If you've played Rainbow Six Siege in the past few weeks then you've probably come across Jäger players exploiting a glitch with his deployable shield. The glitch makes him nearly impossible to kill, and Ubisoft has been rushing to fix it. That fix is nearly complete, the developer said on Reddit on Friday, and a patch should be live in the next few days, which is good news.

Usually Jäger plonks his shield on the ground so that other defenders can use it as cover, but by following a series of steps players can get it to sit on top of their gun so that they can run around with the shield covering the upper half of their body. Their view is not obstructed by the shield, so they can still shoot as normal, but nobody else can shoot through it.

Basically, it breaks the game. If the Jäger player crouches behind cover then they are virtually impossible to tag, but they can still kill any attackers that come into view. As you'd expect, it's become pretty popular with a certain group of players. 

Ubisoft has not set an exact date for the patch, but says it should happen "earlier in the week". For people that have had rounds ruined by the exploit, it can't come soon enough. 

It's an odd feeling when playing games weighs on you like an obligation. While the discussion over the unsavory ways that developers manipulate players is entirely dominated by loot boxes and microtransactions these days, that's not the only tool to entice players to come back again and again. If you're a fan of Hearthstone, Destiny 2, World of Warcraft, or even Rainbow Six Siege, you're already acutely aware of the draw these games have to log a little time in each day—even if you don't want to. It can feel overwhelming. And it's all thanks to the daily quest system that many of these games employ.

On the surface, daily quests are a smart way to entice players to come back each and every day. The idea is simple: set up a few meta-objectives that reset every 24 hours. In Hearthstone, for example, daily quests can range from slinging 20 spells over the course of several games to winning a few rounds as a specific class.

From a developer's perspective, daily quests can keep players coming back again and again—that's crucially important if your game is funded through microtransactions and paid DLC like Hearthstone or Siege. In subscription-based MMOs, daily quests keep players coming back between major updates, giving them an infinite series of tasks to complete when all others have long since been completed. It's a system that, at best, gives you a little extra reward for things you're already doing in-game. But in execution, daily quests can turn the joy of playing into a monotonous chore—especially when you're juggling multiple games that have them.

Long-term investments 

While daily quests can be found in games dating back to everyone's favorite social-media-meets-Pokémon website Neopets, their most known implementation was in World of Warcraft's first expansion, The Burning Crusade. At the time, daily quests (or 'dailies') seemed like an elegant solution to the age-old problem of MMOs never having enough content for players to complete. Blizzard's solution? Add a system of mundane repeatable quests that players could grind through each day to work towards long term goals like earning gold or gaining reputation with certain factions.

If the decades of forum posts are anything to go by, daily quests weren't a hit with players. Instead of capitalizing on Warcraft's most exciting group content, like dungeons and raids, they forced players into neverending loops of killing 'X' of 'Y.' Azeroth's greatest heroes became its ultimate labor force. But, somehow, the system has survived and spread to nearly every game Blizzard makes and well beyond. It's become such a staple in digital card games that I can't think of one that doesn't have daily quests. Even competitive shooters are starting to see the appeal.

But what is that appeal? 

While daily quests aren't likely to ruffle the feathers of gamers in the same way that loot boxes have, they still try to manipulate us. Like arcade games designed to extract quarters from pockets, daily quests are another small (but not necessarily insidious) facet in the complicated relationship games have with our need to feel rewarded. Daily quests offer a tangible goal to meet each day and the feeling that, even if I only have a few minutes to spare, I can earn a little extra if I use them right. But too often, I find myself resenting the fact that they exist at all.

In competitive multiplayer games like Hearthstone, daily quests go deeper than giving you a little extra gold. They are intrinsically tied to your worth as a player. The problem with competitive free-to-play games that use daily quests is that if you ignore them, there's a palpable sense of missing out. It's no longer just about how good you are, but how many hours (or dollars) you can invest. Because these quests reward gold used to pay for new card packs which, in turn, have a chance to reward more powerful cards, daily quests feel necessary instead of optional. It's not a little "thank you" for playing each day, it's clocking in for work so that you can have fun later.

Unless I'm willing to cough up money to buy these packs and skip that grind altogether, I need to optimise how much gold I can earn. My objective subtly shifts from having fun to completing these quests as quickly as possible. If one of my daily quests asks that I win three rounds as class I don't have a competitive deck for, I'm frustrated as I'm stuck playing matches hoping for an easy win or just ignoring the quest altogether and feeling like I'm missing out on valuable gold. Instead of playing a class that I've invested in and care about, I'm forced into playstyles that I may not find fun or satisfying.

In MMOs, daily quests create a more abstract sense of frustration. Daily quests aren't a meta-objective, but a wholly separate activity you have to make time for. Final Fantasy 14, for example, has various Beast Tribes that each have a set number of daily quests that offer currency that can be spent on powerful gear in addition to reputation with a faction that unlocks items and cosmetic gear like mounts. These quests are never fun, but MMOs continually leverage their weakest elements, like fetch quests, for use in daily quests. It doesn't matter how cool that mount may seem, every time I've done the math and realized I would need to login every day for the next 24 days to complete these quests to unlock it, I immediately resent the grind and abandon it altogether.

It's worth noting that not every daily quest system is a bad one, but many of them are designed poorly. Ironically, World of Warcraft: Legion's world quests, a complete overhaul of the old dailies, is actually pretty great. Not only does it offer a ton of choice and variety over which quests you want to complete, you are also given tangible rewards that can be immediately satisfying, like a new piece of gear. If you complete four quests for a specific faction each day, you'll also unlock even more rewards. 

What's more, world quests act like a Greatest Hits of Legion's leveling process, letting you revisit wacky and fun quests all over again. And, while they're still dedicated activities, you can bang out four of these quests in about 12 minutes. It's a quick and inoffensive system with multiple layers of rewards that helps hide the monotony and necessity of doing them—a start difference from Final Fantasy 14's monotonous routine.

But daily quests still represent a symptom of a wider issue many MMOs and multiplayer games with a progression system struggle with: the feeling that you have to constantly play in order to stay relevant. Whether they're a necessary part of grinding in-game currency or an abstract way of gaining power, daily quests almost always leverage the most boring and frustrating parts of a game in exchange for a reward. Put up with this crap, they say, and eventually you'll get something good. 

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I'd finally given up the grind in World of Warcraft, embracing my status as a "casual" to just enjoy the game at my own pace. It was a liberating experience. But it's frustrating to see that grind seep into other games, to have my precious few hours of gaming become a list of chores I need to knock out in each game before the real fun begins. I must constantly be skeptical of games, their developers' intentions, and my motivations for why I keep playing.

Like towers unlocking sections of the map in open world games and loot boxes, daily quests will continue spreading to other games. Game design is often seen as an art but there's a science to it as well, and developers are always experimenting with new ways to keep us playing. Daily quests are rather innocuous on the surface, but understanding how they factor into your desire to play is important. And, like me, you might have to ask yourself the tough question. Is a little bit of extra gold a day really worth it?

The Rainbow Six Siege Year Three pass, giving owners seven-day early access to eight new operators from Russia, France, Italy, the UK, the US, and Morocco, is now available for purchase.   

The pass also includes access to eight exclusive uniforms and headgear, a Rainbow Six charm that can be attached to weapons, 600 R6 credits to spend in the in-game store, and one year of "VIP Perks" good until January 31, 2019: A ten percent discount in the shop, a five percent Renown boost, and an Alpha Pack boost.   

Owners of the Year Two pass will get a bonus 600 R6 credits on top of everything else, and purchasing the pass prior to March 5, 2018 will also get you the Damascus Steel Signature weapon skin. It goes for $30/£27/€30 on Steam and the Ubisoft Store.  

Rainbow Six Siege is two years old, and it's aging well. Off the back of a 50-percent discount on all versions of the game in November, last weekend Siege hit 100,000 concurrent players, an all-time peak.

There's plenty of stuff that still needs to be improved in Siege: the frequency of teamkilling and leavers, 'spawn peeking,' 'dropshotting,' and that thing where one player loads into the first round of a match really slowly. But right now, here's why I think it's one of the best FPSes on PC.

It's not all about your aim

Marksmanship does matter in Siege—headshots are lethal, gun recoil varies, and you'll often see players aiming through tiny 'murder holes' in a wall to surprise opponents. But good gadgets, good information, or good timing can counter good aim.

Check the clip above: I'm in a 2v1 with 40 seconds left with my teammate Kootness, a PC Gamer Club member. We're out of stun grenades, and our opponent has a positional advantage—he's somewhere in the hostage room, but we don't know where. If we peek into the door, there's a good chance we'll instantly lose our heads because he only has to focus on a small bit of real estate.

Instead we try a timing attack, where my teammate and I enter the room simultaneously from the door and an opposite window. My breach alters the state of the map, the defender turns, and Kootness is set up to make the game-winning kill through the front door.

Multiple ways to contribute (even in death)

Siege isn't strictly about your K:D ratio, either. The way your team spends resources has a big influence on who wins, so much so that Siege reserves the opening minute of each round for laying defenses and gathering information. I love this phase because both teams get to feel each other out without the threat of death. It's a test of map knowledge. You can't reinforce every surface with steel walls: which ones are the most important? Should you place tripwire bombs in unexpected positions, or in more obvious, but higher-traffic doorways? A clever claymore mine can win a round. 

And as an attacker, maneuvering your fragile surveillance drone onto the objective safely is a feat of miniature parkour and stealth. A carefully hidden drone can end up being the MVP. 

Those drones are also a gateway for dead players to participate in the round. When you die, you can live on as a guardian angel for your teammates, marking any enemies who walk into the field of view of cameras. Ubisoft said in a recent video that it believes there's lots of unexplored territory in this part of the game, and I'm hopeful they'll expand even more on the after-death tasks available to players.

Rainbow warriors

Rainbow Six is by-definition a diverse squad: a counter-terrorism team made up of operators from around the world. With Overwatch and Dirty Bomb, Siege is one of the few shooters where you can run an all-female team; 12 of the 36 operators are women. Brazil, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, and Hong Kong are all represented on the roster, with Italian and Moroccan operators coming in 2018. The most recent update, Operation White Noise, focused on the Korean 707th Special Mission Battalion, but also included Zofia, its second Polish character.

Psychological warfare

Siege's 18 maps are clusters of small rooms and hallways, layouts that often allow attackers to get extremely close to the objective before encountering an enemy. This phase—after setup, but before all-out combat—is a strange mixture of quiet and tension. You might be a few meters away from the enemy, but short sightlines and the abundance of walls usually grant enough safety to move, set up gadgets, and pause to communicate. 

As Shaun wrote in 2016, this moment "is especially effective because there are virtually no other shooters that value silence or stillness." It's one of my favorite things about Siege, the space the game makes to poke at each other with gadgets, feints, and mind games. Some of my favorite fear-inducing maneuvers:

• Blowing up a segment of the ceiling, sending defenders scrambling
• Rolling a drone under a door, making eye contact with an enemy, and coyly rolling away
• Concussing someone over and over with Echo's hovering, invisible drone
• Marking an enemy over and over with a drone they can't find
• Making all enemies' phones audibly buzz with Dokkaebi's ability
• Barricading random doorways away from the objective to make attackers think about whether someone's inside

You can grind in PvE

Bots are uncommon in multiplayer FPSes. Siege's aren't very smart, but on certain variations of its PvE Terrorist Hunt mode, which has three difficulties, they can challenge experienced players with snappy aim or whole roomfuls of C4 traps. And each win earns some renown, Siege's non-cash currency.

More importantly, PvE is a low-pressure way for newcomers to learn some of Siege's sprawling maps. At the peak of CS:GO's popularity, a bunch of my friends who hadn't played wanted to jump in with me, but I couldn't offer them a true training mode like Terrorist Hunt to ease them into the mechanics. 

I'm interested to see what Ubisoft does in the Outbreak "co-op event" it's teased for 2018. Outbreak is planned as a temporary addition, and apart from the expanding map roster it'll be basically the only addition to PvE since launch.