Rainbow Six Siege X's Renown currency is getting a boost following complaints about slower gains since the Siege X transition. Longtime players noticed the smaller Renown rewards soon after Siege X launched earlier this month, with payouts for lost matches taking a particularly huge hit.
The squeeze on Renown, a non-premium currency used to unlock new operators and many skins for free, coincided with Siege going free-to-play and the introduction of a new $50 tier of cosmetic bundle (purchasable only with premium R6 Credits, not Renown). The storm of economic changes has some veteran players worried that Siege is already getting greedier in its free-to-play era.
In an interview with PC Gamer, creative director Alex Karpazis acknowledged the lower Renown gains and said a Renown "buff" has already rolled out.
"We have noticed that we do have a smaller payout, something close to 10% less than what we used to have before Siege X's launch," he said. "And actually, as of a couple of hours ago, we have made a buff to that. We've seen the communication online and we acknowledge it in the data as well."
I've yet to see this buff for myself, but I don't expect match rewards will be fully restored to pre-Siege X numbers. That's because, as Karpazis points out, Siege X also introduced several new Renown rewards in the form of daily and weekly challenges, and a new 1,000 Renown reward for reaching the next Clearance Level (an account leveling system that previously did nothing but grant access to Ranked).
"The goal is not to change the amount of grind to unlock operators to unlock anything in the game. The goal is to keep it more or less the same. However … we wanted it so that players who had less time, maybe they can only play a match or two in a day, to get more rewards for that [time]," Karpazis said.
A secondary goal, Karpazis added, was to equalize the Renown payout across all of Siege's modes so there isn't any one that's best for grinding. With today's Renown buff in place, I wondered if Ubisoft also plans to address XP boosters becoming less useful under a slower grind.
"We want to make sure boosters are just as useful today as they were a few months ago," Karpazis said. "For us, we will need a bit more time to see how that kind of balances out. With only two weeks of data to see how players are using them, we do ask for a bit of patience, but we're listening, and we do not want to devalue the boosters players already have and what they can get in the future."
If this is the first time you're hearing about Siege X, here's some catch-up: It's very much not a Siege sequel, but full of welcome refinements. The biggest addition is Dual Front, a new 6v6 mode with respawns and attackers/defenders on the same team.
