Ubisoft have already sent in digirozzers to bust cheating cheaters and the cheats they cheat with in Rainbow Six Siege, and now they’re setting up a neighbourhood watch scheme. In preparation for the Rainbow Six Pro League, today they’re releasing update 2.2. It patches up a few exploits, tweak maps to stop spawn killing, adds kill cams in Ranked play so folks can see if their death was fishy (everyone who kills me is cheating, I’m sure), and pops in a Report button to grass up suspected blaggards.

Reports from players “will feed directly to our cheating counter-measures to increase their effectiveness,” Ubi say in the patch notes. One imagines many of these will reports will come from folks who’ve watched the kill cam (a killer’s-eye view of your death). Ubi explain their decision to add it to Ranked play:

“We are aware that there is a certain widespread sentiment that high level Ranked matches are often ruined by cheaters. We want to deter ‘witch hunting’ as much as possible. While there were legitimate design reasons to remove the Kill Cam from Ranked, we cannot compromise on the quality of our game experience. For this reason, we are enabling the Kill Cam on Ranked matches to remove this ‘hiding spot’ for cheaters. It will help the community as well as ourselves identify suspicious behaviors with a better level of certainty. Given the nature of our game (destruction, observation tools, high lethality), players are very likely to have doubts about what happened when they get killed. This causes confusion whether they died by a legitimate player or a cheater. This doubt causes a negative atmosphere for everyone regardless of the presence of cheaters in the match. Therefore, activating the Kill Cam in Ranked serves two purposes: make it harder for cheaters to hide and improve players’ perception by allowing them to witness how they got killed. In the long term, we will also be working on improving the Kill Cam in order to make it more accurate and reliable.”

Kill cams can be a problem, as they will reveal information on positions and whatnot which the dead player can relay in any number of ways. I wonder if this is maybe a stop-gap solution while they beef up their anti-cheat technology.

Besides, good cheaters know how to conceal tell-tale signs of their antics. It’s actually pretty interesting, the ignorance cheaters must perform in case someone’s watching – pretending they end up in the right place through luck, and miming aiming up until their bot takes over. Cheats are easy to spot when fools use them to become godlike, but it’s a flipping nightmare when they’re used by someone who’s already actually quite good. This makes me wish I’d saved replays from other games Back In The Day to illustrate these little performances. They were great fun to study, I tell you.

Anyway! Back on R6 Siege, update 2.2 also tweaks spawn points on many maps, spreading them out and hiding them behind cover so spawning players aren’t so mercilessly gunned down by Defenders. “We believe these tweaks should fix the vast majority of those spawn killing occurrences,” Ubi say.

There’s more. Check the patch notes for everything. It’s out today on PC.