[2021] [AMA] We are the Rainbow Six Siege Dev Team, ask us anything!

Manual bans are not our long term strategy as it would not be scalable, but that doesn't mean that we don't do manual bans - they're still very valuable to the team. We are looking at more automated detections so they can be as fast as possible and able to scale as needed. This is why we're investing in data-based detections and sanctions while continuing to reinforce BattlEye detections. This also means improving the client complexity to increase the cheat support costs for cheat makers. It does not mean that we're not issuing manual sanctions - we are. We're simply looking at the future, where we see more value in ramping up our data models detections rather than relying primarily on manual operations. ~ Ben, Technical Director for Live Operations

It sometimes depends on your area of expertise but from personal experience I would recommend not being afraid of getting in the door through Game Testing or very Junior levels. The amount of knowledge you will gain by being close in proximity to experienced team members will pay dividends in your career growth. You can also try looking for Industry Meetups such as IGDA to get close to those with industry experience. There are many developers that attend these and are willing to have conversations with those looking to join the industry. It is all about getting out there and meeting others in the industry and putting into practice what you have learned from those conversations. Making games is a team sport and learning to play your position on the team is an asset to any team looking to deliver on products, content, and features.

-Christopher, Assoc. Game Director

It's true we haven’t added new guns for some time, because we have already a huge pool of weapons - we have 100+ weapons (23 Assault Rifles, 20 SMG, 18 shotguns for instance).

Because of Siege’s lethality system (a headshot guarantees the kill), rate of fire is the king parameter for all weapons. This makes all low rate of fire weapons sub-par, and reduces drastically the pool of weapons that are really played, only 30 of them are played most of the time. This reduces the diversity of the game experience.

The Loadout should guide the player in the playstyle and abilities of the operator.

- New weapon is created for new gameplay. Example with the CSRX 300 on Kali.

- New weapons can be created for lore / universe reasons. Zero with the SC3000k is a good example

Each year we bring a new weapon. Recently we have released the Gonne-6 to help for the 20 sec meta and a new one will be available soon.

We concentrated also some efforts on sights to help make weapon more unique and different from one another. This add a whole new level of balancing for the Barcelona team, adding some options that are different.

Recently we have also started to rework the recoils like the G36, 416C, .... To have different recoils and gives different experience.

The weapon variety is in a center of our work. We focus on the balancing of the existing weapons – sights, recoils, magazine, attachments

-Aurelie, Game Director

We have indeed added Gamelift to the roster. The idea behind is 3-fold and pushes to improve the overall server quality of service:

1. Improve our resiliency, offering a service backup in case of outage of our other providers
2. Mid-term we plan on putting Gamelift in the siege server pool more frequently in order to improve connectivity (some users might ping Gamelift better than our other providers, hence directing them to the best option available)
3. Having more providers enables us to improve the global coverage by allowing you to benefit from new regions that might be unique to some providers while not being available to others

~ Ben, Technical Director for Live Operations

Great question, and that representation is incredibly important to us as a team. This year, in fact, the team has taken great strides to really level up how we are authentically representing our Operators, for example with the partnership of Nakoda consultants for the creation of Thunderbird. This is an approach we'll be taking moving forward as well, to ensure the future LGBT operators we bring to the game feel like honest, real people. Please stay tuned, very shortly you may meet someone interesting joining the crew...

-Eric, Senior Community Developer

We've already touched on toxicity and reporting in other answers, but you've got some great thoughts on the Test Server! This is actually something we're in the process of working on and have some solid improvements coming quite soon - especially to matchmaking. Let's just say we're looking into all the things you mentioned here. Stay tuned, because we'll have more to share soon ;) ~ Mo, Business Strategy and Live Performance Director

She has a very good secondary weapon and to be honest, for now, we are not looking to give her another primary. For us, if we do that, nobody will use her sniper anymore and that's a shame.

So we need to look at the sniper itself how to buff it. We still believe on a bolt action sniper rifle in Siege. We are aware that this is a very polarizing weapon, and that some are convinced otherwise, but this is still an option that we want available in the game.

We have no plan to share yet.

-Aurelie, Game Director

You're actually making a valid point here. Adding new content on top of existing content can be tricky.

To give an example: when we first shipped, we realized it was tricky adding new gadgets, because parts of the code were shared, and every time we added a new one we risked breaking existing ones. This was not scaling well - the more gadgets we added, the trickier this was becoming.

So this is why we created a gadget v2 framework, to isolate gadgets and make sure that new ones don't risk breaking existing ones. Today, I'm happy to report that over 90% of our gadgets have been migrated to the new framework, and of course all new ones are as well. ~ Paul, Technology Director

This is a very nice question, and a keen observation. It's no secret that our obsession since the beginning has been competition rather than making a realistic and immersive game. So the more the game evolved, the more we felt the need to explore gameplay areas that were no longer compatible with the "realism" and the original settings.

Also as game dev we wanted to make a game that talk about the stuff we love and what we love is esport :)

So that’s why we decided to move away from the classical terrorist hunt storytelling to the more "Competitive and Search for Perfection" story telling that also exist in special forces fantasy. This provides a setting that is closest to us, and also that is way more sustainable on the long run than the classical good vs evil classical story arc.

Think our story as a Season of NFL or NHL.

-Leroy, Creative Director

For the scoreboard we listened to the feedback of the community and we are going to do some improvements for Y6S3.

The colors are going to stay the same but we still want it be to be clearer and less overwhelming.

-Aurelien, Assoc. Game Director

You got one of them! It's Jaeger and Sledge :D

I've seen things you wouldn't believe... https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cpoiYHCtPXw/maxresdefault.jpg

-Eric, Senior Community Developer

Good question!

Ela and Zofia were always the intended operators for that season - the initial concepts for the map were actually an old distillery. When operation health happened not a lot of the conceptual work on how to present that season was finalized, but due to the new cadence of content (3 operators in two seasons) we had to go back to square one. We put together a mini strike team of one extremely talented writer - and one artist - and the idea was to introduce a bit more lore into the game through these two iconic operators - this is what brought back operator CGI that we currently have every season.

I wanted to also add that if anything - this was a golden opportunity to try new - different approaches to how we present operators to our community.

-Laure Guilbert, Marketing Director

There are multiple aspects that make a map competitive map or not.

The top one is overall balancing. Each team must have equal opportunities to win at high skill level of play. There must never be a point where one team can't do anything due to the layout or setups. Perfect balance is almost impossible but we are happy when we are within a certain margin (not easy with lots of moving variables from the meta). It is also a question of trade-off. When a map has certain aspect that favors one side we try to counter balance by having something else that favors the other side.

Here is a sample of some parameter we keep an eye on for competitive maps:

-Good rotations possibilities for both attackers and defenders

-Good balance of entry points

-Good balance of destruction around sites.

-Having at least 3 strong sites.

-Proper lighting all around. It must not affect gameplay.

-Reduced noisyness (geometry,material and clutter)

-Each stronger position must have a counter.

-Not have automatic plant...meaning that there's no way to retake.

-Not making it impossible nor too easy to take control of the map.

-Certain size and number of rooms.

-At every spot on the map trying to control the number of simultaneous line of danger. Yes, it varies but we try to make sure it is never overwhelming.

...

The maps called "casual" are maps that are outside that mold and are greatly lacking in one or more of these parameters. The focus is more about trying different fun things and letting loose.

-Yann, Level Design Director

Oh yes!

We cannot imagine releasing today some of our Legacy operators!

Having a Hard counter like Thatcher which destroyed all electronic gadgets in his range without any LOS, was not very interesting.

Frost can be also a good example! We would like also to rework our shield operators.

We have established some guidelines to help the creation of the operators

-Define the player skills needed to manage each operator such as knowledge skill, communicate skill, resource management skill, …

-We need to have some balancing levers

-Play around soft counter instead of Hard Counter – Soft counter creates more gameplay and implies more skill.

These are some examples!

-Aurelie, Game Director

We're also looking at ways to improve the esports packs experience. We understand the frustration around the duplicates, so we'll make some exciting changes later this year! Stay tuned! ~ Mo, Business Strategy and Live Performance Director

We are agreed and we are currently investigating this point.
Unfortunately, we have no date to share, but we are aware about this issue and we are trying to find a solution.

-Aurelie, Game Director

Before the Montreal Studio was shut down in March 2020, we tried to secure our short-term commitments and have the team focus on seasonal content.

We made sure all our team members and their families were safe at home. There were a lot of logistical challenges involved in sending equipment to devs, and the technical teams worked extremely hard to empower people as we got them set up to work remotely (for example, reviewing builds and playing from home).

We're proud of how it all came together and the incredible work of everyone on the team who adapted to working remotely and managing all the constrains of working from home. Making a move like this involves a ton of trust, and that really shined through. ~ Éric, Producer

We believe in developing and deploying features in an iterative fashion. This is how we're proceeding for cross-play.

So far, console generations (e.g. PS4 & PS5) can play together. Stadia, Luna and PC players can play together as well. Coming up next is crossplay between all consoles.

Crossplay between PC and consoles is a more complicated subject, and we want to make sure we can provide a good experience before activating it. It's not a technical restriction, but more a matter of making sure we have better control over cheating, toxicity and type of controllers. ~ Paul, Technology Director

Indeed! As mentioned in our last Top Issues & Community Concerns article, we are currently working on a major update of our MMR Rollback system. This new version aims to bring changes that will restrict the time window for rollbacks and addressing rollback that occurs when you win against a cheater. ~ Emmanuel, Player Behaviour Product Owner

Thank you so much for the kind words! It means a lot that this was appreciated :) We absolutely plan to do more AMAs in the future. While we don't have timing to share right now, know that we WILL be back!

And that's a wrap for today's AMA! Thanks for the incredible amount of support and interest, everyone. The sheer number of questions was staggering. We tried to address as many topics as we could.

We'll be back for another AMA down the road, so we'll be sure to keep you informed. In the meantime, have a great end of your week! ~ Ryan, Community Developer