How do you tell if a character in a game is overpowered? Unfortunately, that anecdote and thousand-word essay you read on Reddit may not be the most accurate source. As much as you might think someone is strong, the numbers don’t always add up – in Rainbow Six Siege, Blackbeard often falls to cries of being overpowered. But, Ubisoft have released some of their internal numbers on who really is the best.
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Analysed as a part of their Data Peek series, the team have put together a small table of the operators with the highest win rate over three recent parts to the year. A year of Rainbow Six Siege is split into eight sections, the four seasons, each split into before and after the Mid-Season Reinforcements, a balance patch that sometimes comes with Operator reworks.
Ever since he was released, people have considered Blackbeard, one of the DLC operators, to be broken. His unique gadget is that he can put a shield on top of his gun, guarding himself from headshots until it is broken. Initially, that shield needed a lot of damage to break, but nowadays he’s instead got two much weaker versions.
Regardless of the fact that he’s been reworked, he’s still thought of by many to be overpowered. And the numbers do sort of support that. While he dropped to second place in Attackers after a rework to Glaz’ kit, he’s still pretty high, but only 0.8% above the average Attacker win rate.
Pure numbers don’t tell you the whole story though, and 0.8% isn’t a huge margin. Is Blackbeard OP? Not really, he’s just got a little more weight behind him.
In case you want to take a look at all of the numbers, the team have released a few files of data that you can play around with. One is called the Full subset and is a whopping 19GB, only for dedicated data nerds who know their way around a database. Let us know if you look into them and find anything interesting!