Vulcan 2 watches you from afar
The Explosion of Xbox LIVEWhen Toulouse joined Xbox LIVE in 2007, the entertainment service had not yet reached 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.
Though it took years to hit the one million user mark, it took one year to hit two million concurrent users.
“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.”
The folks at Xbox LIVE, including Toulouse, wanted to stay ahead of the game. He slowly started assembling a team, and they started designing a tool to help the team effectively police the growing community of users. The result was a software program called Vulcan to help enforcers handle and escalate complaints.
“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.
Enforcers are now using a brand-new version of this tool, called “Vulcan 2,” which makes sorting through complaints even faster. In fact, because all enforcers are experienced gamers, they also often use an Xbox controller to navigate their work.
Say one gamer is offering to sell cheating services, or another user in a multiplayer online game is spouting racial epithets into his or her microphone, or yet another registered an offensive gamertag. Enforcement agents will find out about it either via a complaint sent by another Xbox user or by experiencing it firsthand.