For Rainbow Six Siege players, having a stable connection all throughout the match is much more important than in any other shooter given the fast time-to-kill, and no respawn element of the game. However, like it or not, there is a problem with the game regarding Rainbow Six Siege ping abuse, and the devs know about it.

Over on the official Rainbow Six website, Ubisoft has made a lengthy explanation of ping abuse, “peeker’s advantage” and the steps they’re making to fix it.

HIGH PING AND PEEKER’S ADVANTAGE

Replication is the process by which we mirror a sequence of movements and actions done by a player on a remote computer, such as a game server. You can think of replication as “ghosts” that follow players. This “ghost” represents your position as seen by the server. For example, if you have a ping of 200ms, your “ghost” is where you were 100ms ago (since ping represents round trip duration). The higher a player’s ping, the further behind the player their “ghost” is.

However, when peeking (moving out of cover), a higher ping will not give you more time to react and shoot before becoming visible to other players. This is because all shots need to be validated by the server, so any increased amount of time will also apply to your shots reaching the server.

Peeker’s advantage is a result of the aforementioned “ghosting” effect. We cannot remove “ghosting”: doing so would require all movements to be validated by the server before taking effect on your client. This would result in increased input delay (equal to your ping), which is contrary to the design philosophy of making movement as reactive as possible. However, unlike the common perception, peeker’s advantage depends only on the speed of the victim’s connection, not the peeker’s.

The maximum time, once the peeker becomes visible, that the victim has in order to shoot and come out on top is what we define as the window of opportunity. Peeker’s advantage is caused by the fact that this window of opportunity is always shorter than the reaction time of the peeker.

Window of opportunity = Reaction time of the peeker – Ping of the victim (including processing time)

Starting with Year 2 Season 3, Ubisoft will be implementing adjustments and changes to how the Rainbow Six Siege manages latency, hit validation and more. The studio’s plan is continue working on these issues during the upcoming seasons.

For a more technical and detailed report, check out the complete breakdown here.

You can check out the latest Rainbow Six Siege game update here where collision and other bugs were fixed.