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Opinion | What should Ubisoft do with Lion?

It’s been almost a full year since the release of Lion, so as we come closer to the Six Invitational 2019 I thought it was a good time to take a look at Lion and how Ubisoft should handle him.

Operation Chimera was revealed at last year’s Six Invitational, showing off the new operators Lion and Finka, both boasting new “Global Abilities.” What looked like a promising season eventually became one filled with controversy.

Lion’s ability features a drone that can scan the entire map with the press of a button, and any defenders that move during the scan will be revealed to the attackers through a full body outline. Finka’s ability allows her to boost her allies, giving them more health, faster Aim-Down-Sight (ADS) and reduced recoil. While both operators eventually received a nerf, Lion still remains a broken and overpowered operator.

The main problem with Lion is not only that his ability is too powerful, but when used in a team-oriented environment it becomes virtually game-breaking. His ability can also be combined with other operators such as Dokkaebi, Blitz, Jackal and others, which has come to light recently with players dubbing this operator lineup as “toxic” and “meta abuse.”

So this brings me to the question; what should Ubisoft do with Lion? They’ve already taken the necessary steps to ban Lion from competitive play, but this is not enough. While Lion’s ban is a great step in the right direction, this does nothing at all to resolve the issue in ranked and casual play.

In my opinion, Ubisoft has two choices they can make in regards to Lion’s future in Rainbow Six Siege.

Option One: Nerf or Rework Lion

The obvious and most simple choice is to take Lion’s nerf a step further. While not all that simple, there are plenty of other operators Ubisoft can compare Lion to when nerfing him. For example, instead of having a full outline of the scanned defender, Ubisoft could replace this with a ping, similar to a Jackal or Alibi ping. Ubisoft could also make it so the scan only affects a certain radius around Lion, and not the whole map. I think these changes would greatly benefit not only the game’s health, but the player’s experience as well.

Option Two: Put Lion in a cooldown state similar to the competitive cooldown

At the Season 8 Finals in Rio, Ubisoft announced that they were putting Lion into a competitive quarantine, banning him from being chosen in competitive play. Ubisoft could do something very similar to this in ranked and casual play. Pengu mentioned that Fortnite does something very similar to this with their overpowered weapons, where they put them in the “vault,” meaning they can no longer be used until they are rebalanced.

While this seems like a no-brainer, I don’t believe this would be the right choice for Ubisoft to make. If I was writing this article back in the middle of 2018, I would be vouching for Ubisoft to do this, however I feel that it is too late, and that it would be an insult to the players who have had to deal with these issues since Chimera. Ubisoft needs to fix Lion so they can leave these issues behind. I also feel that Ubisoft would face a lot of backlash if they took this route, because many season pass holders would be unhappy as they paid for these operators.

In conclusion, Ubisoft has a variety of paths they can take to remedy the situation, which will greatly improve the game’s overall health and player experience. At the very least, Ubisoft can use this situation as an opportunity to learn from their mistakes, and hopefully not release more broken, overpowered operators into the game in the future.

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