Rogue in-game pop-up makes Rainbow Six Siege players think a controversial change was pushed through

Rainbow Six Siege is a game of inches. If you move the game’s parameters one way or the other a tiny bit, ripple effects can change the meta.

One of those meta-changing updates was seemingly pushed through this morning with the launch of Y5S4, Operation Neon Dawn. The update was simple: Reinforceable hatches that were located on the roofs of maps where defenders couldn’t reinforce them would be automatically reinforced and wouldn’t count against the defenders’ reinforcement pool (defenders normally can only reinforce 10 “soft walls” per round).

But Rainbow Six community developer Karen Lee confirmed that this change shouldn’t have appeared on the live servers. “Roof hatches are not auto reinforced in Neon Dawn,” Lee said. “That is a rogue popup meant for the Test Server only that should not have appeared on the live version of the game.”

What seems like a minor change, though, could have been meta-shifting. The bombsites on the top floors of maps are already more difficult to attack than ones on the first or second floors. Forcing attackers to bring more hard breaching gadgets could lock them into rigid lineups.

This change isn’t going through without more testing, however, to see how the update plays. Rainbow Six fans all over social media were immediately relieved.

Regardless of that minor update, Operation Neon Dawn is now live on all platforms.