Ubisoft’s latest Status Report shows plans to deal with cheating and other “long-standing issues” in Siege

Ubisoft’s highly-anticipated Status Report shared the company’s plans to tackle a series of key issues in Siege today. The post lists a myriad of player concerns over long-standing topics that range from sound propagation to cheating and smurfing.

The blog post is a follow-up to Ubisoft’s previous promise to address “a large number of priority topics that are important to the community” after the company announced on May 20 that a Status Report was on the way.

The Status Report is designed to give behind-the-scenes insight into “long-standing topics of player concerns” with a more big-picture approach than the regular Top Issues and Community Concerns series.

The post starts by addressing the sound issues that affect Siege. The sound propagation can misplace vital audio cues such as gunfire or footsteps, misleading players and having a negative impact on their experience. Ubisoft’s fix to the problem is a comprehensive reconstruction of “large parts” of Siege‘s sound and propagation system. This should begin to go live over the course of season three, but it won’t be finalized at the end of year five.

Ubisoft also addressed the connectivity issues that arose following the stay-at-home orders in mid-March due to the coronavirus outbreak. The company increased Siege‘s server infrastructure to mitigate the impact of the added demand and its data indicates that 97 percent of competitive matches start off with two complete teams and 98.5 percent of games finish without any disconnections. Siege‘s plans for the future include a series of upgrades and restructures to increase server resiliency.

Ubisoft’s measures to curb incomplete matches will come in the form of the Match Cancellation feature, which should make its way to the game over the course of Operation Steel Wave. “This will not ship at Season launch but later on during the Season,” Ubisoft said.

The Status Report also mentions Ubisoft’s plans to tackle boosting and smurfing. Cheaters who use hacks to inflate other players’ MMR will be banned and the MMR will suffer a rollback. To combat cheaters, however, Ubisoft’s future plans only list an “upcoming unified MMR change” as a new solution. The feature will reportedly allow for easier detection if players change regions and will take place alongside other existing measures.

Ubisoft’s plans for smurfing, too, rely mostly on measures that are already in effect. The Siege team will “continue to work to improve [its] understanding and analysis” of smurfs and to increase detection, but will “continue to enforce measures such as two-step verification” to curb players from creating multiple accounts.

The Status Report also addresses a myriad of other issues, including smoke propagation, drones, accessibility features, and a possible streamer mode.

Ubisoft first promised a Status Report in May after the #SaveSiege movement gained traction in the Siege community. One of the highlights of the movement was G2 pro Niclas “Pengu” Mouritzen’s two-hour video called “Everything Wrong with Rainbow Six Siege,” in which the player addressed a series of deficiencies with Ubisoft’s tactical shooter.