For a brief moment, Blitz was the most powerful character in Rainbow Six Siege

Like many multiplayer games, Ubisoft operates a test server for Rainbow Six Siege, where patches undergo some public trials before being rolled out officially. The incoming Operation Chimera update hit the Siege TTS this week, allowing some players to get an early look at Lion and Finka, the two operators about to be added, as well as Outbreak, the cooperative mode coming March 6.

Part of the fun of being a tester, though, is sifting through the smaller changes that lurk underneath the surface—recoil tweaks, gadget changes, and stuff that hasn't yet been outlined in patch notes. As testers hopped in, they found a massive one: Blitz, the attacker who wields a ballistic shield with an embedded flashbulb, was now moving like The Flash.

Blitz's movement speed was way, way faster—to the point of absurdity. In the gif above, a tester plows through all five defenders in a dozen seconds, meleeing them all without stopping and without any help from his teammates. Other players chimed in with their own superhuman killing sprees, and others on the receiving end, seen below, shared little horror clips of their encounters with Blitz.

A buff to Blitz's movement speed was expected, but not like this. Testers concluded that this probably wasn't the adjustment that the Siege dev team intended, and began voicing their concern in forum threads like "Blitz is actually op now," "This Blitz buff is pretty crazy," and "Well at least Blitz suits his name now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯."

Ubisoft was quick to respond. In a Reddit post yesterday, a Ubisoft rep acknowledged what players were seeing, and what would be done: "We have been investigating the reports about Blitz’s speed change, and we have found a data error that made him faster than initially intended. There is a mobility modifier for all shields that reduces the operator speed, and this was not active for Blitz at the launch of the Test Server. This will be fixed. His base speed will still be from a 2-speed operator, but his shield will bring a reduction to that speed. This reduction in speed will be live on the Test Servers as soon as we can confirm the fix; target is tomorrow."

By now, speedy Blitz will have been removed from the test server, and will likely fade from memory as unnaturally quickly as he entered it. But for a couple days, Blitz became Siege's most fearsome operator, and players had fun terrorizing one another in the safe environment of the test server. One of the best memorials of this moment came from Redditor QuarterTurnComics, who shared this comic:

via Redditor QuarterTurnComics - click for source.

Evan's a hardcore FPS enthusiast who joined PC Gamer way back in 2008. After an era spent publishing reviews, news, and cover features, he now oversees editorial operations for PC Gamer worldwide, including setting policy, training, and editing stories written by the wider team. His most-played FPSes are Hunt: Showdown, Team Fortress 2, Team Fortress Classic, Rainbow Six Siege, and Counter-Strike. His first multiplayer FPS was Quake 2, played on serial LAN in his uncle's basement, the ideal conditions for instilling a lifelong fondness for fragging.