Most FPS games have grappled with smurfing in some shape or form. For some players, playing ranked modes on a separate account takes the stress out of losing games as your rank doesn’t matter as much. For others, it’s the simple joy of beating people who are below their rank. Rainbow Six Siege is no different, but Ubisoft wants to do better at tackling it in a way that’s fair for everyone.
“It’s a difficult problem, one that the whole industry is fighting with,” Rainbow Six Siege director Jean-Baptiste Hallé tells us. “One thing we want to improve on is detection. You can’t really prevent people from having multiple accounts, you have the right to do that and you can do that legitimately, but it’s important that you don’t do it to lie to the matchmaking system about your skill level.
“One thing we need to improve on is to get faster at identifying when the performance you’re showing doesn’t fit with how young your account is. We need to be better at this.”
Hallé also spoke about how Season 1 of Year 6 will change the way the game is played and break the 20-second meta. Part of that, though, could mean having a phase in the game that suits the attacker.
“I don’t think it’s possible to reach a state where the meta is perfect and infinitely varied, but I think we will need to keep breaking things to make things move forward,” he tells us. “We need to take risks and to maybe have an attacker-sided meta for a while, but I think things need to evolve, so this is the right thing to do.”
We’ll have our full interview with Hallé up soon, but in the meantime, you can catch his thoughts on a Blackbeard rework and the need to “find ways to encourage players to use the test server”.
If you’re looking for the best Rainbow Six Siege operators in the meantime, though, you know where to click.