Whatever you make of Apex Legends' meteoric rise, everyone can agree that it gets non-verbal communication right. With a simple button press, players can quickly make specific callouts (“enemy was here” or “need light ammo,” for example). The hugely positive feedback of contextual pinging has left Rainbow Six Siege players understandably jealous, and Ubisoft is taking notes.

Since Apex’s release, the Siege subreddit has been abuzz with requests for more ping options. There’s a bit of irony to acknowledge here—before Apex, Siege was one of the only competitive shooters around with a ping mechanic at all. Apex might be popularizing it, but the OG here is Siege and the Rainbow Six games that came before it. Its dedicated ping button creates a small yellow mark to indicate enemy locations, where shots were heard, where to breach a wall, or anything really. But Siege's pings lack any context unless they’re backed up by a vocal callout or laborious chat message.

For years, players have adapted by developing an imperfect language for interpreting pings. If a wall is marked on the objective, they’re probably suggesting someone reinforce or breach it. When a window is pinged in the first few seconds of an attack round, they’re probably calling out that the window is broken, signaling a spawn peeking defender trying to score an early kill.

But Ubisoft has been paying attention to Apex’s fluid comms. In an interview with Stevivor at the Six Invitational last month, game director Leroy Athanassoff said Ubi is exploring the idea of Apex-style pings in Siege. “We have a ping in our game, though I would love to be able to ping a reinforced wall and ask for a breach. For instance, maybe when I ping a wall I can open up a contextual wheel to select what to do, or alternatively be able to ping something like a Mute jammer,” he said. Athanassoff went on to say that they’ll probably implement a similar system “at some point,” but it’s not a priority.

Respawn's contextual pings work by varying their shapes, colors, and playing a character voice line that alleviates the need to get on the mic. Siege has the ingredients to replicate this, minus voice lines for its 46 characters. Pinging has a dedicated key and currently only works as a single press, so holding the button to bring up a ping wheel or double tapping for enemy marks wouldn’t cause complications, in theory. One of the best uses, I imagine, would be during the operator selection phase. Teammates could ping specific operators as suggestions and encourage better team compositions.

The loudest dissenters of the idea believe that Siege doesn’t need more reasons for players to unplug their microphones. After all, strong verbal communication is the backbone of a good team. Players have spent years building an unofficial catalogue of callouts for every single room and hallway across 20-plus maps. Learning the maps and winning a round because of good callouts is one of the greatest (and hard-earned) joys of the game. Some think contextual pings would shift the focus away from voice and trivialize the skill of making callouts. There's also the concern that a richer pinging system would clutter the screen with UI, creating unwanted distractions in some situations.

The worries are understandable, but I don’t believe an expanded ping system would somehow ruin Siege’s established culture of voice comms. Besides scanning enemies on cameras, pinging is only possible when players are alive. Contextual pings could absolutely replace voice comms for small callouts (“enemy here” or “breach that”), but round-winning callouts usually include details like which way an enemy's facing, whether or not an opponent is defusing, or whether a specific gadget is in a specific spot—details that would be tough to replicate with an automated system.

Just because nuanced pings work in Apex doesn’t mean they’ll automatically make sense in Siege, so a good implementation would hinge on building a system that respects Siege's slower, stealthier gameplay. A few general options for breaching or calling out movement is probably all that's needed. To avoid too much UI noise, the new pings shouldn’t be any flashier than the ones it uses now. If you’re in a firefight and need to focus on what’s in front of you, they should always be ignorable.

But contextual pings aren't just a gameplay feature, they're an accessibility improvement. Having a way to communicate non-verbally is important for folks who stay off-mic because they experience harassment, have a speech impediment, or are just in an environment where they have to play quietly. Over the weekend I asked Twitter whether Siege should get Apex-style contextual pinging. Beyond all the people clinging to the “just use a mic” stance, the strongest responses I received were from women that have seen Siege’s ugly side. As of this writing, the poll has over 6000 votes with “yes” in a hefty 77 percent lead.

“Sometimes talking on mic as a girl results in me getting teamkilled or trolled. I’m a bit afraid to play ranked too much because it’s a 50/50 chance that this will happen, but I also get yelled at for not communicating since it’s important,” Siege fan Petra told me. “Would LOVE something like this.” Evan explores toxicity more in his story about Apex’s contextual pings from back at the game’s launch. 

Overhauling something as fundamental as communication in Siege is a big step, and it’s likely far on the horizon. If done right, context-sensitive pings will feel like a natural extension of what we already have.

Ubisoft is taking a new approach to deal with Rainbow Six Siege's teamkilling problem. In a new blog post, Ubi detailed the new rules going into testing. Instead of kicking players after two teamkills, all damage dealt to the offender after the first teamkill will be reversed onto them. If the teamkill was truly an accident, the victim is able to "forgive" and not activate a penalty.

"The goal of this system is to contain the impact of players abusing the friendly fire mechanic, while maintaining a degree of flexibility for accidents," reads the post. When the reverse damage mechanic was first tested in the last test server, some players worried it was too harsh a punishment for a truly accidental teamkill. The piece of the puzzle that seemed to be missing was the forgive option. Players have been asking for a forgive option for years, but Ubi has been strangely silent on the subject until recently.

For the pure of heart who don't teamkill on purpose, the changes shouldn't have much of an impact for you. With the status quo, a griefer could get away with two TKs before being booted from the match. Now, the griefer will get one kill in, assumedly be unforgiven, and no longer be able to cause harm to anyone but themselves. This also goes for gadget damage, apparently. If reverse damage is active and you shoot a teammate with a shock drone, the damage is reversed onto the drone, not the user. I'd really like to see a shock drone suddenly self destruct.

The new system leaves a significant loophole for griefing still open: Caveira. With her Luison pistol that sends players into DBNO, she can down all of her teammates before leaving the match and losing the round. Because of this exploit, some think reverse damage should activate after a certain amount of friendly damage is inflicted, not complete teamkills.

I'm a little mixed on the new rules. It's great that griefers can't do as much damage anymore, but it also feels like their behavior is going unpunished in the long term. I'd rather kick a griefer and be down one player than be distracted by their shenanigans. Ubi's plan for penalties is a bit wishy washy under the new rules. "We will continue to track team kills, and we may issue appropriate sanctions after multiple offenses." The "may" does a lot of work there.

Without a clear-cut ban for multiple TKs, Ubi is possibly obfuscating what a real griefer looks like in their data. Unless someone looks very closely, it might be hard to properly punish someone that is griefing in every match. I guess the devs are hoping reverse damage ruins the fun of being a jerk, but I wouldn't count on that.

Ubi will be testing the new teamkill system on the test server and iterate based on feedback before releasing on the live servers. The devs seem pretty confident in what they've got here, so I don't foresee many changes before it's live.

Ubisoft love to sneak references to their games into their other games. Far Cry New Dawn, to pick a recent example, contains nods to Splinter Cell, Assassin's Creed, and the rabbids who have gone from enemies in Rayman to somehow become Ubisoft's weird mascots. And now, players have found a reference to them in the new Rainbow Six Siege map as well.

Over on Reddit you can see a demonstration of how to find it. They're painted on the inside of a log in the Outback map. As an Australian I'm not sure how to feel about this. Yes, we do have a lot of strange animals in this country. No, lapins crétins are not among them. (That's their French name, it means "idiotic rabbits".) I do have fond memories of that Wii minigame where zombie rabbids in scuba gear come out of the ocean and you have to fill their masks with carrot juice to drown them. If they invade Siege more fully, that's the tactic I recommend.

The next season of Rainbow Six Siege will add two new operators: one Danish, one from the United States Secret Service. We don't know much about them yet but a new leak, from a seemingly reputable source, might have revealed some of their abilities. 

According to the leak, first posted on Resetera, the Danish attacker will be "invisible to cameras" and will have a "sort of silent step similar to Cav"—a reference to Caveira's ability to make her movements near-silent for a period of time. The US defender, meanwhile, will have a "special eyesight that bypasses flashes and smokes".

Nothing has been confirmed, but the information comes from Resetera user Kormora, who last year correctly predicted the names and gadgets of the two Australian operators added to the game this week—Mozzie and Gridlock—based on conversation with an "industry friend". She doesn't say where she got the intel this time around.

The description of the Danish operator certainly fits with hints from Ubisoft: in a tease last month, the developer revealed the attacker would be an "expert in covert reconnaissance and stealth tactics".

The first season of Year 4, called Operation Burnt Horizon, is now live, and you can read about it here.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

Winning duels in Rainbow Six isn’t just about aim.

Being able to flick to headshots with your mouse is only one part of the equation. The other part involves fine-tuned restraint, awareness, and appreciation for tactics. 

Running headlong into firefights is a recipe for disaster. Know when to push, but also know when to hold back and wait for your opponent.  

Being good at Siege is a real test of your ability to be patient. These are some ways to develop that tactical patience and excel at one on one battles.

Reduce visibility

Rainbow Six is not a death-match game that rewards brazen and open conflict.

We’ve written that Rainbow Six is Counterstrike’s sexier cousin. In many ways, Rainbow does inherit some of the same tactics from its meta.

Crouching and leaning, and reducing your visibility to an enemy is essential.  

Pros hold corners tightly. Observe the movement of pixels rather than entire character models that cross your field of view. Expose your operator as little as possible. Gain information on your opponent through ambient sound, cameras, and other special abilities that Rainbow Six’s operators provide (e.g. Pulse’s heartbeat monitor, Lion’s EE-ONE-D, or Dokkaebi’s Logic Bomb).

Tactically, Rainbow Six is a game of information. Seeking that information by rushing into open areas without prior knowledge cedes initiative to your opponent.  

Anticipate, anticipate, anticipate

Initiative, or the ability to engage first before your opponent can, is key to winning firefights.  

Once engaged, battles last only seconds. If you’re good, fights are over before the enemy has a chance to even return fire.

Anticipation is everything in Rainbow Six. Use the small clues the game drops to anticipate movements. Even shadows generated by the environment can tip you off to an opponent’s location.

Being a quick aimer is different from being smart aimer.  

If you know the direction and general area your opponent is in, you can pre-fire down corridors or around corners.

Reduce your own footprint

Keep that last lesson in mind — you also do not want to give your opponents the kind of information that allows them to anticipate you.  

Sound reveals a great deal of information. Sprinting is one of the noisiest behaviours in Rainbow Six. Avoid it when you have the luxury of doing so.  

Keep discipline with your weapons. Unless you’re pre-firing with solid information, gunfire can let your enemies know your location more so than footsteps.

Yet, keep moving

Stationary targets make for easy headshots.  

Although Ubisoft has committed to reducing crouch and lean spam, you will want to always keep moving, crouching, and strafing in engagements.

Practice how to track targets while also pressing your movement keys. If caught in a direct firefight, strafing left and right while laying down fire on a target is imperative. Use natural cover in the maps to duck behind as you reload and plan your next move. Duck frequently in and out behind that cover to throw off your opponent and give yourself critical protection.

Mind the asymmetry of defender vs. attacker

Rainbow Six’s weapon and gadget loadouts are balanced in favor of the attacker. Attackers have more powerful and accurate rifles, less recoil, and almost total access to the ACOG optic.  Defenders mostly have access to weapons that excel at CQB, such as shotguns and submachine guns.

What defenders lack in damage and range, they make up for in fire rate and recoil, and therefore thrive in close quarters combat.  With rare exceptions, like Jager’s HK-416, defenders will almost always be at a disadvantage in longer range engagements. 

Run a loadout and optic you’re comfortable with

Rainbow Six’s customisation offer some degree of choice over how your aiming profile looks and acts.

For some, the added magnification of the ACOG scope is essential to staying accurate and pulling off critical headshots in engagements.  For others, the added shake and recoil of the ACOG can be distracting, finding it easier to use the unmagnified Red Dot, Holographic, or Reflex sights. 

Choose the sighting that is most comfortable for you.  Never feel like you’re second guessing the outcome of a match because you felt that your sights were off or forced you to miss a shot.

When you can, rely on teammates

Although being sharp with your senses and instincts helps, don’t forget that Rainbow Six isn’t a free for all.

Head to head engagements can turn on whether your teammates are able to give you intel regarding the location of your opponents.  Even when dead in ranked or casual, your teammates can watch cameras and give in-game voice callouts to enemy locations.  

Even if your team is silent, it never hurts to ask (or plead).  If someone has been knocked out of the round, diligently watching cameras can be a huge help.

And of course, get better at aiming

Tactics and knowledge can only get you so far.

Aim will always be a critical component of winning at shooter games, and Rainbow Six is no different.

No matter how well-trained in tactics you are, as you climb the Ranked ladder, your opponents will only get faster and more disciplined.  

Quick and accurate fire is a way to bail yourself out of mistakes. While the time to kill in Rainbow Six is very short, being able to “flick” your aim and make quick turns on potential ambushers can make all the difference.  

After two weeks on the Technical Test Server, Rainbow Six Siege Operation Burnt Horizon is officially releasing Wednesday March 6. As always, new operators Mozzie and Gridlock will only be available to Year 4 pass holders for the first week. Outback, Siege’s excellent new map, will be available to all.

Ubisoft aggregated the weeks of testing in an addendum to the original Burnt Horizon patch notes.

Dokkaebi

• Auto-hang up timer of Dokkaebi calls reduced to 12 seconds (down from 18).

Ubi is intensifying the original nerf introduced to the Logic Bomb at the beginning of the test server. In my experience, 18 seconds was still long enough that I always felt the need to stop and hang up the call myself. Bumping it down to 12 sounds like a good middle ground where you can easily let it ring without much annoyance.

Capitão

• Back to Wind Bastion version.

Ubi is completely reversing the changes to Capitão’s fire bolts. The new bolts did feel a bit overpowered. The effective radius was march larger and had huge potential for denying areas from defenders. The devs are going to “take a look at and evaluate the data and feedback we've gathered.” For now, we’re back to the wimpy fire bolts of old.

Gameplay tweaks

Some small, previously unlisted changes were noticed early on by players on the test server, but Ubi took this opportunity to make them official.

• Minimum Clearance Level for Ranked Playlist increased from 20 to 30.
• Reduction in HP after being revived from a DBNO state: PvP = 20 (down from 50), Terrorist Hunt = 15.
• Holosight color is now determined by the base skin of the weapon it is equipped on.

Most notably, “resetting” (in which you intentionally shoot a near-death teammate into the DBNO state and revive them back to 50 health) is effectively going away. Instead of being revived back up to 50 health, you’re now revived to 20. With so much less health after a revive, resetting will almost never be worth the risk.

Despite its inherent ridiculousness as a mechanic, resetting has always been treated as a normal part of Siege’s meta. It was always treated as a sort of workaround to the fact that attackers have no reliable way to regain health. Finka can save a life in a pinch, but her healing is temporary. A proper medic on attack could help fill the hole left by resetting, but I’m not holding my breath.

Ubi has also fixed an issue with head alignment following the lean spam fixes coming to Burnt Horizon. “Previous camera placement at a full lean allowed players to fire without being completely exposed. As part of our fix to counteract lean spamming, we are shifting the camera to the center of the head instead of the far side of the head, even when at a ‘full lean,’” the post reads.

The devs are also using this patch to consolidate the file size of Siege from its whopping 81GB (!) to a more reasonable, yet unspecified size. Unfortunately, that also means the Burnt Horizon patch will be larger than usual. A whole grip of general bug fixes are also on the way. You can check out all of those here.

Ubisoft's latest Rainbow Six Siege teaser reveals that the upcoming Danish operator, arriving in Season 2 of Year 4, will be an “expert in covert reconnaissance and stealth tactics"—and also suggests that a proximity alarm gadget will come to the shooter soon.

The image is taken from a trailer Ubisoft released last week, but this version is much higher quality, allowing players to zoom in and pick out small details. Towards the bottom left is a map of Denmark, over which is a post-it note hinting at stealth skills and the ability to "blend and adapt" to the environment. Could that mean some kind of cloaking device? We'll have to wait and see.

The info also appears on the attacking side of the board, which means the Danish operator is likely to be an attacker.

The other tease is at the far left of the image: it's a piece of blue paper that lists the game's gadgets, and on there is a "proximity alarm", with a red arrow pointing to it. No such item is in the game at the moment, but it's not hard to guess how it'd work. Place it down to watch your back and it'll tell you if an enemy gets near, is what I'd imagine.

For more details on Siege's upcoming Australian operators and their gadgets, click here.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

For Rainbow Six Siege fans, Christmas comes every February at the Six Invitational. It’s the special time when Ubisoft takes the stage and gives a “State of the Siege Address” that sets the tone for the year to come.

This year, among many other great announcements, Ubi revealed that Siege’s Ranked mode would finally be coming out of beta in Season 2. The new and improved Ranked will receive the much loved pick/ban feature as well as an in-game stats hub. It was an exciting announcement that made a lot of people very happy, myself included. What they didn’t address are the biggest problems that still plague the mode: 

• Inadequate punishment for abandoning a match
• Uneven matchmaking that allows high-level players to stomp the less skilled (you know, me) 
• MMR penalties that don’t account for abandons, griefers, or uneven matchmaking 

It’s hard to feel great about Siege’s revamped Ranked when it still has so many pitfalls that keep it from feeling competitive. If two teammates abandon the match, a loss is a loss. If your opponent brought their Diamond friend to a Copper-level match, a loss is a loss. Your rank decreases because of factors completely out of your control. The MMR hit for losing is way more than you get for winning, so you can only ever take one step forward and two steps back.

In about half of my Ranked matches, somebody leaves at some point. They can return if they were disconnected by lag or a crash, but that feature only works about half the time. In most cases, players are leaving because they don’t like how the match is going and they don’t fear the consequences of the abandon. Sure, you get locked out of joining another Ranked match for 30 minutes, but that doesn’t matter if you were closing the game anyway or just want to play Casual.

Matchmaking is hard to get right. Every game has its share of issues, but it’s frustrating to see templates for solutions in other games go unexplored in Siege for years. In Overwatch, an early abandon from a teammate triggers a window for a surrender to be called without anyone losing MMR. That feature alone, tweaked to Siege’s ecosystem, would improve the Ranked experience for everyone overnight.

Dota 2 has Low Priority Matchmaking, a temporary account status that automatically groups together players who often abandon matches or have several reports against their account. Players who make the game worse for everyone else are banished to their own matchmaking hell and everyone else has a smoother experience. Siege needs low priority matchmaking yesterday.

When the credits roll on most matches, it’s commonplace to peruse the enemy’s ranks and find at least one high-level player that shouldn’t have been allowed in. Unlike Siege’s cousin Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, you can squad up with a friend no matter their rank. It’s nice to know that I can always play with friends no matter what, but the lenient rule is constantly abused in a way that sabotages matches from the very beginning. Siege needs some sort of limiter for squadding up with mismatched skill levels.

Make no mistake, the changes that are coming to Ranked are amazing. Pick/ban is a welcome strategical addition to Siege and I’m glad there will finally be resources in the game to track stats. It’s a smart move for Ubisoft to recognize the Road to S.I. mode’s positive reception and feed it back into Ranked. But it’s disconcerting to see Ubi ready to take Ranked out of beta while other issues are still so prominent. It doesn’t instil confidence that they really see these things as big problems.

It’s possible that Ubi is working on the stuff mentioned above. Now that they’ve formed a dedicated team to look at the playlists and improve them, I’m sure they’ll be tackled at some point. But with the pace that Siege moves, we don’t know if that means next season or next year. I reached out to Ubisoft to clarify if they’re working these problems ahead of Ranked’s full release, but I haven’t heard back yet. If solutions to these problems aren’t coming soon, then Ranked isn’t ready to leave beta.  

Ubisoft has detailed exactly how Rainbow Six Siege's next two operators—Gridlock and Mozzie—will use their gadgets to mix up the meta when Operation Burnt Horizon launches at the start of Year 4.

Gridlock is a three armour attacker who carries Trax Stingers. These stingers, when thrown, will create a growing cluster of spike traps designed to slow down defenders or flush them out of entrenched positions. In addition to a slowing effect, the traps deal 10 damage and create noise. She carries the new F90 assault gun or the M249 SAW LMG as her primary, plus a Super Shorty shotgun as a secondary.

Jäger’s ADS gadget won't affect the Stingers, but attackers can destroy them with bullets, explosives or melee attacks. If you shoot a Stinger soon after it hits the ground, you'll reduce the number of traps it can spawn. 

Mozzie is a defender that's all about taking over enemy drones. He has a Pest Launcher, and the Pests it fires can hack into attacker drones, giving you control over them. You can either fire a Pest directly onto a drone or place it somewhere hidden and hope an enemy drone passes by, at which point the Pest will latch on. Attackers will be warned it there is a Pest nearby when they're controlling their drones.

You can gain control of multiple attacker drones, which should help you gather lots of intel. You can also hijack Twitch's shock drones. Dokkaebi can re-hack a Mozzie drone to access the video feed, but you won't get control of the drone back. Instead, you'll have to destroy drones that Mozzie has hijacked, which will be shown by a blue light on top. Alternatively, IQ will also be able to tell which drones are hacked. 

Mozzie's primaries are the P10 Roni automatic pistol and the Commando 9 assault rifle.

I like how Ubisoft has mixed up the formula, giving a defensive gadget to an attacker, and giving us a defender that's all about drones, which is usually the realm of the attacking team. They'll be live on test servers tomorrow, and you can watch footage of them in action in the video at the top of this article.

Ubisoft also revealed the full Year 4 roadmap today—read all about it here.

Ubisoft has revealed the roadmap for Year 4 of Rainbow Six Siege, which includes new operators from Demnark, Peru, Kenya and India, as well as reworks to the Kafe, Kanal and Theme Park maps.

Following the introduction of two Australian operators and the Outback map in Season 1, which Andy covered here, Season 2 will add a new operator from Denmark and one from the United States Secret Service. Instead of a new map, Season 2 will see the map Kafe reworked, Ubisoft announced at the Six Invitational 2019 today.

For Season 3, Ubisoft will introduce operators from Peru and Mexico, and rework the Kanal map, while Season 4 will add operators from Kenya and India and rework Theme Park.

That means that after Season 1, we won't see any new maps for the rest of Year 4. But there's still plenty going on: after tweaks to Capitão and Dokkaebi, outlined here, the dev team will nerf both Lion and Glaz. Lion will be able to scan for enemies quicker, but enemy positions will be visible for a shorter time, and only as red pings rather than full outlines. As for Glaz, his scope will only reveal enemies while you're stood still, which will make him less of an entry fragger.

Ubisoft is also trying to target toxicity and team killing during Year 4. Specifically, it plans to reverse damage you deal to teammates—after a certain level of friendly fire, you'll receive a sanction, and any more damage you deal to your teammates will be reversed onto you, chipping away at your health bar.

Year 4 will also see the introduction of a newcomer bomb-only playlist that's for players between levels one and 50, which will only offer three maps. The aim is to ease new players into the game, providing a bridge between casual and ranked play. In ranked play, Ubisoft will make the much-requested pick and ban system permanent.

Other changes include a big rework for deployable shields to make them a viable piece of equipment. They'll fully cover doorways, and they'll have small panels of one-way bulletproof glass in them, allowing defenders to see what's on the other side, almost like a mini Mira window.

Ubisoft also detailed the new tiered cost system for operators: they'll cost 25,000 renown for their first year, 20,000 renown for their second year, 15,000 renown for their third year, and 10,000 renown after that.

Lastly, the development team detailed their first attempt to target lean spam, which will go live on the test servers tomorrow. Basically, spamming lean will only move your head slightly side to side, rather than the wild flapping that happens currently and makes headshots near-impossible. 

More details on the Aussie operators and the new map will arrive later today, so stay tuned.