Wow!  Lots of comments/emails from that last post.  Seems others have been trolled on Live too.

So there's a positive too:  there are a host of decent, very nice people playing Halo 2 on Live.  People who have the courtesy to say "good game" even after they trounce you...or get trounced.

It must be a difficult problem for the Live admins.  (totally uninformed ranting to follow, which does not reflect Microsoft's position only my own, and does not contain any inside information)

The Live folks probably work under several constraints:

*  they have to increase the # of subscriptions

*  stupid people cause regular people to leave

*  stupid people also pay for their subscriptions

*  feedback is subjective; who knows what feedback I've got?

So they have to balance booting with subscription counts, keeping in mind that a certain number of judicious bootings will actually increase the number of Live subscriptions--by making it a more pleasant place to be. 

They have to keep false positives low--unfairly booting a decent person due to negative feedback probably left by trolls is a bad thing.

Ultimately the most reliable boot-decider would be for Live admins to sit in and listen to games.  I don't know how many Live accounts there are, but it's millions--so they can't all be monitored.  Perhaps they listen to the accounts with the most negative feedback to decide; I don't know.

The constraints above sound like a system highly amenable to statistical analysis.  I don't know if the Live team has taken a rational modeling approach to it and set it up as an optimization problem.  Seems doable though; I'll have to ask my statistician PhD buddy John how hard/easy it would be.  I'm just a dumb biochemist/doctor/developer :)

Or, how about a code solution?  Perhaps a voice-recognition bot that caught racial slurs and other nastiness and flagged the account?  It sounds Orwellian, but it _is_ a subscription service--not the town square.  After a very few flaggings the abusive user would get a sysadmin message next time they logged into Live warning them...

Live Team--if ya'll are listening, I'm ready to code.  I want Live to be the finest online gaming, period.