Two mechanical quirks of Rainbow Six Siege wound up making the difference during a match between G2 Esports and Team Empire last weekend. An Ubisoft game designer has helped explain what happened, and it has to do with how the bomb defuser process begins, and with how bodies are handled between the multiplayer game’s server and game client.
With seven seconds remaining on the clock, G2 player Virtue began counter defusing – a process which, on paper, takes seven seconds. While this was happening, Team Empire’s Joystick began firing at him from the floor below. From the broadcast booth, it seemed that Virtue should have had time to counter defuse, except that he would have been shot by Joystick. But in the game, neither of those things happened. Virtue ran out of time, and none of Joystick’s rounds ever touched him.
Rainbow Six Siege game designer Emilien Lomet took to Twitter to explain the discrepancy. It’s true that the defuse time is seven seconds, he said – but there’s a 0.6 second animation to start the defuse process, which makes the whole thing take 7.6 seconds.
Here’s the tweets:
For the client side body situation: I can't discuss it just yet, but stay tuned 👀
— Emilien Lomet (@Ubi_Melo) April 12, 2021
While Lomet says he can’t discuss the particulars yet, what he’s talking about in the second tweet is the factor that kept Joystick’s rounds from hitting Virtue. There was a body blocking line of sight between the two players, and since this was being handled on the client side, the broadcast booth couldn’t see it – making it look like Joystick was firing directly at Virtue to no effect.
Lomet says the team is working on a change that would include the start animation in the total defuse time, and that while he can’t yet comment on the “client side body situation”, players should “stay tuned” – so you can probably expect the Siege dev team to address it sometime soon. They’ve recently gone and fixed the recoil bug, after all.