Rainbow Six Siege anti-cheat: Ban numbers, updates, improvements

The Rainbow Six Siege community has been frustrated with the game's anti-cheat for a while now. As cheaters continue to be a big problem, FPS fans are questioning what can be done to make the game's anti-cheat more effective. 

Ubisoft is apparently aware of the complaints. The R6 developers decided to come out with a hefty blog post discussing what the game's anti-cheat does and what the team is hoping to accomplish in the future. 

Who are Rainbow Six Siege cheaters?

Ubisoft first wanted to define the types of cheaters who are ruining the game for others. The first type of cheater is a blatant cheater. These are cheaters who "show no regard for gravity or spin out of control to get rid of their opponents,"  basically making it obvious they are cheating. Covert cheaters will claim they aren't cheating and that it's their true skill.

Said Ubisoft: "Their goal is to appear better than they really are and create noticeable disruption in the community."

Overperforming players are another type of cheater Ubisoft has their eyes on. They are often highly skilled players using smurf accounts to dominate lower levels. Boosted players take advantage of the system by playing with overperforming players and cheaters. 

Other popular types of cheaters include account stealers who resell other players' accounts, cheat makers who are the "brains behind the cheats" and profit from them, and then cheat resellers that profit from cheaters. 

"This ecosystem exists because there is money to be made on Siege and will unfortunately exist for as long as they can profit from it, which is why disrupting their money flow will always be one of our primary jobs," Ubisoft stated. 

Why do so many people cheat in Rainbow Six Siege?

Ubisoft included a few reasons why cheaters are targeting the popular FPS. 

1. We are a competitive game with a solid player base. This equates to money in the eyes of cheat makers and resellers.

2. We are part of the esports scene. And with more attention on the highest level of play comes an increased market for getting players up to that level.

3. Players are always looking for an edge. As long as there's incentive for players to perform at a high level, there will be an aftermarket to support easy enhancement.

How many cheaters have been caught in Rainbow Six Siege?

While many Rainbow Six Siege players have been skeptical of the game's anti-cheat, the program has been doing some work. 

According to Ubisoft's blog, the total cheating bans thus far have reached over 222,800 accounts. On average, the team bans over 10,000 players for creating every month. This includes over 100,000 cheaters in 2021 alone. 

"We keep a close eye on new cheats and plan to focus more time and energy into threat intelligence — working with others in the space to expand our knowledge of emerging cheats so we can deal with them before they reach you in-game," Ubisoft added. 

What does Rainbow Six Siege anti-cheat do?

This is probably one of the most commonly asked questions Ubisoft gets about the anti-cheat since the community has been constantly let down by the anti-cheat's lack of impactful updates and the times it has wrongfully banned accounts. 

Ubisoft decided to explain what exactly the anti-cheat team does. The main goal of the team is to identify and detect cheats and "make sure the offending players are actually cheating." They do this with help of BattlEye, a third-party system. 

"They tap into a robust, ever-evolving cheating knowledge base to detect cheaters at a large scale, casting an incredibly wide net to effectively catch blatant cheaters and many covert cheaters that fit the parameters within their system. Of course, some cheats are more elusive than others. Where possible, we try help BattlEye expand their detections to account for emerging issues. We then act as a second layer of cheat security," Ubisoft said. 

The team also protects the game's code, trying to slow down the cheating process by having a more secure build. The anti-cheat team improves the build with encryption, refactoring, server-side validations, and investing in threat intelligence. 

What improvements are coming to Rainbow Six Siege anti-cheat?

Future developments are under way, according to Ubisoft. The first plan is to improve data ban detections, ensuring players can trust these detections. The goal is to identify more cheaters while limiting the program's impact on fair players. 

Adding more verification for players looking to enter competitive modes is another main goal. This will help slow down the re-entry of cheaters who try to come back to Rainbow Six Siege. This can also slow down surfing. 

Meanwhile, Ubisoft is urging players to continue in-game reporting. Players can show video or photo evidence of someone cheating and send Ubisoft that along with the player's username. 

Ubisoft said the team will be more transparent going forward. Every 1.5 months, developers plan to bring the community regular updates on social media. The first update will be coming February 10.