December 6, 2019 Rainbow Six Siege will keep All chat after all.
Yesterday, Rainbow Six Siege’s test server got an update aimed at curbing toxicity – the patch removed cross-chat from all standard game modes, so that you could only send messages to your own team. After some significant pushback from the community, the developers have reverted the change after just one day.
“After discussing with the team, and based on feedback,” the developers say on Reddit, “we have decided to focus on implementing a on/off toggle option for cross-chat in a future update.” For now, “cross-chat has been re-enabled on the test server,” and “cross-chat functions will stay as they are on live as well.”
After the devs announced the removal of cross-chat yesterday, many members of the community argued that a toggle would be a better solution – and it seems that’s the one we’ll eventually get, though there’s no word yet on when this version of the feature will be implemented.
Ubisoft has been making efforts to curb toxicity in Rainbow Six Siege over the past few years, including reworks for the report system and strict suspensions over racist and homophobic language.
“As part of our continuous efforts against in-game toxicity,” Ubisoft said in yesterday’s patch notes on Reddit, “we will be removing the cross-chat feature in live games. Our data consistently shows that a very high percentage of abusive chat reports are from cross-chat. Our aim is to make games a more welcoming experience and return the focus of the in-game chat to strategic team-based communications.”
Siege’s TTS updates tend to be a strong indicator of what’s coming next. As one of the biggest multiplayer games around, Siege could set the blueprint as other developers try to make their communities friendlier places.