Ubisoft is no longer issuing instant bans for hate speech during Rainbow Six: Siege matches.

Back in March, the developer made the decision to curb toxicity by applying instant bans ranging from two-day to permanent on use of racist, homophobic or otherwise hateful text chat.

Now Ubisoft is rolling this back - the company still wants to hold a firm line against hate speech in its competitive shooter, but there were some key flaws with this shotgun approach to toxicity.

“As a part of our efforts to address toxicity, we previously implemented an automatic ban feature for inappropriate language,” said Ubisoft, in a blog post announcing the change.

“Upon review, we found that the automatic ban feature, while effective at curtailing bad behaviour, was intrusive to the gameplay of other players not engaging in the inappropriate activity.”

“Therefore, the current system for auto-bans is evolving to improve the experience for all players, including those behaving appropriately. The goal of the chat filter is to encourage players to be vigilant with the language they are using without immediately disrupting other players.”

The new system will instead mute flagged words in text chat, replacing the message with a warning to other players. The offending player will then be reviewed by moderators who can choose to apply bans as usual.

The updated anti-toxicity system came into force on December 10th.