Ubisoft just fixed an exploit that was allowing Rainbow Six Siege players to force their opponents to lag by filling up the game’s chat window with random symbols. Players who abused it to get an advantage in the competitive shooter will be temporarily banned.
Exploits in Rainbow Six Siege are like Whac-A-Mole. When one gets fixed – like the Clash glitch that allowed the character to shoot through her shield – another pops up – like the shield making her invulnerable even to melee attacks.
The latest issues players have been contending with revolves around the game’s chat window. When one team wanted to crash the game or cause their opponent’s lag to spike, they would fill the window with a string of as many symbols as it could take, usually dollar signs, greater than symbols, or ampersands.
By forcing the game to lag, the offending players were sometimes able to disrupt the matches at key times or force their opponents to disconnect entirely, something that was especially frustrating for those competing in the game’s ranked mode.
“We have now deployed the fix for the chat symbol exploit,” Ubisoft announced in a Reddit post last night. In addition, the company said that players who used it were guilty of breaking the part of the game’s Code of Conduct that forbids people from interrupting “the general flow of Gameplay in the Game Client.”
“These bans are targeting players that abused the chat symbol exploit to crash matches,” a studio rep noted. “They will have varying lengths, depending on the frequency and severity of the exploit’s usage. This is our next step towards sanctioning players that knowingly and deliberately take advantage of exploits to the detriment of the overall match.”
This immediately led some players to fear that they might be banned simply for triggering the exploit accidentally or trying to recreate it to confirm that it existed and was an issue. “We accounted for that,” senior community developer Craig Robinson said on Twitter. “If you did it less than 10 times you’re safe.”
Other players have already called on Ubisoft to crack down harder on people believed to be cheating. “On a side note, this should expand to people who use glitches (such as Clash shield) in Ranked,” wrote user LiberDBell on Reddit.
Traditionally, the only players at risk of being banned in multiplayer games are those engaged in harassment or cheating enabled by third-party software. With this latest wave of bans, Ubisoft has made it clear it intends to also sanction players who try to cheat by exploiting problems in the game itself.
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