Small changes can have big effects in games sometimes, and Ubisoft has made one that the Rainbow Six Siege community has been crying out for. Where CSGO is debating the ethical fairness of scopes, and Dota 2 has a billion heroes to balance, R6S had a much smaller problem, that of crouching or crouch spam, but it was a problem that desperately needed to be fixed for the integrity of competitive play.
In the clip above, taken from this PCGamer article, you can see an extreme example of what players had to deal with in many online matches. R6S rewards players who hit headshots with a insta-kill, meaning that the flickering hitboxes on crouching characters were a big advantage, on PC or console. The problem is more pronounced on the former platform, but still exists on console, too, with modified controllers making it possible.
Ubisoft says patch Y4S1.2 will be deployed to PC on April 4 but there is no ETA for the fix on console.
Y4S1.2 patch to the rescue
The issue had even permeated professional play, with online league matches far from free of the spam, and to be honest the fix was long overdue. Ubisoft have made other tweaks to the game too, which can be found in full here, with the majority involving fixes to bugs that existed around operator abilities, including the new Australian pairing Mozzie and Gridlock, as well as a few quirks on the new map Outback.
There are still a lot of issues waiting to be resolved by Ubisoft, but this is a start. Pro players in the game are extremely vocal about their likes and dislikes, but right now the "world’s best player" and G2 in-game leader Fabian Hallsten is on a Twitter campaign to simply get sound in R6S sorted, rather than any balancing tweaks. In Rainbow Six, sound is probably more important than any other aspect, and the fact it has been broken since the last major patch is a bit embarrassing for the game’s developers.
The competitive scene is in a fairly good place right now, patching aside, with the latest Invitational in Montreal having a $2m prize pool, putting it ahead of more established games such as CSGO. Equally, the UK scene is also thriving, with the recent championships drawing in thousands of viewers and a good number of teams too, as the game is one of the more popular esports titles on these shores, and one of the few that UK players are close to the top level in.
