Ubisoft plans to introduce some important quality-of-life updates to Rainbow Six Siege in Year 6 Season 3.
In their new top issues blog, R6S devs have highlighted upcoming improvements to flash consistency, skin visibility, and more bug fixes that will make lives a lot easier for Siege players.
Some cosmetic skins in Rainbow Six Siege have been a source of major frustration for many players. Skins such as the Ember Rise bundle are being used to gain an upper hand in the field, as they easily blend in with the map environment. To mitigate this issue, the devs want to add a rim lighting effect to operators, similar to the one that was accidentally added before.
Other upcoming improvements include better flash grenade detection, loadout reset fix, revamped flinch animation, and more. Check out what the devs had to say below.
MPROVED FLASH DETECTION + CONSISTENCY
The goal here is to make flash detection more reliable and to give players confidence in this type of utility by improving its consistency. Basically, when you throw a flash, we want you to know how this will affect your opponents and the environment. The solution that we’re working on simulates the light bouncing off objects in the immediate environment, and the results we’re seeing are encouraging. We’re currently evaluating the strength of flashes and are excited for players to get a chance to test this change soon!
Status: Y6S3
ENEMIES ARE TOO HARD TO SEE WITH CERTAIN SKINS EQUIPPED
We know that certain operator skins are well-known for blending into some environments, and this has led to situations where players felt they were at an unfair disadvantage. Our solution is to add a rim lighting effect to operators. So far, we’re quite happy with the results and feel it is cohesive with the art style of the game. We are in the process of aligning on the colour of the rim lighting, and ensuring the effect is consistent across the game’s many unique cosmetics.
At the end of the day, we want players to be able to choose the cosmetics they want without gaining an unfair advantage of any kind.
Status: Y6S3
GAMEPLAY TOPICS – NEW ADDITIONS
As the topics above near completion, we’re beginning to set our sights on some additional changes that we believe will have a positive impact on player experience. We wanted to give you an early look at what we’re beginning work on and will share more details and timing for these in subsequent Top Issues updates.
Loadout Reset
We’re aware that loadout and customization reset issues are prevalent for some players. While we have noticed the issue occurring during in-game events, we know that the issue is not exclusive to those. We’re investigating the issue and working towards a reliable reproduction and solution for this.
Flinch Animations in PvP
The flinch hit reaction has been a prominent topic across the player base, and this an area that we feel can be improved. We’re investigating this topic and and will share updates in future editions of this blog.
DBNO Kills
Getting an enemy to a DBNO state and not receiving a point for the kill has been a source of frustration for players. We’re looking at this, as we feel that the player who downed the enemy should be awarded with the kill point if the enemy is taken out. Not only would this be more rewarding for the initial player, but this could remove a cause of toxicity from the game.
Friendly Fire – Team Gadget Launcher Damage
We are currently looking into the impact of hitting an ally with a gadget (e.g. Lesion’s Gu Mines) or a launcher’s direct hit (e.g. Mozzie’s Pest), so that it no longer deals direct damage or results in a points loss. We are considering this change because such interaction does not bring any additional value to the gameplay experience, while also adding a form of unnecessary toxicity.
Following this, our intended plan is to remove the various damages caused when these situations occur. However, damage related to the end result of a gadget’s deployment (e.g. actual explosion of a frag grenade) or launcher’s actions (e.g. explosion of Ash’s Breaching Round) will still inflict damage to allies and will still be considered within the Reverse Friendly Fire system.
PERFORMANCE AND PLAYER BEHAVIOR
Servers & Connectivity
During Neon Dawn and Crimson Heist we have seen connection based issues having a negative impact on players, and this is an area that we continue to work on at a global level, as we aim to resolve issues at their root.
In order to improve player experience, we’ve implemented a number of changes and shared our results in connectivity updates here and here. These changes have included migrating PC and PlayStation users to better servers, relocating the data centers for Japan and Australia, and launching a Middle East data center. Looking to the future, we have set a number of next steps, including global server migration on Xbox, working with partners to improve performance of the Middle East data center, and migrating servers in the South Africa data center.
Cheating, Hacking & Toxicity
AUTOMATING DATA BANS
In our last Anti-Cheat DevBlog, we mentioned that we were working on building new cheat detections based on statistics to uncover our most disruptive cheat users. While this process was originally performed manually to stress test and validate its accuracy, we’re excited to announce that we’ve updated it to be automatic. This mean that sanctions for cheaters identified through data-based detections will be delivered faster, reducing their impact on the community!
Implementing this automated process allows us to work in parallel and strengthen our collaboration with BattlEye. In the coming months, we will continue to develop new models and detection opportunities to increase our velocity on this front.
MMR ROLLBACK
We are continuing to evolve the MMR rollback system by improving reactivity and minimizing negative impacts on honest players. The goal of MMR rollback is to help players who were in an unfair match. That being said, we know that it is frustrating for honest players to have their MMR rolled backed for matches where they won against a cheater, and we are working to address that.
We will continue to tweak the design as we work towards a clear and fair system. We are not able to share an exact timeline right now but are aiming for Season 3; stay tuned for more updates!
PREVENTATIVE SANCTIONS
This past year we have been working on the implementation of preventative sanctions, one of the first visible aspects of the reputation system. In the future, by detecting patterns of griefing and harassment, we will be able to preventatively activate sanctions, allowing us to quickly deal with repeatedly disruptive players and reduce the frustration associated with them.
One of our first integrations for preventative sanctions will be oriented around Reverse Friendly Fire, and we will then expand the scope to other issues. We believe that this new way of controlling regular abuses will greatly contribute to the detection and prevention of disruptive behaviour. As with other topics above, stay tuned for more updates!
ABANDON MATCH PENALTIES
We have increased sanction penalties for abandon-related offences, which players will notice with the launch of North Star. Paired with the recent improvements to match cancellation, we expect this to help discourage players from match abandons and limit the overall impact on committed players.
DDoS On Consoles
Over the last two seasons, we’ve made valuable progress in our fight against DDOS attacks on console, mitigating the effects of attacks. In addition to this, players who use this method of cheating are being banned, and our detection of such actions are constantly being improved. We will continue to look for methods of continued improvement as we seek to protect players from DDoS attacks.
Status: Ongoing
Mouse & Keyboard On Consoles
This subject is still a project priority, and the team continues to make progress. We appreciate your patience and look forward to sharing more in the future as we continue to refine our approach.
Status: Ongoing
Stream Sniping
We know you’re expecting an update on protections against stream sniping, and we know how important this is to you. Since our last update, we’ve been very actively investigating several avenues for deploying a system that would counter this situation, all while providing an acceptable layer of security, but we don’t want to set inaccurate expectations.
As a six-year-old game, Siege has a lot of technical debts, some of which go against anonymization or don’t take into account the problem of stream sniping. This is unlike contemporary game releases which are often built from the start with streamers in mind. This means that the process of ensuring true anonymity is complex and not limited to the Siege team, but the team remains focused on providing a solid solution.
This also means that we don’t have a timeline to share at the moment. We want everything to be right to match your needs, which will continue to require validating and testing of our approaches to ensure they’re viable. Of course, we will continue to communicate on our progress.
To the many great creators in our community: we understand how profoundly disruptive it is to both your gameplay and content creation experience when you are targeted by stream snipers. We agree that it’s unacceptable and we ask that you continue to bear with us as we seek actionable solutions in and outside of the game to resolve the core reasons snipers are able to do what they do.
