Microsoft recruiting players to hunt Xbox trolls

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Microsoft is rolling out a pair of new initiatives to help hunt down their trolls. The first is Enforcement United, where Xbox players can sign up to serve justice to players who may be making the community a worse place. The second is Xbox Community Level, a program where players can level up and earn rewards by being a positive member of the Xbox Live collective, like volunteering for Enforcement United.

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At first, players will only be judging the appropriateness of other players’ Gamertags, looking for potentially bad ones that the built in filters didn’t catch. Despite present restrictions, attention-seeking players always seem to find a way to use numbers and wonky letters to spell out offensive identifiers for themselves.

There will be a system of checks and balances in place so players aren’t just arbitrarily punished, though I expect there will be some level of false positives as always tends to happen with “tribunal” style community judgment systems like this one. That said, I think it’s a good idea and could help, at least to some degree, to make gaming on Xbox Live more livable. Enforcement United is in its beta phase with this Gamertag analysis program, but there’s no reason to think it couldn’t extend to other aspects of someone’s profile or online habits as well.

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