EN DE CN BR ES RU
Image
Icon

R6S MMR Update: Why Beating Cheaters Used to be Penalized

Up until very recently, Rainbow Six Siege had a strange system when it came to dealing with matches that... Fragster | 18. September 2021

Up until very recently, Rainbow Six Siege had a strange system when it came to dealing with matches that involved cheaters. Once a cheater was discovered within a ranked game, even if the game had concluded weeks before, everyone in the lobby would have their MMR from that game wiped.

Rainbow Six currently utilizes BattleEye anti-cheat systems, often regarded as the gold-standard of anti-cheat software in gaming and is used by many other top games such as PUPG, Fortnite, and Escape from Tarkov.

Usually, BattleEye is an appreciated system by the Rainbow Six Siege community and does a relatively good job of protecting the player base from the unpleasant experience of hackers. That is save for when it clears your hard-fought MMR, which can often mean the difference between dropping or staying up a rank.

There are few things more frustrating in gaming than playing against a hacker – even playing with one isn’t particularly fun. When playing with one, they steal kills, clean the enemy team every round, and generally leave you with nothing to do. And of course when playing against one, you have to play with the knowledge that your enemy has an unfair advantage.

Of course, this makes victory even sweeter on those rare occasions you may be able to best a cheater through clever tactics, teamwork, or just better aim. Not all hacks are created equal and depending on how the hacker is playing, it’s certainly not impossible to defeat them through pure skill and determination.

The Boycott

It seems strange then that BattleEye would punish you indiscriminately just for being in a lobby with a cheater, even if you beat them fair and square. To come back to the game a week after sweating for thirty minutes to beat someone you know was cheating, only to see your rank and MMR go down because that game no longer counts.

As of 2020, Siege became inundated with hackers, and the BattleEye system had its work cut out: according to a Ubisoft Developer Blog released earlier this year, BattleEye banned over 91,000 accounts suspected of hacking over the course of 2020.

There is currently no relevant data available for 2021, but it is likely that a similar number of hackers have been or will be banned by the end of the year.

This became such an issue for some people in the Rainbow Six Siege community that around April of 2021, a group of content creators and other players began to boycott buying R6 credits (the game’s internal currency) until the issue was fixed.

Tweet Alt text: “I will not be purchasing R6 Credits until the Anti-cheat is improved. I really hope this isn’t a long-term thing but it just hurts to play cheaters every game. It also sucks to lose hundreds of elo in rollback to cheaters that we beat. I invite others to join me in this as well.”

King George (shown above) along with other content creators Kassa, YoBoyRoy, and AceeZ, all called for a public boycott of money flowing into Rainbow Six Siege until the issue was resolved. There was no official response from Ubisoft, but now a few months down the line and it appears that King George and his fellow creators got their wish.

The Rollback

Announcing the update on Twitter on September the 8th of this year, Ubisoft has scrapped the MMR wiping rule for all players. From this point onwards, only the players on the hacker’s team will have their MMR from the match wiped.

This is very clearly a step in the right direction for balancing out Rainbow Six Siege, allowing players to keep their hard-fought MMR after beating a hacker.

The news certainly seems to have been received well amongst the community, with popular Rainbow Six Siege content creator BikiniBodhi responding “W so hard I can feel it inside of me” and Esports commentator Parker Mackay tweeting “PogChampion, friends”.

 

(Header image via Ubisoft)