Rainbow Six Siege Developers Address Jackal And Echo’s High Ban Rate

Rainbow Six Siege’s operation Phantom Sight, the season which reworked the game’s ranked mode, is currently underway. Alongside pulling it out of beta, the rules of ranked were changed up a bit when it exited beta. This season added pick and ban, a new feature which allowed both teams to ban one attacker and one defender each. Many thought this would be beneficial for ranked, but it didn’t exactly turn out that way.

Pick and ban was first introduced to Rainbow Six Siege pro league before it was added to public ranked. In a dedicated competitive environment, the mechanism is fine. However, in ranked, it results in the same operators being banned over and over again. The most commonly banned operators include Jackal, Caveira, Blitz, and Echo.

In their latest developer update post, Ubisoft says they are aware of the “high ban rate” of some operators. “We are discussing how we want to approach topic of balancing around Pick/Ban in Ranked, and the Operators that are affected the most by it.”

With pick and ban, Ubisoft wanted to bring some variety into ranked matches. The new ranked has the potential to be vastly unique compared to its beta version. Unfortunately, repeatedly banning the same operators turns ranked stale and boring.

It will be interesting to see how Ubisoft handles this issue. As pick and ban is also used in pro league, we might see ranked receive a separate, altered version of the gameplay mechanic.

In addition to the problem with pick and ban, Rainbow Six Siege is currently experiencing a high volume of bugs and glitches. Although last week’s chat symbol exploit has now been patched, there are still a number of “top issues” with the game.

Sound bugs consisting of muffled or missing sounds are one of the biggest problems. Moreover, some players are reporting facing random disconnections. Ubisoft clarified that, despite popular belief, these are not “Denial of Service” attacks.

Another thing that all Siege players despise is when debris gets stuck in wooden barricades. This problem has been plaguing the game for multiple seasons, and Ubisoft says that a permanent fix could be as far away as next year. The full list of top concerns and community issues is a fairly lengthy one, but the developers explicitly state that its not “exhaustive” and “should only be used as a reference to give a general idea of where our focus currently is.”