Rainbow Six Siege is by many accounts a pretty damn good game, but despite featuring anti-cheat technology from the very beginning it simply couldn't do enough to prevent the slow but steady increase in cheaters on the PC version, which as you might imagine didn't go over well with the general public.
Thankfully, after many months of work Ubisoft has finally added an extra tool to their arsenal against cheaters, a client-side anti-cheat system. While it most likely won't stop every single cheater out there, this is an important step towards ensuring that Rainbow Six Siege remains as fair as possible, a notion the development team seems to share if the announcement message is anything to go by:
"We are consistently inspired by the devotion and passion the community has shown to Rainbow Six Siege since launch. Your feedback has been a driving force for our Development Team, and has helped us in improving the game.
It is to progress further down this path that today, we present you a modification that has been greatly discussed: adding an additional anti-cheating system. Today, we are performing a preliminary integration of BattlEye (Beta), an active client-side anti-cheating protection system.
BattlEye will complement FairFight, which is, as you know, our current server-sided anti-cheating engine. To prevent cheating, FairFight uses algorithmic models to identify statistically anomalous actions in our game. For the specific needs of our game, however, we felt an additional anti-cheating system was needed.
For this reason, we chose BattlEye which will focus on prevention rather than behavior. BattlEye functions as a shield around the game. “You can picture it operating like anti-virus, scanning your memory to detect known cheat signatures,” R6 Technical Architect explained."
During the testing period for BattlEye no bans will be issued, except for those that come from the already existing FairFight system, as the team will be running numerous tests in order to ensure that everything is functioning properly. If you run into any issues with BattlEye, or if your game no longer starts as of this patch, head over to the official FAQ and see if any of the solutions on offer are able to help.
As a final note, Rainbow Six Siege is free-to-play on Steam for the next two days, so if you've never played it but harbor a bit of interest, now's the best time to give it a shot. Also, if you do decide to buy it, make sure to do so in the next two days as Rainbow Six Siege is currently 50% off, which brings the price down to €20.
