What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here and today I want to talk about great ideas that
backfired in the development history of Rainbow Six Siege! Many thanks once again
to Nvidia and Alienware for their support of the channel and with that, let’s jump right in!
Number five on my list of changes that sounded great at first but then either backfired
completely or at least had more or less unforeseen consequences, is: raising the skill ceiling of the
game by adding more complexity to new operators. Rainbow Six has always prided itself as a game
where players can spend thousands of hours learning & improving and still not hit a defined
skill ceiling. There is no doubt in my mind that this never ending learning curve is the reason why
Siege has been able to keep dedicated players interested for going on six years now. But,
as the saying goes, it is most definitely possible to have too much of a good thing.
Throughout Year 2 and into year 3, there were several instances of new operators being added
to the game with more and more versatile gadgets or hidden passive abilities that were intended to
add more complexity to the game and thereby raise the skill ceiling and reward players who were able
to stay on top of these developments. Some of the most prominent examples include the Bosak sisters
(Ela and Zofia - with their stun resistance, Zofia’s self-revive ability and Ela’s down but
not out backup stun), Maestro (who’s LMG used to have hip fire that improved, the longer you
held down the trigger), Echo’s invulnerability to Dokkaebi’s phone calls, Caveira’s ability to hide
her footsteps from Jackal and of course, the queen of complex and confusing abilities herself: Finka.
Unique and special counters between individual operators, secret passives and fiendishly
complicated gadgets at first all sound like a great way to add complexity to a game and
thereby lengthen the learning curve and raise that all important skill ceiling. But, as time showed,
being able to keep all of these details in your mind once the round timer starts ticking and the
bullets start flying was virtually impossible, even for the most engaged players no matter how
religiously they followed all of the reveals and read all of the patch notes. And there’s nothing
worse than losing a round to some tiny little obscure detail you completely forgot about.
Luckily, the devs recognised the issues caused by these features and by now,
most of them have been scrapped or reworked into something simpler.
My personal number four on the list of stuff that sounded good at first but later started
to cause issues is the map banning system. Those of you who have been playing Siege for a while now
will remember that in the not-so-distant past, you could barely go a week on Twitter without seeing
someone rant about having to play Skyscraper or quitting the game for the day, because they had
to play Hereford twice in a row. And yes, playing the same map repeatedly or having no way to avoid
a map you really, really hated was frustrating, so it made perfect sense for the devs to implement a
system that gave players at least some measure of control over which maps they get to play.
When this new system was announced, it felt like the answer to so many players’ prayers
and it seemed fool proof, right? Three maps are presented and one is banned by each team,
what could go wrong? But of course, once you give players the chance to ban maps, one of the
side effects is that players who have not had a chance to properly familiarise themselves with a
freshly reworked map, will ban it by default. In all fairness, out of all of the examples,
this one probably has the mildest side effects that (once you think about it) are
probably not that surprising. It still makes my list though, simply because it’s actually
been quite amusing to see the complaints on twitter turn from: complaining about having
to play certain maps to not being able to play certain maps because they are always banned.
Coming in at number three is the match cancellation feature introduced in Year 5
Season 2. The idea was simple: if a teammate had connection issues at
the beginning of a match or randomly left on purpose for whatever reason,
the remaining players were given the choice to vote to cancel the match; a simple
safety mechanism that was introduced due to the aggravation caused by server issues at the time.
And it sounded straight forward enough when it was announced but of course,
ingenious players quickly realised that if they didn’t like who they were matched up against,
all it would take is for one player to quit the match, to allow his squad mates to cancel. All
it would take is an alt account for the leaving player to return and everyone’s back in business
again. In all fairness, this isn’t all bad because it also allows players to dodge suspected cheaters
or stream snipers but it still makes the list because a measure that was introduced to help deal
with legitimate technical reasons is now being abused to quit matches whenever a team doesn’t
like their opponents and this can be especially annoying for known pro players or high ranked
streamers who find themselves on the receiving end of a manufactured cancellation quite frequently.
Number two on my list is: the MMR lock. Back in the dark ages of Rainbow Six Siege
a form of cheating existed that was sadly fully legal and allowed mediocre players to
swindle their way to Diamond rank, while at the same time making the game absolutely miserable
for any legitimate players unfortunate enough to get matched with them. This practice became known
under the name of: reverse boosting and all it would take is a stack of similarly skilled players
where at least one or two of them have a second Rainbow Six Siege account.
The practice was simple, take these secondary accounts into ranked and make sure you lose
by whatever means necessary. Go AFK, grief your teammates and if necessary even leave the match;
anything to ensure it’s recorded as a loss. Keep doing this until
you go all the way down to Copper V, Now, once you have artificially lowered
the ranks of these accounts, simply squad up and play properly and because the matchmaking system
uses an average all of the players on a team to find suitable opponents and decide how much MMR is
gained after a win, this stack is now effectively making sure that they are always matched to lower
skill players and that they still receive a decent number of MMR points after every match.
Doing this allowed low Plat and even Gold players to cheat their way all the way up to Diamond
while at the same time making the game less fun for everyone else around them.
Something needed to be done and the solution, brought into Rainbow Six Siege in Year 4 Season 4,
was implementing an MMR lock that only allowed players within a 1000 MMR range
to squad up with each other. With Year 6 Season 2, these rules were tightened
even more to include unranked players and the permissible gap was further reduced to 700 MMR.
And while these measures did a great job at essentially eradicating the practice of
reverse boosting it also means that legitimate players are in many cases no longer able to play
ranked together with their friends. All it can take is someone going off and running into some
bad luck while solo queueing and even friends that are legitimately on an equivalent skill
and experience level, are now no longer allowed to play together, at least until the next season
AND in extreme cases, with some bad luck, it could even be possible to be blocked from
squadding up in the next season, due to the soft MMR reset that was implemented in Year 4 Season 2.
Yes, in all fairness there is the option for friends to still go into the unranked game mode,
instead of ranked, but as most of us have been able to experience for ourselves, the unranked
mode can come with its own whole set of challenges (like: less strict matchmaking, resulting in more
random matchups or the fact that some players use this mode to warm up before ranked and all
they really want is to run and gun, leaving you to put up 8 reinforcements on your own). Many players
just don’t take the mode as seriously and for someone who just wants to play actual Siege with a
friend or two, it does result in a less enjoyable, less balanced experience compared to ranked.
Everyone knows how devastating peeker’s advantage is in Rainbow Six Siege and
one of the key skills for new players to learn is how to use this advantage in their favour,
while adapting their positioning so as to avoid getting peeked themselves.
But what if you could minimise the lag you experience in the game? Well,
that is exactly what the brand new Nvidia Reflex setting in the graphics menu is for, especially
when you combine it with a state of the art, ultra-high FPS monitor like, the Alienware 2521H!
What Reflex does, is it reduces the system latency your PC will experience by synchronising your
system’s processor and graphics card. And that minimises the time it takes between your enemy
being rendered on screen, your mouse click being registered and the information of a fired shot
being relayed to the game, resulting in a kill. That’s what the setting does in a nutshell and
I will be going into this topic more in a dedicated video coming to the channel soon!
And finally, number one on my list and a feature that sounded amazing at first, the solution to
all of the problems of a serious ranked player but something that in the end appears to do more
harm than good on a day to day level is the MMR Roll Back, introduced in Year 4 season 1!
The idea was simple: when a cheater gets banned, nullify all of the matches they
played this season and add or remove MMR points from all of the affected players. In theory,
no matter how good you are, you should always lose more matches against cheaters than you would win
and this should have resulted in net win for all legitimate players.
But, for a number of reasons, this has backfired quite spectacularly and for almost all players,
the net result at the end of a season is that they will have lost far more points than they got back.
The first feature that contributes to this issue is the practice of removing MMR from player who
managed to beat a cheater. Now this does make complete sense because you would otherwise have
a whole bunch of MMR added into the system each season, leading to significant inflation but,
it nevertheless contributes to the issue of legitimate players being
punished with a net loss of MMR each season. Another issue with the system is that all
matches in the entire season are nullified once an account is banned for cheating.
But it is completely possible that an individual could play hundreds or even a thousand plus
legitimate games in a season only to get fed up with being stuck in plat and install a cheat
right at the very end, resulting in all of those legitimate matches (including the many matches
where other players legitimately gained MMR by beating this player) being struck from the record.
And last but very much the opposite of least, there is this one little sentence in the
original dev blog from 2019 about a feature of the system, that has hugely contributed to making it a
negative experience for most legitimate players. “The system will not grant you MMR beyond
your max MMR for the current Season.” This insignificant seeming little comment didn’t
even register with most people when the new system was announced but its effects are undeniable.
The reason for this feature sadly does make sense. The thing we have to keep in mind is that ranking
is really supposed to be used to make sure that matches are relatively well balanced in terms of
the skill level of the players on each team. Now imagine this scenario: you play for a few weeks
and match up several times against a player who is cheating, losing MMR every time. But you keep
on playing and eventually, you make up the lost ranking by winning legitimate matches and then you
reach a rank that accurately reflects your skill. Now this cheater is banned and in theory, you
could suddenly be catapulted into a rank that no longer matches your skill level and you will have
days or even weeks of playing with and against players that are much more experienced than you.
There is a significant potential for causing imbalanced matchmaking and that is why the
system caps your cheater related MMR gains to the maximum you naturally reached for that season.
I get where this comes from but at the same time, this is probably the one feature that contributes
the most to making MMR roll back a punishment, rather than a reword for legitimate players.
Your gains are capped, while your losses for beating a cheater or winning
with a cheater on your team are limitless. What would you prefer? Would you rather put up
with potentially worse matchmaking for a little while after gaining MMR through the rollback
or do you think it is better to keep this cap in place? And more generally,
what is your most hated change that started out with good intentions but then went wrong?
Let me know in the comments below and do feel free to leave a like while you’re down there.
I hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you in the next episode!