Opinion: Permanent TDM mode shows Ubisoft's commitment to competitive viability

_{Image via SiegeGG}

“Ubisoft made a decision universally loved amongst the competitive Rainbow Six Siege community” is not a sentence you hear uttered often — for a variety of reasons. 

First, it’s nearly impossible to please everyone. Second, Rainbow Six Siege’s community can be absurdly and irrationally negative about almost anything at any given time. Third, Ubisoft has made a couple high profile missteps in the past. No one’s perfect. 

However, the decision to put a permanent team deathmatch mode into the game
(it will go live on test servers before entering live servers) is an absolute win for all involved, even though it might need some tweaks to map choice. 

Permanent Team Deathmatch Mode Provides Fun Alternative to R6 Players

Rainbow Six Siege players have been clamoring for two things for years: A “less sweaty” way to enjoy Siege’s unique gunplay and a functioning warm-up mode. This mode solves both of these complaints. 

You can drop in and out as you please, and play as any operator you want. This gives players looking for a warmup a way to practice against real, human targets instead of bots. 

Additionally, this is a way to practice recoil, peeking, and everything else related to gunfighting in Siege while also giving players a less stressful way to play the game. 

Is it the core Siege experience, filled with the destruction mechanics and utility play that we all love Siege for? No, definitely not. But it’s another way for newer players to get a semi-Siege experience while also playing casually, as well as a way for veterans to get a quality warmup. 

Moreover, this change shows Ubisoft’s commitment to the game as a competitive product. Balance is something professional players are at times divided on, and a poorly balanced game doesn’t mean that Ubisoft, as a company, isn’t committed. 

Modes like this one prove that there’s investment; that Ubisoft does, in fact, care about the future of this game. 

There will be naysayers with pithy comments about how the anti-cheat doesn’t work right, or that it took until year six to finally ship this feature that players have been clamoring for. 

I’m not here to say that there haven’t been missteps along the way, or that the game is perfect in its current form. But, the fact that this feature shipped at all is evidence that the desire is there, even if the execution sometimes isn’t. 

There’s critique abound for not being able to stick the landing. All fall short at some point, and hiding critique helps no one. However, the asinine assumption that Ubisoft doesn’t care should be placed directly in the trash, where it always belonged. This feature is exactly what this game needed, and even if it took some time, its addition proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can’t reasonably say that Ubisoft doesn’t care about the competitive side of Siege.