.”
The post continues: “If they ignore that feedback and continue to receive abuse reports, they’ll receive a penalty: they will be muted by all other players by default. This ‘default mute’ state will remain until the player earns enough XP to remove the penalty, but other players can choose to manually unmute the user (as they would any other muted player).”
The main strength of this concept may be its simplicity. Abuse reports lead to a simple flip of a switch that other players don’t have to consciously bother with, but can overturn at their discretion. The muted player can continue to play, earn XP, and eventually have the default mute status removed.
Valve is building in some safeguards against this system being abused, too. It says it will give more weight to reports from players who play more and report less frequently, which means spamming reports won’t be an effective way to abuse the new system.
The CS:GO team says it’ll be considering player feedback on this new system, so email them if you have concerns or ideas.