Rainbow Six Siege devs are considering free to play but want to tackle smurfing first

Given how much additional monetisation is now implemented in Rainbow Six Siege, there have been plenty of questions over whether the game will go down the free to play route eventually. It turns out that the developers have been thinking about this as well, although they want to find a solution to ‘smurfing' first. 

Speaking with PCGamer, Rainbow Six Siege director, Leroy Athanassoff said that the development team wants Siege to go free to play eventually if Ubisoft allows it, but first certain features would need to be in place to properly support the transition. One such feature would be a solution to smurfing.

For those who don't know, smurfing in competitive games is the practise of high ranked players creating a new account in order to dodge their skill rating and match up against low-rank players. It is common in a lot of competitive games, ranging from Dota 2, Overwatch, CS:GO, Rainbow Six Siege and more. In order to avoid ranking up too highly, smurf accounts may also intentionally lose games in order to keep their skill rating down.

Ubisoft doesn't ban smurf accounts in Rainbow Six Siege and for now, the developers don't plan to. However, the developers are aware of the unfair environment these players create and wants to tackle it. Part of that solution might involve another update to the MMR rating system that ranked Siege games are based on. By taking into account more stats, like large disparities between kill/death ratio and ranked match win rates, detecting a smurf account should be possible.

There is no information on whether Rainbow Six Siege will ever make the full jump over to a free to play model, but the developers are thinking about it, so perhaps that is a move we'll see once we move beyond the current ‘Year 5' season.

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KitGuru Says: Smurf accounts were an issue for me back in my CS:GO days but I don't think I've ever really encountered it in Rainbow Six Siege. What do you all think of the idea behind smurfing in competitive games? Is it all just good fun, or does it cause a major competitive disadvantage for lower skilled players? 

 

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