Earlier this month, Ubisoft shared the first details of Operation Grim Sky, Rainbow Six Siege’s next season. Today, full details of its third campaign have been revealed from this weekend's Paris Major—including more on its new operators Maverick and Clash, and its reworked Hereford Base training camp map. 

As outlined in the five-minute short above, Maverick is known as the American spook who "went native". A hard-breacher and member of The Unit, his Suri Torch blow lamp lets him burn through surfaces "at an almost inaudible level", says Ubisoft, including reinforced walls. Which is surely great news for those players keen on horizontal shooting.  

Clash, as we learned earlier this week, is an ex-Scotland Yard officer. She can look a wee bit like System Shock's Shodan, and is the first defender to come equipped with a shield. During my short hands-on time with the new operatives—more on that this coming week—I struggled to work out a strategy for taking Clash on. Her shield not only nullifies head-on offence, you see, but also emits bolts of electricity which prevent you closing in from the wings. Needless to say, I copped a few fatal charges along the way.  

With this in mind, I reckon Clash marks a good starter operative for players learning the ropes. Siege now has 40 playable characters, each with their own respective repertoires of special abilities. There's therefore more scope to get overwhelmed than ever. Tooling yourself up with an electro-shield, however, is sure to help reduce newb anxiety.  

Elsewhere, Grim Sky implements modifications to address weapon sights misalignment, and includes adjustments to Operator Idle Pick. 

Expect Grim Sky to feature on PC test servers tomorrow, August 20. No concrete live date as yet, but Ubi says it's "available in September". If the developer follows previous Siege season launches, that might be September 3 or 4. Watch this space. 

Sometimes a detailed breakdown of our performances in competitive games can reveal important things about our playstyle that we might not have noticed. In the case of stats in Rainbow Six Siege, there are so many variables to a match that it’s important to know which operators you truly excel at and where your strategy could use some work. There are a few helpful options for Siege stats, so let’s break down what they are and how they differ.

How do these sites work?

There are four main resources for statistics in Siege: one built by Ubisoft themselves, and three built by third parties. The official one is simply called Rainbow Six Siege Stats. It’s accessed pretty easily from the Siege website, but you’ll have to log in through Uplay first.

R6Tab and R6Stats are third-party sites put together by dedicated fans. No login information is needed—you simply search for any player's record using their in-game name. There is one other resource, Rainbow Six Siege Tracker. This site is a part of the Tracker Network, which has dedicated sites for most of the popular competitive games right now. Each site also works for any player across PC, Xbox One, and PS4. 

What Siege stats website is best?

R6Tab

At the rate that the site is growing, R6Tab feels poised to become everyone’s go-to stat resource for Siege. R6Tab is a brand-new site that takes up the mantle of Siege’s previously best resource for stats, R6DB. After its closure in August, R6Tab founder Nader Halim wanted to fill the void and expand on R6DB’s limited feature set. In the weeks since the site’s launch, over 750,000 players have been added to the site’s database. The big feature here that R6Tab currently does best is its leaderboards. This is useful for yourself, but also when looking up other players to see just how hopeless your efforts were to beat them. Among the top tier of players, the leaderboards are fun for bragging rights, but it only shows players who have used the site, so it’s not a perfect representation.

Right now, a stats page for R6Tab is still in development, but Halim plans to replicate all of R6DB’s features with even loftier goals for the future of the site. “We're planning on making this a community site where players will soon be able to open accounts, follow other players, track their daily stats, discuss various topics, and rate and report players.”

Halim has been hard at work cranking out new features for the site on a near-weekly basis. A recently added button allows player to pull of a list of other players with a similar ranking. Just added this week is a tool that lets players upload a screenshot of their in-game scoreboard and automatically search and find the stats for each player. The site has a Discord bot that can be installed on any server to look up a player’s profile with a simple chat command. Halim is also working on an official mobile app for iOS and Android. The dedication to the project and diligent development cycle has made R6Tab feel like the natural home for stats in Siege in a short amount of time.

R6Stats

By pure coincidence, R6Stats is also in the middle of a rebirth. The site has been around since the early days of Siege, but its developers stopped updating it around the time of Operation Velvet Shell in 2017. After radio silence for over a year, R6Stats V2 surprise launched last month, and it’s looking pretty great. Feature-wise, R6Stats has a similar offering as R6Tab. It does already allow favoriting players, has graphs mapping out your K/D, and has an app released for iOS and Android, all features that R6Tab has promised in the future. The app is a great resource for stats on the go, but the performance is sluggish and the ads are somewhat intrusive, so buy the pro version if that’s a dealbreaker.

The most interesting thing going for R6Stats is the seasonal stats section, which lays out detailed overviews of your performance in the current and past season with more detail than the other sites. Comparing your win/loss ratios and max MMR ranks for each season is a fun way to see how your skill has evolved over time. The team behind R6Stats has committed to new additions and updates to the site this time around, so let's hope that sticks.

Ubisoft’s official tool

Ubisoft’s official stats tool isn’t as fancy as its competition, but it’s perfectly acceptable. It’s simple, functional, and easy to use, but the tool clearly doesn’t see much maintenance and hasn’t added any new tools over time. It does offer one neat stat breakdown not found anywhere else: you can see detailed stats for each type of weapon to see which ones you excel at. Apparently I should stay away from shotguns.

You can also see how many times you’ve used your gadget with each operator, which breaks down differently for each op. For instance, it tracks how many Rook plates you’ve provided to teammates or how many tracking assists you’ve received while scanning footprints as Jackal.

Tracker Network

Tracker Network’s Rainbow Six Siege Tracker provides a lot of the same functionality as what we’ve already listed here, but with a presentation that isn’t quite as elegant. Even in its new relaunched state following Operation Grim Sky’s release, I spotted several inconsistencies in the info. It’ll get the job done, sure, but it’s the tools dedicated to Siege that will likely add new and better features going forward.

What statistics are tracked?

Each site handles its stats a little differently, but some things are consistent. The most basic stats that you’ll find are you win/loss ratios, kill/death ratios, and how those stats break down across all the game’s operators. The official Rainbow Six Stats showcases your most played operators in an especially flashy way, seen below.

Other important pieces of info can be found on all four sites, like headshot counts, accuracy ratings, melee kills, etc. But there’s also a lot of small things different about them that could make one more useful than another for you. For example, R6Tab and R6Stats have leaderboard features that allows you to rank yourself and players encountered against the best in the world.

Wrap-up

For a long time, Siege’s stat offerings felt really sparse. It would be nice for Ubisoft to throw more effort behind its own stat tracking resources, but dedicated fans are doing great work regardless. R6Tab is still a new site, but it has already proven to be a powerful tool. The R6Stats relaunch has the site in a great place and has its own neat features, but it’s hard to say how dedicated development will be moving forward. For now, you’re bestoff using a combination of R6Tab, R6Stats, and the official Ubisoft tool for the best representations of your skill. 

Update: Maverick has been officially revealed, and the leaks and rumors have been confirmed. As you can see in the teaser above, he indeed uses a blow torch, though rather than breaching the wall in this case, he creates a horizontal slit which he can shoot through. His bio indicates that while creating "murder holes" is one of his talents, his blow torch has other uses, too. Maverick’s full reveal will take place during the Six Major in Paris, which begins tomorrow and runs through the 19th.

Our original story, in which fans dug up his name a bit early, follows below.

Original story (Aug 14): Following the official reveal of Rainbow Six Siege’s newest defender, Clash, fans have already been digging for even more info. And thanks to their tenaciousness, we now know the likely name of our new blow-torched attacker: Maverick.

There are already a few things that are adding credence to this theory, the main one being video tags that can be found in the reveal video for Clash on Ubisoft’s YouTube channel. As you can see below, “new operator maverick” is embedded in the video’s keywords for anyone to see. Well, not anyone—YouTube hides these tags on the normal video page, so they’re only visible when viewing the page source in another tab.

Maverick’s mention sits right next to other keywords that we would expect, like “new operator clash” and “hereford base,” so this seems pretty cut and dry. But for good measure, clever redditor veolicitycontrol noticed that trying to open the page for “maverick reveal” on the Siege website doesn’t simply redirect back to the main site like other bogus URLs. Instead, it hits a 404 and stays there, suggesting the page may exist and just isn’t visible yet.

We know from leaks back in May and the Operation Grim Sky reveal that Maverick is an attacker from the Delta Force who will carry a blow torch gadget. This likely means he’ll be Siege’s third hard breacher alongside Thermite and Hibana, an addition players have wanted for a long time. Ubisoft will probably officially unveil Maverick’s name sometime this week, leading up to the full gameplay reveal on Sunday during the Six Paris Major.

Ubisoft has also released a new Designer Notes blog post detailing a few small operator changes before going into Grim Sky. The most interesting change will be coming to Thatcher—his EMP grenades will no longer destroy cameras, only disable them temporarily. “This is a small part of a larger project that we are working on, but have too many dependencies on current systems to implement this at the same time as the rest of the changes. Future changes will include elements that will make Thatcher stronger, but we needed this interaction in place before we can begin working on those,” the post states.

Valkyrie’s throwable cameras, bulletproof cameras, Maestro’s Evil Eye turrets, and the default map cameras all apply here. Right now, this comes across as a simple nerf, but Thatcher isn’t typically used to destroy cameras in the first place. His EMP grenades are most commonly used to safely destroy Bandit's batteries and Mute’s jammers to free up a wall for hard breaching. The nerf is in line with what Ubisoft designers said last month during a Reddit AMA, admitting that they weren’t satisfied with how the EMPs leave little room for counterplays. 

After feedback that Twitch’s shock drones were too hard to hear even in a quiet room, Ubi will be making them a bit louder when moving around in Grim Sky. If this nerf is as slight as they make it sound, it shouldn’t change up Twitch’s playstyle too much, but it’s important to know for the Twitch mains out there who might not notice they’re suddenly making more noise when trying to stealth around.

We'll surely have more on Siege's new operators come the Paris Major this weekend.

The slow, steady rollout of the next season of Rainbow Six Siege, entitled Operation Grim Sky, continued today with a teaser introducing one of the game's two new operators: Morowa "Clash" Evans, a defender who bears an uncanny resemblance—at least for a brief, flashing second—to Shodan, the infamous AI villain of System Shock.

Clash, a Scotland Yard crowd control specialist, is the first Rainbow Six defender with a shield. And not just a shield, but a massive, transparent, person-height shield with a built-in taser. And not just a taser, but a howling Tesla coil, basically, that looks like it's cranking out enough juice to drop six men and the elephant they rode in on.

A native of England, Clash served with the Territorial Support Group during the 2011 riots, before earning a spot in Specialist Firearms Command, the branch of London's Metropolitan Police Service that provides armed response capability. Her shield, the Crowd Control Electro Shield, is actually a DIY rig put together by Twitch and Mira. 

"Clash is the perfect Operator to handle this new gadget and weapon because she understands mob behavior and she pioneered snatch squad tactics, not to mention her experience as a riot officer," Ubisoft said in her character announcement. "She knows exactly when and where to deploy this shield to deny entry and slow down her opponents." 

Clash, and all of Operation Grim Sky including the reworked Hereford Base map that we checked into last week, will be fully revealed on August 19 during the Six Major in Paris. And in case you missed it, this weekend is a fine time to find out what Rainbow Six Siege is all about: From August 16-20 it'll be free to play on Steam. 

And in case you thought I was kidding: