Rainbow Six Siege now using users’ phone numbers to blacklist cheaters

Developers of multiplayer games are waging a never-ending war on cheating. There will always be players that try to gain the upper hand on others by breaking and bending the rules, and there will always be people trying to stop them. That’s just the cycle of any sort of game.

Cheating is usually a big issue in PvP games with a tight focus on mechanical skill, such as Rainbow Six Siege. With so many angles players need to worry about while playing the game, not to mention how quickly guns and other weapons can eliminate enemies, it’s easy to see how tuning on an aimbot or wall hacking can instantly boost a player’s profile and skill level.

That’s why Ubisoft is getting more serious about protecting the competitive integrity of the game as much as it can. And they’re doing it by using cheaters’ phone numbers.

Unlike many similar titles, Rainbow Six Siege requires users to verify their accounts with their phone numbers. Now, the game will use those phone numbers against cheaters. Any phone number that is tied to Siege accounts that are considered “repeat offenders” by Ubisoft will not be able to be used to verify an account.

This could potentially be a big breakthrough in curbing cheating. As opposed to new accounts that players can create by purchasing the game again or just creating a new email to verify a new account, coming by a new phone number to use is much more difficult. It won’t completely stamp out cheating, to be sure. And there will always be those players that find ways around the phone verification problem. But it should help lessen the impact of more casual cheaters, who repeatedly cheat partly because it’s easy to do so.

Rainbow Six Siege is still a game that players must pay for, but other publishers and developers of free-to-play games might take note of this step and monitor how well it performs in curbing cheating in the game. Since titles like Apex Legends or Call of Duty Warzone are free, it’s incredibly simple for cheaters to create new accounts when their old ones get banned. A similar step might make those cheaters think twice.

The Rainbow Six team also offered up an update on the state of its anti-cheat and told players its recently fixed several cheats that players were abusing in the game, including a cheat that forced all players in a server to crash.

Rainbow Six Siege will celebrate its eighth anniversary in December, so it’s good to see the devs continuing to work on improving the game and players’ experience in it.