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The Xbox Live Police

It’s easy to overlook certain things in life. Like the people who make doorknobs or how milk gets from a cow to your refrigerator. Some things will always remain behind closed doors, or in this case, behind a black curtain.

In an all too typical Microsoft office a black curtain conceals a particular team of Microsoft employees who aren’t known by many. These individuals divide shifts amongst their team and work on average 18 hours a day, 365 days a year to protect the integrity of Xbox Live.

Whether it may be hackers, cheaters, account thieves, game code modifiers, or communication abusers, they are all policed by this team of individuals. They are Xbox Live’s Policy and Enforcement team, and odds are that if you find yourself communicating with one of these individuals, you are in big trouble.

The team is there to make sure Xbox Live is a safe environment that remains non-offensive for its users.

“If you’re playing a game on Xbox LIVE, and somebody snipes you from across the map and you drop the F-bomb, we’re not going to ban you – not for the occasional slip. We focus on the really bad stuff,” says Boris Erickson, Xbox LIVE Enforcement Unicorn Ninja. Yes, that is his actual job title.  

“We are not here to be the arbiters of all speech. But there are certainly some kinds of communication on Xbox LIVE that crosses a line – racism, homophobia, sexism, offensive comments about nationalities, and more.”

Each day the inboxes of Erickson and his coworkers pile high with complaints that they need to sift through. Issues could be as small as requesting a user to change a word from their profile, to having to work in conjunction with Law Enforcement for actual crimes.

Although the amount of complaints is ongoing, Erickson and his coworkers treat each case carefully,

“These are paid subscriptions we’re taking away, so we want to make sure we’re doing exactly the right thing.”

As it stands now Xbox Live is topping 35 million users as it incorporates an ever-widening range of gaming, entertainment, and communication features. With these numbers it would seem only natural that the amount of issues would multiply exponentially, but this doesn’t seem to be the case according to Stephen Toulouse, the team’s director.

“Looking at the stats, the cross-section of bad apples we deal with every day is small – typically less than one percent of the overall population,” Toulouse says. “The user complaint volume has tended to stay relatively flat compared to the line of new users. What that says to me is that our efforts are having an impact, and also that we’re broadening our audience. We’re bringing in different people that want to experience different things on Xbox LIVE, not just gaming, and at the end of the day that’s going to improve everything.”

When Toulouse first joined Xbox Live in 2007, things were a lot different. The service itself had yet to reach one million users online at the same time.

“Enforcement was literally done by one guy with a spreadsheet who would go through the complaints once a week,” Toulouse says.

Although, in hindsight we know that Xbox Live didn’t stay this way. After years of Xbox Live taking to hit the one million user mark, it only took one more year for them to double those numbers.

“We knew Xbox LIVE was going to explode,” Toulouse says. “We knew we were on the cusp of something huge, especially when we saw how many people came into the service with the launch of Halo 3.”

To combat the explosion of users on Xbox Live thanks to Master Chief, Toulouse and his team designed a program to help them sort through complaints with efficiency. The program is called Vulcan.

“It was designed on cocktail napkins, then coded and designed to allow people who do complaint investigations to do so in an efficient and accurate way,” Erickson says.

Toulouse and his team continue to work endlessly, ensuring that the Xbox Live experience is a friendly one. I find what they do to be amazing because I could barely fathom the monotony the job could entail sometimes.

“They are absolutely passionate about safety on Xbox LIVE,” Toulouse says. “I personally believe that when you buy your Xbox LIVE subscription, you are getting us ‘free in the box.’ Microsoft has invested in us, and we are invested in trying to make sure the experience is good.”

So remember boys and girls, there are things that go on behind closed doors, behind curtains, there are people who work endlessly, who make this world go ‘round, and they warrant respect.