According to Rainbow Six Siege‘s official Twitter account, Ubisoft is commencing a soft launch of the Privacy Mode a.k.a Streamer Mode.
Ubisoft’s tactical shooter Rainbow Six Siege has lacked a proper streamer mode for ages. The devs acknowledged that because of technical difficulties they had to delay the release of this much-anticipated setting.
However, with the release of the mid-season patch today, some Privacy Mode features have also been added silently.
Why a soft launch?
“We want development on Privacy Mode to be iterative, with a cycle of taking feedback, making improvements, and live (but restricted) testing throughout.
This will let us improve the mode for everyone by working closely with players who actively use and stress-test it.”
WHEN? WHERE?
“Once the soft launch participants and our teams are happy with Privacy Mode, the rollout will continue, first to PC players, then console players with the full release (target mid-2022).
Meanwhile, we’ll keep making improvements based on growing sources of feedback.”
For now, only selected participants will get access to these new privacy options. These options include:
- Appear as Nickname: This will allow our players to create and use a custom temporary display name to be used directly in-game without losing their legacy name. These will not be cross-linked and can be changed at any time, which will add more friction to malicious players’ process of griefing.
- Appear as “You”: Both your legacy and alternative generated names can be a primary indicator used by malicious players to follow you from match to match. To reduce any collateral effects, this option will replace the player’s name on their screen with “You” so that somebody viewing their livestream, for example, cannot determine their displayed username.
- Hide Other Players: The use of surrounding information is also part of the problem and can contribute to the identification of a specific match. To alleviate this, this option generates pseudonyms for all usernames on the streamer’s screen in a match session except their own. This applies to both teammates and opponents in the match.
- Account Identity Privacy: Additionally, we’ll be testing an experimental iteration of account privacy settings to conceal the Ubisoft account name (with a randomly generated username) and profile avatar of users to protect their name on the platform. This will prevent stream snipers from using third-party tools to reveal streamer identities. Note: depending on the success of the test, this may not be available for public release.
The news has already got Siege streamers quite excited, and they are hopeful that this feature will make their Siege experience more enjoyable.
