Like most people on this thread seem to think, I do like the concept of this but I'm a little worried by the execution of it. The big problem for me is that context seems to have no bearing on this. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong since I don't own an X-box, but live is an international thing right? So people from different countries and cultures will be interacting over it? What I'm getting at is the definition of offensiveness is subjective, so there is no way to tell if what I say is offensive to someone else (with obvious exceptions for blatantly offensive things said only to be offensive).
For example, my family is largely from Zimbabwe and South Africa, and the older people in my family, including my parents, still use the word coloured to describe non-white, non-black people. They're not racist, they just come from a different country, but if they were talking to people during a Halo match (why they would be on Halo I don't know....) and somehow the topic of South African ethnic-politics comes up and they say something about how coloureds need more representation, or have too much representation or whatever, and someone who didn't understand what they meant and was offended, they would be perma-banned? In a perfect world then there would be a system to stop that, like having individual judges or something to decide these things but for obvious reasons that is impossible, but a no-warning ultimate strike against anyone who dares say something that somebody else could even remotely misconstrue as offensive seems way too far, even though I would say it is in the right direction. The other problem is, as there is sometimes no way to tell context, people could think they are defending someone from abuse while in fact they just got that person's friend or girlfriend or boyfriend or partner or whatever banned for playful banter. So unless there is some magical way to immediately distinguish two friends exchanging good-natured racism/sexism/homophobia/etc (yes, those things exist) and someone actually being an obnoxious little freak, I can't see how this can really work.
A good example for the sexism thing would be my history prof. He believes that women should not work and that men should not play a large role in child-rearing because, according to him, biology makes women better at raising children and men better at making money, to the point that he has said that if his wife were to die than the kids would go to a foster home, since he believes that he, or any man, is too incompetent to raise the children without doing damage to them. While i obviously disagree with him on that, I would hardly call it sexism (well, not malicious sexism at any rate), he just comes from a different culture where it is okay to say those things. So why should he, or anyone else, be punished for not being "western" enough to understand what offends the western people he is interacting with?
I guess it all boils down to what my ethics prof used to say was the hardest debate in human history, "How many murderers do you let go free to avoid killing/incarcerating a single innocent, and how many innocents will you kill/incarcerate to punish a single criminal?" I'm sure that the majority of people who get banned this way do deserve it, but I for one don't abide punishing people whose only crime was being misunderstood or mistaken for somebody else in order to get the really guilty people. Not that anyone who disagrees with me on this is wrong or anything, but it all really boils down to personal opinion on what constitutes offensiveness and what constitutes appropriate punishment.
TL;DR, people have different concepts of what judges offensiveness based on culture, on familiarity with the people they are interacting with and on personal experiences. Unless the people enforcing this ban have a way of distinguishing the real offensive people from those who were just misunderstood, then this system is doomed to failure right out of the gate.
