Four months after free-to-play launch, Ubisoft Montreal is still grappling with the surge.
When Rainbow Six Siege morphed into the free-to-play Rainbow Six Siege X back in June, it wasn’t the brave new beginning some had hoped for. Players didn’t like how currency gain slowed to a crawl (that has since been fixed) and server woes were widely reported. But one of the enduring complaints about Siege X is that the shift to free-to-play has triggered a huge uptick in cheating.
I caught up with Siege creative director Alexander Karpazis at Gamescom Asia x Thailand Games Show last week. I asked if the team at Ubisoft Montreal expected cheating to surge to the extent that it did in June.
«We knew having free access that it could be a vector that is exploited», he said, «and we were ramping up our R6 ShieldGuard. In a lot of ways it really did help, but we need to be faster when it comes to making sure that we stay one step ahead of cheat makers, too.»
Eliminating cheating entirely is impossible, I acknowledged, and Karpazis agreed. «Absolutely. That’s a message that we keep on having to share with our community. It’s not something where we’ll receive zero percent cheating.
«But there is a goal for us to make sure that, again, if we stay ahead of cheating and we address it faster and faster, and we make it more expensive for cheat makers so that more and more of them drop out of the cheat making scene… These are the wins, and these are ways of making the game a lot more competitive and a lot more fair.
