May 7, 2019 Ubisoft’s “reverse friendly fire” mechanic to deal with teamkilling goes live tomorrow.
Friendly fire abuse and teamkilling can be a real problem in Rainbow Six Siege, which why it’s a good thing that Ubisoft has been looking into a fix for the problem. The studio’s solution is a ‘Reverse Friendly Fire’ mechanic, which allows team-killed players to choose to either forgive their attacker – or let them suffer the consequences. And it’s hitting the live servers tomorrow.
The consequences, in this case, would be a punishment for any damage done – intentionally or not – to their teammates or any hostages. This slap on the wrist will take the form of reflected damage, where any and all friendly damage attempted will be bounced back to the offending player. This includes attacks on hostages, or even using operator gadgets.
This overhaul of the teamkilling punishment system was revealed back in February and began testing on the Siege test server in March, but as of tomorrow it officially leaves testing and enters the real Siege environment on the live servers – although the team will continue to iterate it based on player feedback.
Previously the only punishment for teamkilling was for the offending player to be kicked, but only after they’d murdered two of their teammates – and therefore ruining the match. Now, with this new system, during their kill cam a team kill victim can vote on whether their death was accidental or intentional. If they say it was on purpose (or don’t vote), then the player that killed them will get Reverse Friendly Fire activated. They can still play normally, as long as they don’t attempt to attack other members of their team. Ubisoft says it will track team kills, and “may issue appropriate sanctions after multiple offenses”.
The full list of specific changes regarding reverse friendly fire can be seen on Ubisoft’s latest dev blog post. While generally any weapon or drones can set off the RFF mechanic – so repeated team attacks will reflect damage to the griefer – at the moment explosives still do team damage, although the team says “this is not intended and will be fixed in Season 2.”
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The response to this system has generally been on the positive side, although the real test will be when the new RFF system goes live properly tomorrow. Ubisoft also notes that this is “not our final version of the system” and will continue to tweak it based on player feedback, with further changes coming in Year 4 Season 2 – including situations where RFF activates squad-wide, which will be interesting. We’ll find out what the player response to the new system is tomorrow.