My concerns with Rainbow Six: Siege game balance

Warning: some of you who know me know just how „brutally honest“ I am, those of you who dont, you have been warned



Hey guys, I decided to voice my concerns in terms of R6 game balance. I will not go into how bad the ESL management is, how nothing ever goes smooth, how many bugs the game has etc (people from the community or people working with the competitive community can offer better insight on those things). I will try to focus purely on the issue of game balance, as I believe I can offer a decent opinion as somebody who has played several other FPS games at a very decent level (Quake, Unreal tournament, CS:S) and other games on an „well above average“ level (Dota2, SC2, Overwatch etc.) so I have wide palette of games to compare R6 game balance with.



While I dont compete anymore I play the game from time to time for fun (soloQ ranked) and watch pro league sometimes, etc.

I am mostly writing this because I enjoy the banter / discussion and recently verdi has posted a video trying to spawn a discussion so I decided to follow this trend, trying to spawn a discussion.



To put this bluntly – R6 game balance is beyond abysmal.

Let me elaborate – competitive games get balanced for two reasons, or rather, two purposes.

1. Balancing the game so that the game is balanced

2. Balancing (or rather changing) the gameplay or game balance (or adding new content) for the sake of keeping the game fresh so to speak to shift a stale meta-game (e.g. CS:GO, Dota2) while maintaining the game balanced

However 1. should always be a priority before 2. – well that is not really the case in R6 at all



Let me explain



5~ weeks ago a Battlefield youtuber MarbleDuck released a video where he talked with Rela (the French BF4 pro I quoted in my article, link below) on „why Battlefield1 sucks“ and Rela made a very good point. I recommend you to watch the whole video



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R2OUQ0TJhw (there is many many points easy to apply to Rainbow6, but if you dont have 30 minutes, just play the part from 11:30 till 13:00)

but to summarize the most important things Rela/Marbleduck said that carries over to R6 beautifully:



„There is simply too much in the game and something needs to be stripped away“



„Hopefully we can go into a direction of less content and more quality of what content we have in the game and everything works better together and its not just a whole lot of features and gadgetry being thrown at the game“



Relas response is what makes the whole video: „Yeah I think its pretty easy to throw in a lot of features and must be enjoyable as a developer to throw a lot of things on the game but then you have to do the bad work, the hard work, which is to make everything fit together, and that must not be the fun work to do“



Rela then used an anology, to summarize it: „You know how you take a piece of paper sometimes and you start writing down ideas and things you wanna do, and it feels kinda nice and sometimes you go crazy with it, but the developers lacked the idea of sitting down and finalizing that paper into a very clear vision of what they want to put into the game“ – which left us in Rainbow6 with a lot of content that feels „random“ being thrown at the game at times (Of course they are talking about battlefield but this is undeniably easy to apply to R6 devs). Content that doesnt fit within the meta or the competitive spirit of the game or content that doesnt feel like should be a part of competitive shooter (montagne and more recently Glaz for example).



Another huge problem (at least I think so) the developers dont understand is that in each competitive game there will be a meta game meaning no matter how hard you will try to balance your game, there will be things that are stronger and thus more popular than other things (operators for R6, heroes for Dota2, Champions for League, Cards for Hearthstone, Units for starcraft, weapons for CS:GO and so on). R6 devs try to constantly make irrelevant operators relevant, usually resulting in a totally batshit overpowered dumb ass operator (Im sure you can think of many examples on your own if you play R6) and also trying to fix things that are unimportant to the game (irrelevant operators but this goes for more things)



Another thing I think R6 devs are guilty of, however they arent the only developers guilty of this (or people in general) – far from it ; is that they are thinking of their product wayyyyyyy too highly (especially considering how good CS:GO and Overwatch is at the moment in terms of polish and eSport viability) and dont give in too much to pro players opinions.



To expand on my thought process here, if you look at CS:GO or Battlefield4 (or some other examples could be made) – those games were broken to their bones when they were released. And while the launch of these games was a disaster, it allowed developers to not be scared to make drastic changes in order to fix the game and in the long run because of the game being broken on release, they potentially shaped it into a much better game than what it would be if the game was „mediocre“ at launch and they would be content with the gamebalance, netcode, etc.

But R6 is pretty damn broken right now, so why are no drastic moves being made? At this point the game balance needs divine intervention



R6 devs reading this, im sorry but you have no god damn idea how to balance your game, simply put, like it or not. That is of course my „rude“, egoistic and biased opinion, but I am sure many more pros would tell you a similar thing if they werent trying to be political with you, because once they stop being so political, you wont listen at all (have the pro players in the private subreddit take an anonymous survey if you really wanna know what they think of the game balance decisions or anything else for that matter – give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth - but regardless of the "truth", you dont seem willing to act on it firmly enough). On another note - I still remember the huge „fuck you“ cloud that hanged over the entire competitive community when you announced open QLs 4 days before they happened, but the pros dont tell you „fuck you you *insert unpretty word here*, im scrimming 6 hours every single day for a month and now I cant even compete now because of 4 days notice for open QLs, can my time and commitment to the game be treated with respect for once“, they just say „try to get it better next time“. And if its not better the next time, more pro players will be pushed away. And if its not better even after that, even more players will be pushed away. I was treating this game as my second job and many other people still do so as well, so would you be so kind as to take our feedback into serious consideration and actually act on it for once. (I could make some examples here that would prove my point much further regarding game balance decision and the implementation of new content but I have no intention of revealing what goes on in the pro subreddit, or what used to go on in there as I dont have access anymore and it has been shifted towards somewhere else but you know – I ask here and there)



Solution is pretty simple (EA alrdy resorted to this solution after failing with Battlefield eSport multiple times) – hire (I mean actually hire, fly them into the studios and have them stay in Montréal for some time or even better - fulltime) somebody who understands the game as a 5v5 mechanism very well. Be it Meepey, Sixquatre, me or anyone else (canadian for NA for example and theres many more). Meepey is the kind of person that when hes bored, he sits down and starts making strats, he thinks about the game more than most people and hes damn fucking smart about it, at least from my PoV. Same goes for Sixquatre, Canadian and some other players. Meepey is the kind of person that should be put into the role of Icefrog.



Let me explain



Dota2 and SC2 balance changes are all decided by 1 person for the most part. For Dota2 its Icefrog, for SC2 its David Kim. These game balance head figures or game balance designers if you want talk to pro players and make decisions on their own pretty much and the game balance is just fine (of course these head-figures consult developers etc.). This is the kind of divine intervention R6 needs at this point. A pro player with a clear vision of how a competitive shooter should look like (and prefarably somebody with a big spectrum of experience in terms of FPS games, meaning somebody who has played a lot of FPS competitive games on a good level) within the environment R6 provides and the premise and narrative the game is trying to stay true to ; and this pro player would make game balance related decisions and stray r6 devs away from the most stupid shit, meaning everyones life would be easier.



Let me quote the same part of Relas article I quoted in my article from December:

„To conclude, video-game series are not a democracy.

A clumsy attempt at explaining how important it is for experienced players to try to be heard over other players. The answer to what gameplay could suit casual players the most is often not to find among casual players themselves. The mechanisms behind a "fun" gameplay are complex, and having fun on a game doesn't mean understanding exactly all the parameters behind this feeling. I know it can be read as the expression of a radical overconfidence in competitive or experienced players, and I try to [I somewhat tried here as well] explain why it's not.



Rela talking about BF here but it is easy to apply to R6:



The phenomenon is the same in the case of players' advices about what would be the good improvements for a game like Battlefield. A very experienced player may actually have a more doubts about what is good or bad for the game than a guy with a reduced experience. Because his vision of what makes a gameplay good is complex, while the other guy's vision is simplistic because he has a reduced number of facts to synthesize, and also a reduced horizon of comparison with other FPS games. In consequence, it's very possible that the less competent player will be the one with the most visibility and confidence in his feedbacks. That’s why, if developers' gameplay choices are influenced by the number of players making a remark rather than by the experience of these players, the consequences can be disastrous. Was it the reason behind some of the gameplay choices at the release of Battlefield 4 ? In any case, players with a big experience and training in video games must be the priority counsel in the evolution of a game serie.“



Another thing I wanted to talk about is the tempo of the game/feeling of struggle and luck factor (which is basically game balance too, but this is game balance taken from another angle)



Tempo of the game and the feeling of struggle:



The game is slow and for the most part in terms of viewership experience, that is a bad thing. But there is a lot of this „slowness“ that can be removed without changing the game in a major way.



Reduce the time of all the animations and reduce prep phase. Why does reinforcing a wall have to take 7 seconds (not sure if its 7 but its long af). Make it 2-3 seconds less, and shave off 5 seconds prep phase. This could be applied to many other things.

The reason I am saying this is because the teams will always have time to deploy all their stuff in a way they want, they will go into a custom game and find the most efficient / fastest way to do their defensive setup, meaning as long as prep phase time and animations time is reduced equally, this will not be a problem but it will speed up the boring part of the game where nothing happens (much like in earlier versions of starcraft where for the first few minutes both players were just building drones and expanding and the commentators had to fill the void of nothingness with chatter, Artosis+Tasteless are really good at this during GSL).

Another way to speed up the tempo of the game without disrupting the tactical gameplay is to put action phase to 2:45 (or even less) and make drones faster but also bigger so they are approximately equally hard to hit. Reasoning? Buildings / parts of maps will be cleared faster, meaning the part of the round where nothing is happening will be shorter and the fight with the roamers will happen faster but teams will have approx the same amount of time to execute after clearing the map (of course this is very abstract/figurative and would have to be properly playtested with pro players, but you get the idea).



There are other ways to improve the tempo of the game to be more viewer-friendly without disrupting the tactical gameplay



Right now competitive siege match is always 2 minutes of nothing and 2 minutes of action. In Dota2, you dont really have these moments of nothing. In starcraft for example, this moment of nothing is a single moment that takes few minutes (5 minutes or so) at the start of the match. But for Siege its literally 2 minutes of next to nothingness (45s prep phase + 1 minute at least to enter and clear the building and secure the flanks) at the start of each round. This disrupts the viewers experience in a major way



„Feeling of struggle“:

If you watched the whole video by MarbleDuck and Rela, you heard them talk about „high APM gameplay“, APM meaning action per minute – simply put, a lot of shit is happening or a player is able to string many actions one after another. For this APM high gameplay to be viable, the game has to provide an environment for it. An environment where animations or actions can be stringed one after another, creating sort of „mastery“ feeling for the viewer. Example could be made on competitive Dota2 team MVP, a korean team that would literally pick 5 melee heroes and run at you with constant agression, creating a very hype-based playstyle for themselves and having many fans despite being the underdogs a lot of the time. Another example could be made on BF4 competitive scene, where the brazilian players exercised a „high APM“ playstyle meaning basically they jumped around corners constantly and played a very fast game, making themselves more popular than a methodic team like Fnatic or Epsilon for example, because such playstyle appeared attractive to the viewers, despite Fnatic winning way more than the brazilians did.



To put this into real life terms - just because you are the best doesnt mean you will be the most popular (e.g. music business) and at the same time if something is unique that doesnt automatically mean that something is useful or good – replicating and imitating sucess is a basic human instinct, but R6 devs are at times trying to be wayyy more different than they need to be with their game to suceed - try to take a page from counter strikes or cod2/4 book.



The „Feeling of struggle“ is basically somebody with FPS expertise or a big pallet of games to compare with, lets say me (I played quake, unreal tournament, overwatch etc. – these games can all be classified as „fast“ or „viable of high APM playstyle“) struggling to find high-apm playstyle viable because animations take too long, the characters move too slow etc. – its described well in the video, rela basically said that one of his friends said that „physically struggle“ during these long animations. Its a pain and its not the good kind of a pain, its the kind of pain that makes you stop playing the game immidietly.



Another important point the video makes is basically „Believe it or not, but at the end of the day people play shooter games to shoot stuff, and if that core mechanic of shooting stuff isnt satisfying, then that is a big problem for the longetivity of the game and eSport viability“. Also netcode is, well you know, not good – which contributes to why gunplay in R6 isnt very satisfying.



Another alarming thing is that in a lot of competitive FPS titles, the gunplay was altered in a major way so its optimalized for competition and has skill cap as high as possible and learning curve as steep as possible. Think CS:GO gunplay when the game was released vs now, BF4 release gunplay vs now, CoD4 release gunplay vs promod gunplay, so on and so forth. The fact that R6 devs are content with the current gunplay / infantry meta* (or at least it appears they are) is not a good sign at all, especially considering the skill cap is garbage (im sorry but it really is, look how hard most FPS eSports are to master – Quake, 1.6, CS:S, CS:GO, CoD2, CoD4, any Unreal tournament, TF2, Overwatch etc. – now if you look at Siege, anyone who has played an FPS game before on a decent level can come in and become a pro player within few weeks of dedicated play. That really says a lot)

*Infantry meta = the way you move your character and shoot/aim your gun





The luck factor

Oh boy I cant even express how badly luck-dependant pro matches are (between two top t1 teams)

CS:GO is a very simple game and has 30 rounds per map, first to 16 win (ignoring OT rules). Rainbow six is in comparison extremely complex and has many factors that come into play that will ultimately decide which team wins the round. Figuratively speaking, if Rainbow6 is three times more complex (and it is at least that), that means it should have three times more rounds. But obviously that is not doable due to the pace of the game and the design. But regardless in theory – why should it have three times more rounds? So the more consistent and overall better teams are able to win more on average.

There is too much blind-countering strat-wise (basically your default strat counters what the enemy wants to do by default without preparation for that specific opponents strat, so its „blind“-counter ; this is well known in starcraft) and too much luck simply because of how complex the game is in combination with unintentional factors like losing a aim duel because of poor netcode and losing the round (and maybe the match) because of it as well as losing rounds because of bugs. Regardless, this goes hand in hand with what I said – speed up the game, try to remove the unnecessary „moments of silence“ where nothing happens (or rather try to make them shorter, removing them is not really possible – talking mainly about prep phase and when attackers are droning and entering the building) ; this will make R6 much more viewer friendly, it will make better teams win more on average and it will be also easier to build hype e.g. it is easier to build comeback stories if there are more rounds



Also the prizepool is a joke considering its 2017 and how much time a team has to put in in order to even have a shot at making it to LAN, let alone winning decent money on LAN so they are at least partially compensated for the ridiculous amounts of time they spent making strats, watching vods, sitting in custom lobbies, scrimming, argueing and debating, analyzing, dealing with unnecessary stress because of poor ESL management, etc. etc.



If you agree or want to spawn further discussion, feel free to share/retweet/DM me, papa bless



Heres my article from 9th December last year, "Rainbox Six: Siege as a legitimate eSport"

https://goo.gl/y7zElt



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