Rainbow Six Siege Devs Dedicate More Resources to Addressing Future Exploits

Ubisoft recently triumphed over a series of Rainbow Six Siege exploits that rendered several parts of the game unusable including Clash and some gadgets. The victory wasn't exactly a speedy one though with these features remaining disabled for some time as exploit fixes were tested and progress was made, but the processes required to fix these problems has led to another positive effect other than just patching the exploits and reenabling the features. The experience has led to the creation of several systems that'll help tackle these exploits, and future exploits will be addressed quicker.

The problems that plagued Rainbow Six Siege and caused Clash and other features to be disabled were well chronicled in the past few months. It makes sense then that Ubisoft would have a post-mortem analysis of the exploits that offered a timeline beginning back in early May and leading up to late July when the issues were resolved. Part of the solutions involved working on switches and fail-safes, Ubisoft said, which were used to target only the exploitable features by removing them as exploits remained throughout the attempted fixes.

"The fail-safe solutions needed to satisfy several requirements, they needed to be: surgical so that it would not cause any type of regression or unintended collateral damage, easily modifiable for rapid response, and require minimal testing for fast delivery," Ubisoft said. "The resulting Operator and gadget switches were our first response to rapidly address the exploits with the understanding that it was a last-resort and extremely short-term solution as we prepared and tested our fail-safes."

Our latest Dev Blog discusses the fix for the recent exploits and our improvements to better address them in the future. We also take a look back at the issues that impacted our community and how we worked to resolve them.

You can read the full blog here: https://t.co/BJCmIdfGc4 pic.twitter.com/8xKxJJC3TN

— Rainbow Six Siege (@Rainbow6Game) July 23, 2019

Ubisoft also employed the use of "Global Ordering" which was a different way of ordering all the messages sent to the server based on player inputs. Commands could previously "fail to be properly received" if players performed certain actions like spamming commands quickly, but the new system reorganizes these messages to make the process more reliable.

With Clash and the other features now back, these changes also have implications for the future, Ubisoft said. Global Ordering being in place should prevent any issues with out-of-order messages in the future, and Ubisoft said it will be prepared to respond quicker to future exploits.

"The exploits and their impact on the community have also highlighted the value of Operator and gadget switches, and the need for us to have greater control over Operator and loadout configuration on the live servers," Ubisoft said. "We have since begun to dedicate more resources towards fulfilling this need to ensure that we can respond quickly to the situation in the event of future exploits."