Things to improve in Rainbow Six: Siege

Here’s my free-form response to the survey about the stage of Siege. It is addressed to the Rainbow Six developers.

Urgent fixes

First, you need to tackle the cheaters problem. Currently there seems to be a tad too many cheaters. There are probably more than people realize, because there is no way to review a match. You only see a brief death camera. Let’s say that a guy knew exactly where you were. Did he see you on camera a few seconds ago? Did his teammate see you on camera and told him? Did he see you with wallhacks? No way to tell. That’s why it is important to have replays and be able to report cheaters after a game.

Also, being able to watch games is of value in itself. It’s kind of crazy that the best you can do currently is to record a first-person view video. That’s just my opinion, but here’s WarOwl, saying that he didn’t cover R6 because it didn’t have a replay system.

Second, it is my impression that Siege is coming apart at the seams a little bit. For example, since the season start it takes half a minute to connect to the servers, instead of a few seconds before. There are no sound cues sometimes. The other day I didn’t get the “enemy detected outside” notification at all. Some listed weapon damage numbers are false. Things like that need to be tidied up, pronto.

Map selection

Only third come the actual feature requests. The most important one, in my opinion, is being able to select maps to play. In unranked modes, a player should be able to select any maps or even a single map, period. Queue ten minutes long? Warn him, but let him. Here are the reasons.

One reason concerns new players. The map learning curve in Siege is very, very steep, compared to other games. And map knowledge is critical to playing well. The discovery playlist with three maps was a step in the right direction, but it needs to go further.

Here’s another. Let’s say I want to test a tactic for a given map, for example how to play an operator. By the time I get this map in matchmaking, a million other things will have happened.

Here’s another. Everybody has that one map that he hates. There’s no need to make a gamer play a map he doesn’t like in Unranked.

In Ranked it’s another matter, but I’ll toss an idea: allow the player to optionally narrow the ranked pool to maps played in Pro League.

Map bans are said to be coming shortly, meaning that teams will vote on which map to play. However, voting doesn’t address issues listed above. Map bans are optimal when:

1) there are few players, not enough to allow map selection on individual player level
2) there are many bad maps in the pool

This means that they would work best for cooperative T-hunt, with relatively few players and maps like Plane, House or Favela.

I think Siege has enough players to allow map selection in Unranked/Casual. If not, at least allow a player to deselect up to three (or four, five…) maps he doesn’t like, leaving the rest in the pool.

Visibility

The second most important feature request is to improve visibility. In my opinion, tactical shooters should be designed so that enemies are clearly visible. Examples of how it is done are Counter Strike (well, before Valve introduced green models on a green map), and now Valorant. I am aware that there are no simple solutions to visibility in Siege, perhaps except one: enemy player outlines. Valorant has them and nobody complains. Maybe it’s time to try this again.

Shooting range

The third feature I’d request would be to introduce some way to quickly try out different weapons and weapon setups (muzzle attachments and sights), and to warm up aim. There is plenty of inspiration sources here: Counter Strike has many custom training maps, Aim Botz being the most popular, and Valorant has a nice built-in training facility. Just copy the good things.