Rainbow Six Siege AMA addresses hit detection issues

Rainbow Six Siege

The Rainbow Six Siege dev team recently took questions in an AMA on the Ubisoft forums, and despite the usual non-committal 'at this time'-ing and 'no current-plans'-ing that accompanies any large publisher's response to probing questions, some interesting titbits came to light, particularly regarding Ubi's attitude to reported hit detection issues.

Historically (think Battlefield 4), network problems have been tempting to deny, being sporadic, hard to replicate and dependent on players' accurate estimation of their own abilities: "No way he could have seen me there!" yells the scrub, dead in the middle of an airy street. But no, Ubi has pinpointed a number of problems to be fixed in a series of patches beginning mid-December.

Rainbow Six Review (3)

The big bad network bogeyman was something termed 'pawn rotation latency': "the difference between a player’s action, the server’s perception and another player seeing said action". This was more noticeable when playing as an Operator, the server believing your shield was somewhere other than its present position. This issue has reportedly been squashed, and the developers are looking into upping the server tick rate to further reduce latency (in the current build, player positions are updated 30 times per second).

There are a host of other improvements scheduled concerning connections to incorrect data centres and players with ping spikes, all of which you can browse here. James Davenport adored Rainbow Six Siege, so this determination to knuckle down and tackle the hard issues is promising. Ubisoft claims to be gunning for monthly updates.