PUBG’s latest update adds a souped-up new sports car, more improvements to test out in the lab version, and most importantly a reputation system that will try to give you a score based on how toxic you are as a player. That sounds amazing. More games should have this.
Out today as part of patch 10.2, the reputation system will assign players a number of zero through five, with five being the least toxic and zero being the most. “Keeping in-game interactions healthy is important to us,” the game’s development team writes. “We know passions can run high on the Battlegrounds, but toxic behavior is never justified.”
Just playing the game will naturally raise your reputation level to five, but abandoning matches or doing stuff that gets you reported by other players will slowly bring it down. Not surprisingly, being suspended or banned for cheating will also bring it down. The number is then displayed as a warning next to players’ in-game names and on Team Finders.
It’s not clear if players’ reputations will come into play in some way during matchmaking. Recently, multiplayer games like Apex Legends and Fall Guys have taken to sending ne’er-do-wells to cheater islands so they’re kept from ruining the game for anyone else. Using a reputation system to matchmake assholes with one another seems like an obvious evolution of that concept, and the logic of battle royales in general.