Ubisoft finally addresses lean and crouch spamming in Rainbow Six Siege

For a game that was once pronounced dead on arrival, Rainbow Six Siege surely is alive and kicking thanks to continued support, community feedback and communication from the development team. In an effort to keep up with the latter, Ubisoft has finally addressed a problem plaguing the game in recent months – crouch and lean spamming.

For those not in the known, crouch and lean spamming is the ability to rapidly manoeuvre the character by spamming controls that inevitably see the operator bobbing up and down, flicking their neck in ways that should almost certainly cause whiplash. Frustrated players have mistakenly confused this abuse as warping the hitbox, which is somewhat true but testing by Rogue9 shows that it’s more about confusing the enemy and making the head much harder to track.

Fortunately, Community manager UbiNoty took to Reddit in order to address the issue by stating that Ubisoft is aware of the “rise of players encountering abusive crouch and lean spamming.” Currently, there is no fix in place, but the developer is trialling a number of counters that could be used to treat the abusive tactic.

“The team is actively working on how we want to approach the problem and planning our next steps,” read the post. “We are currently prototyping a few systems to address this. More details will be shared about our exact methodology as we draw closer to a final version.”

Much like Nintendo’s admission that development on Metroid Prime 4 had been scrapped and restarted, the forthcoming announcement has been met with an overwhelmingly positive reaction. User SugarbearSID summerised the feeling well by stating “maybe you don't have a fix, maybe you don't even have an idea for a fix, but at least you confirm that you are aware of the problem.”

Other competitive shooters have their own methods of handling crouch abuse, with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive allowing players to crouch twice before slowing the third and stopping a fourth try. This particular system has been cited a number of times throughout Operation Wind Bastion, proving to be one of the more popular options. It remains to be seen which direction the Rainbow Six team will settle on.

KitGuru Says: Communication really is key, as the one thing players resent more than anything is silence. It leaves them feeling abandoned. Ubisoft has done a good job of quelling this in the past by moving away from an automated chat filter, but still has a long way to go with its anti-cheat efforts. How do you feel about Siege’s latest announcement?  

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