I rarely get praise from teammates in FPS games. So when my Rainbow Six squad starts worshipping me as a god after pulling off a single kill, I have no idea how to react. I'm learning that this happens more than you expect when you pick Tachanka, Siege's worst operator, affectionately known as “our Lord and savior”. 

His unique gadget is a mounted LMG with insane stopping power. But it also makes him an easy target. Once enemies know where he is—usually by sending a drone his way—they’ll exploit his lack of mobility and swarm him. In a game dominated by stealth and quick thinking, he’s the ultimate misfit.

The advice on playing Tachanka is almost unanimous: don’t. But what if I only played Tachanka? If I dedicate the time to learning his ins and outs, can I make him a viable part of a five-man team? 

I set to work, reading guide after guide online. Among the photos of him relaxing on a sofa with a nice glass of red, the TachanCats, and Ubisoft’s own in-jokes, there are a few players taking their Tachanka strategy seriously. You can boil the best advice down to three key points. First, don’t be tied to your turret—think of it like you would another operator’s gadget. Second, reposition it often, especially if you’ve been spotted by an enemy. And third, try to place the MG in unpredictable places.

I jump into a casual game full of optimism, and die without a single kill. It’s the same in the next game, and the next. I always seem to be facing the wrong direction, and because his gun won’t rotate all the way around I’m constantly having to pick it up and noisily slam it down. I haven’t figured out how to protect my flanks, either, so I’ll often manage to suppress one chokepoint only to die to an enemy breaching another spot.

Things get better when I play away from the objective, setting up in adjoining areas and opening up new lines of sight by ripping through wooden walls. Enemies that peek me end up dead. Tachanka’s gun really is a monster, and all it takes is a quick click to delete them.  

I start to think more carefully about covering my flanks, giving myself small, manageable areas to lock down. If I feel unsafe, I abandon my LMG and try to find a new angle with Tachanka’s punchy SMG. When I’ve given away my position or killed an enemy I immediately relocate, and start to find off-angles that enemies wouldn’t usually check. As the hours tick by, I'm racking up at least one kill per round much more often.

I even use a few tricks of my own invention. My favourite is to give away my position, leave my turret behind as a slight decoy, and then kill an enemy when they poke their head around the corner spraying where they think I’ll be standing.

(And yes, I know that shield placement is woeful.)

It all comes together during a match on Theme Park. When the attackers finish with their drones, I plonk myself on the rail platform that splits the map’s second floor in half, aiming at a popular entry point. Sure enough, a Fuze tries to batter it down without scoping it out, and they fall to a quick burst from my LMG. Another attacker backs off, thinking better of it. 

I shoulder my turret and find another spot, this time pointing down a corridor that my teammates have said a group of enemies is heading for. I’m exposed but I trust the call and sure enough, one jogs right into my crosshairs. 

I end the round with three kills—just about the best I’ve managed since picking up the game—and I spend the next few hours perfecting my technique. The wins rack up, but a dawning realisation taints the victories. In Casual mode, you can basically make any tactic work. Most players don’t bother to send a drone through a choke before smashing through themselves. They don’t carefully peek corners, or work as a team. Everyone’s out to enjoy themselves and muck around—either that or they’re a new player learning the ropes. The fact that I can notch a few kills with Tachanka probably doesn't mean anything.

The real test will be Ranked. The mode makes me nervous when I’m playing with operators I'm great with, like Jäger. Here, my teammates' ranks are on the line. “Hey guys,” I mumble into my mic. No response. Okay. Let’s go for it. I click Tachanka’s portrait.

“Hey, would you mind not picking Tachanka?” asks one of my teammates. It’s what I expected. Not wanting to make enemies—and with no small amount of relief—I chicken out and play the match normally.

My next team is already joking around when I enter the lobby, and don’t mention it when I make my pick. But after two rounds on defence, they’re begging me to switch. Enemies are far too smart to be caught out by my tricks, even at my lowly Silver rank, and I die twice to foes that I never even see.

It’s time to change tack. For the next game, on Bank, I pick Jäger, and nail two enemies as they're trying to breach into the basement from above. I’m playing well, and when we win the next round, it seems like the perfect time to switch to Tachanka. Nobody objects. This guy’s decent, they’re probably thinking, so let’s give him a chance. 

Once I know roughly where the enemies have spawned, I set up my turret, carve a hole in the wall in front of me and watch the angle. I just have to wait, and if I get one kill, I’ll have done my job. Simple. Right?

One of the problems with playing Tachanka is that you feel more pressure than you would with other operators. When a couple of teammates die, all I can think of is them at their screens, scrutinizing my every move, watching me mostly stand there as they do the heavy work of roaming, checking cameras, listening for information, and flanking. 

I can feel enemies closing in, and the noise distracts me just as Hibana wanders lazily in front of my crosshairs. I panic, jerking the mouse as I fire, and whiff every shot. My opponent does a double take and taps me in the head. We lose the round. 

I get an earful from my team. “You’re so bad Tachanka!” yells AngryShoutyMan. “Why did you pick him? What are you, some little teenager?” I hold my tongue, but I haven’t lost heart yet. We end up losing on offense but I’m the only one to get a kill, and I still reckon I can do a good job on defence. Plus, I want to prove AngryShoutyMan wrong.

We’re defending bombs in the Tellers’ Office and Archives, and the round quickly falls apart. I’m more mobile this time, but I’m crowded out of some of my favourite spots, the enemy team methodically moving through the level, checking corners and flashing me away. The rest of my team falls one by one as I wait, useless, and with time ticking down I’m left alone on the point with two enemies for company. I hop off the turret and try to get an angle on the first, but it’s no use. I’m mowed down from behind. GG. 

AngryShoutyMan has seen enough. “You are literally contributing fucking nothing. Go back to casual, and learn how to play,” he screams down the mic. The first time he yelled I brushed it off, but something about it really gets to me. It’s not the anger in his voice—it’s the fact that, sadly, he’s right. He’s still raging down the mic when I leave the game.

In Tachanka’s current state he’s worse than useless in Ranked play. Even if you’re good with him, picking him is guaranteed to throw off your teammates before you’ve even fired a shot. And you can’t blame them: it’s impossible to tell whether you’re a Tachanka god or a griefer who’s playing to lose. 

I’d love to see his arsenal changed. Perhaps his turrets could deploy and pack up faster. Perhaps he could deploy two at once, hopping between them to react to enemy positions. Maybe his turret could be remotely controlled? Or perhaps Ubisoft, as it’s considered doing in the past, could take his turret away and replace it with a more viable gadget. The developer said last month that it’s not planning to make him better because, essentially, he’s too good a meme. But the fact that you can piss off your team just by picking him is perhaps a sign that the joke is finally getting old.  

Update: The bug has been fixed on PC—unclear whether it's been addressed on other platforms at this time. About 24 hours after we published this story, Ubisoft took servers down today for emergency maintenance in order to address the issue. That was quick!

Original story:

If you've been playing Rainbow Six Siege this week, you might've found yourself dying to German shieldbearer Blitz a little more often than usual. A recently discovered exploit makes Blitz aim like John Wick without having to leave the safety of his shield.

In an email response to PC Gamer, Ubisoft had no timeframe to share for a fix, but said it has become a priority for the developers.

The exploit allows any attacking operator with a breaching charge to execute a simple series of commands, boosting their hipfire accuracy significantly for that round. For ordinary attackers like Twitch, Finka, or Jackal, this isn’t a big advantage—you’re still better off aiming down your sights to fire accurately. But apply this exploit to a shield operator like Blitz and suddenly you've got a character who can reliably tag you with their pistol without exposing themselves from the front.

Aided by this bug, some Blitz players are scoring consistent kills from the hip at 15 meters without having to to expose their body or head. As you may guess, these fights feel one-sided.

The exploit was reported by one player on the game’s subreddit in late March, but gained steam this past week as videos showing how to execute it have begun to spread.

The Blitz bug echoes another devastating exploit that permeated Siege following the launch of Operation White Noise last December. The infamous “Jäger shield exploit” allowed the defender to affix a deployable shield to his waist and protect his entire body in a few easy steps. He could still shoot through the shield, but from the attacker’s perspective, he was a simply a bulletproof shield with legs sprouting out the bottom. Good times.

There's a strong parallel between these bugs in that they both favor a particular character, yet counter-intuitively, they can't be solved with a fast fix. Last year at the height of Jäger shield mania, community developer Craig Robinson took to the subreddit to explain why patching in a solution for issues like this is harder than it seems. “There is quite a bit that goes into the game beyond just an on/off switch for an Operator or a gadget . . . Disabling or removing a launch Operator (Jäger, Castle, Doc, etc), would lead to a cascade of other issues, and these would significantly sacrifice the stability of the game. This is why we do not remove Operators or gadgets when a glitch is discovered, and instead focus on fixing it,” he said. 

A fix did eventually come during the mid-season reinforcements in January, almost a month after the bug was initially discovered.

In March, Ubisoft announced plans to combat "chat toxicity" in Rainbow Six Siege by implementing a system of bans for players who use hate speech, including racist and homophobic slurs, in the game. Today it elaborated on its goals in a blog post, saying that it aims to "track negative player behavior, manage those that behave poorly, and eventually implement features that will encourage players to improve their behavior." 

Chat monitoring has already been underway since mid-March, but Ubisoft also wants to give players the ability to more directly moderate their interactions by allowing anyone to mute individual players' text chat in addition to voice, which has been silenceable for some time. An automated chat filtering system that will censor text chat based on a list of offensive words is on the way as well; it will also track the number of times players trigger the filter, and Ubisoft "will take action as necessary for players that are intentionally having a negative impact on other players' gaming experiences." 

It's not just chat dickishness that's on Ubisoft's radar: It's also working on improving its systems for dealing with intentional team-killers, a longstanding issue in Siege. Ubi doesn't want to tip its hand about what it has in mind for teamkillers, but we've seen developers like Valve use methods like pairing players with recorded bad behavior with each other in matchmaking in an effort to clump bad eggs into their own baskets.

The team-killer changes are expected to go live this year in season two, while the chat mute and filtering options have an ETA of season three. Exact start dates for those haven't been set yet, but historically they've been quarterly. Season one began with the launch of Operation Chimera last month. 

"These short-term changes will begin to address toxicity, but we do not plan to stop there," Ubisoft wrote. "We are serious about tackling the issues surrounding the potential for a negative player experience, and we will share any further changes with you prior to their implementation."

Ubisoft has been iterating on its Rainbow Six Siege recoil system for a while now, but according to a new blogpost, it looks like the studio has finally hit the nail on the head. The problem involves automatic weapons and the occasional instance of bullets not hitting where the reticule is aimed. Basically, recoil should throw your aim off, but the bullet should always hit where that reticule is, whether you want it there or not.

The changes, which will go live during the next test on Siege's Test Server, is all about precision, but it's also about ensuring fluke headshots are less common. "...we have moved away from predictable recoil patterns, and found another solution that does not involve predictable recoil," the blogpost reads.

"With this new direction, we have made an effort to ensure that each weapon feels as close to the original recoil as possible. We have worked hard at trying to match the unique shooting feel of Siege by firing tens of thousands of bullets and switching back and forth between the two systems, alternating between the two and iterating to bring the new recoils closer to their live counterpart."

For a fairly comprehensive look at both the original recoil system and its ensuing (soon to be nixed) replacement, Andy has you sorted. As for the new recoil system, it'll be playable on the Test Servers from March 28 until 30. There's a handy video of the changes over on the Ubiosoft blog.