Rainbow Six Siege is going to start doing evil things to mouse and keyboard players on console

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Input "spoofers" beware, Ubisoft's going to deliberately give you input lag.

rainbow six siege high calibre
(Image credit: Ubisoft)

As a humble, yeoman, single player FPSer, I can never tell whether gamepad or mouse and keyboard is supposed to be the good one that cheaters use. Overwatch and Apex players all seemed broken up about aim assist and the reviled controller users, while Amazon listings for abominations like the HORI Tactical Assault Commander stand in mute testimony of mankind's misguided attempts to bring M&K to console shooters.

Rainbow Six Siege, with its slow movement and fast time to kill, seems to favor the precision offered by M&K, leading underhanded players to "input spoof" with latter-day Tactical Assault Commander-style setups. They lorded over their gamepad-bound victims with the godly aiming potential we've come to know and love on PC.

That ends soon though with Rainbow Six Siege's upcoming "Mousetrap" anticheat. Ubisoft has revealed that it can fairly reliably catch "spoofers" in the act, and that they are also endemic to high-level R6 Siege play on console. Rather than opting for instant bans, Ubisoft will start hitting detected "spoofers" with deliberate input latency that builds up into an intolerable delay between your mouse movements and in-game actions, hopefully removing the unfair M&K advantage on console.

I appreciate the creative, almost poetic justice here, slowing down the edgiest, sweatiest players until they're practically gaming in molasses like some kind of bad dream. It also gives bad actors plenty of opportunity to give up on their hardware malfeasance and become "goated on the sticks," as it were. It remains to be seen how effective Mousetrap will be in action, but one thing's for certain: I can't take myself seriously typing out the word "spoofer." It sounds like circa-2007 fake slang from Urban Dictionary someone would try to convince you is real on the playground.

The Mousetrap announcement comes one day ahead of R6 Siege's Year 8 live stream, where we expect more details about the long-running shooter's upcoming additions like new attacker Brava and Operation Commanding Force, which is slated to start March 7.

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Ted Litchfield
Associate Editor

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.