When something goes wrong in Rainbow Six Siege, it’s easy to blame the game. And sometimes it really is the game’s fault. But there are many misconceptions about the factors that we often pin our shortcomings on—stuff like server lag, “bad” hitboxes, or ping abuse. That’s where a new video explainer by former Siege developer Dominic Clement may be able to help. 

The video touches on complicated subjects like what ping really is, server vs. client side connections, and tick rate. The whole thing is a great watch, but let’s break down the biggest lessons to be learned.

Debunking "ping abuse"

Ping abuse is when a player uses their high ping to gain an advantage in-game. The idea is that a high ping player can peek around a corner (known as peeker's advantage) and shoot enemies before they have a chance to react. I regularly see angry accusations from enemies and teammates alike claiming that ping abuse is ruining the match. That would be a legit concern, if it were true.

“Ping abuse is not a thing,” Clement remarks in the video. “High ping is not an advantage. If anything, you should be mad at low-pingers.” He explains that when two players with wildly different pings enter a gunfight, their connections are essentially in a race to reach the server first. The faster connection wins the race, which means their shot will always register first. The system is designed to always favor lower pings. Siege didn’t always work this way—a 2017 update adjusted server interactions to make sure peeker's advantage isn't much of an advantage.

You probably just missed

Although Siege is rife with legitimate bugs, Clement points out that players often complain about hit registration (or hitreg) when there is often a much simpler explanation: you missed, or your ping spiked. He plays several clips toward the end of the video to demonstrate this.

I can definitely back up this one with personal experience. It’s common to be spectating a teammate when they lose a fight and immediately protest. Even though I was watching as they missed almost every shot, they’ll still insist that they shot them in the head. Other times what looks like bad hitreg is really a brief connection interruption on your end.

Siege hitboxes are brutal

Source: Coreross on YouTube

Perception problems are exacerbated by Siege’s ultra precise hitboxes. Clement explains that since 2017’s Operation Health, hitboxes are now defined by the body inside of the armor and clothing. Most shooters have much larger hitboxes that often expand past the body itself. In the gif below, you can see just how much you can “miss” in Overwatch and still hit your mark. The difference is staggering.

Source: Nateson on YouTube

In Siege, shooting through the top of a helmet, earmuff cups, or external pouches on an operator will miss. This is the system working. I regularly encounter players who don’t know this, so it’s easy to see how it causes confusion and misguided hitreg woes.

Clement told me via email that he consulted with Siege community manager UbiNoty to confirm everything in the video is accurate, so it’s safe to take the info at face value. He isn’t trying to insist that the player is always wrong, but it’s worth knowing what a fake problem looks like to better identify real ones when they happen.

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.