Sound
Putting aside bugs, sound issues in Rainbow Six Siege are really challenging to deal with. Ubisoft says it’s a “very complex system which attempts to realistically simulate sound propagation in a 3D environment”, which is why it’s difficult to diagnose bugs such as the infamous inverted audio and missing sounds. “We have reviewed the status of our sound and propagation systems,” writes Ubisoft. “We’ve reached the conclusion that we need to rebuild large parts of it, starting with the way sounds are packaged and connected to the game. We are aiming to begin releasing the sound repackaging in Season 3.” The developer further adds that due to the size of the project, a full rebuild of the sound engine will not be finished before the end of year 5.
Connectivity
Another issue with Rainbow Six Siege’s online matchmaking is player disconnection and high latency in matches. In an attempt to minimize such issues, Ubisoft is improving the game’s network infrastructure. Furthermore, the developer is also trying to reduce player latency by adding game servers in additional regions. Even in year five, Rainbow Six Siege is lacking official servers for Middle East and India, so players are forced to connect to either Europe or Singapore. With new regions coming to the game, Ubisoft will “revisit potential changes to ping thresholds.”
Cheating/Smurfing
Cheating, boosting, and smurfing all violate Ubisoft’s terms and conditions, so the studio is finally putting its foot down. While the war against cheaters and boosters is already going strong, smurfing is an issue that the developers have yet to figure out an effective solution for. “Smurfing is a struggle the entire industry faces and in our community, it damages the playing experience.” “Smurfs are difficult to identify, and we need a way to do so before making any changes to our system to combat these players. Currently, our team is using the available data to detect outliers that would indicate smurfing. In the meanwhile, we will continue to enforce measures such as 2-Step Verification to add barriers to multiple accounts creation.” The rest of the Rainbow Six Siege status report promises new features such as a streamer mode, accessibility features, fix for smoke propagation issues, and many others. It will be a while before most of the changes listed above make it to live servers, but in the meantime, Ubisoft has a lot planned for Rainbow Six Siege. An alpha of the match replay system, map pick-and-ban, and various reworks are headed our way in the coming months.
