New ‘Rainbow Six: Siege’ anti-cheat system issues a massive wave of bans

By Gabe Gurwin August 18, 2016

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Nobody likes to play with cheaters, especially when it comes to competitive first-person shooters. Ubisoft has taken several steps to ensure that its tactical multiplayer game Rainbow Six: Siege remains fair for everyone, and after announcing that anyone caught cheating would be permanently banned from the game upon the first offense, the company is staying true to its word.

A client-side anti-cheat mechanism dubbed “BattlEye” was implemented late last month, and Ubisoft has revealed just how effective the new technology has been. Bans officially began to come last week, and in that time, more than 3,800 cheaters have been permanently banned from the game.

Bans will not always come in “waves” like they did initially. The technology is capable of banning players much more quickly, occasionally even “in real time,” and should rarely take longer than a few days.

BattlEye serves as a complementary system to the previously implemented “FairFight.” The latter is a server-side system that looks for “statistically anomalous actions” during matches, but it treated the symptoms of cheating more than the cause. BattlEye, meanwhile, will actively scan players’ system memories to detect “known cheat signatures.”

The BattlEye software actually runs as a separate piece of software on users’ computers whenever Rainbow Six: Siege is running. The same technology has also been used in other large-scale multiplayer games such as Arma 3 and DayZ.

Unfortunately, fixing the cheating problems in Ubisoft’s other big Tom Clancy game, The Division, remains a more complicated problem. Key gameplay features such as weapon fire rate are still calculated by the game’s client and not its server, but the publisher has also begun to ban offenders in that game on the first offense. We know you play to win the game, but let’s all do it fairly.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…

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