Like causing others grief? Such bad behavior will ultimately lock individuals in their own community bracket.

Gamers who enjoy indulging being a constant online annoynace on Xbox Live will soon find themselves cut off from the rest of us who tend to be more down to earth and civil. In an exclusive interview with OXM, Senior Product Manager Mike Lavin discusses an ambitious plan that will encourage good behavior and lock down the “griefers” for misconduct and objectionable behavior.

“There’s a lot of folks, a lot of our core consumers who just want to basically kick back and stay in touch with some of their old college buddies,” Lavin began. “That’s cool, and Party Chat today and our Party system is leaps and bounds ahead of competitors, from the standpoint of just being able to isolate yourself and cross-game chat.

In its current form, the Reputation system doesn’t really have any real teeth to it, so players sadly are still stuck with encountering copious amounts of bigotry, sexism or racial tones. As a result, this forces players to often host private parties in order to minimize the likelihood of encountering individuals that get their kicks from acting like an ass.

“There are industry best practices we’ve looked at, about giving kudos and props to people who behave well. We’ve learned from everything we’ve seen, and we’re trying to take it to the next level. So there’ll be very good things that happen to people that just play their games and are good participants. And you’ll start to see some effects if you continue to play bad or, or harass other people en masse. You’ll probably end up starting to play more with other people that are more similar to you.”

My biggest gripe with the Reputation system now is – it’s too easy to exploit. Players should be reported for conducting offensive behavior, or sending inappropriate messages (note: “trash talk” has its boundaries, but I must admit some folks are awfully sensitive.) In fighting games, this seems to be all too common (as I’ve experienced it first-hand simply from various players who have their own interpretations for what’s “cheap” or “dishonorable”.)

The system will be proof against exploitation, he continued. “Let’s just be clear, there is no way at all that a conglomerate of people can conspire to sink your Reputation on the system. The way that it’s built fundamentally stops that. It’s very much over a period of time – if we see consistently that people, for instance, don’t like playing with you, that you’re consistently blocked, that you’re the subject of enforcement actions because you’re sending naked pictures of yourself to people that don’t want naked pictures of you… Blatant things like that have the ability to quickly reduce your Reputation score.”

You can check out the entire article at OXM.