Rainbow Six Siege’s Operation Shadow Legacy brought some truly transformative updates to the game in September, including one that the competitive community is decrying “Ping 2.0.” And that system is here to stay, Ubisoft announced today in a blog post titled “Balancing And Esports.”
Up until now, “pinging” was divided into two separate categories. While on a drone, you could hold a key for a few seconds to give a red ping that denoted an enemy’s exact location. While off drones, with your gun up, you could still mark things with a yellow ping, but it was inexact. There was an important distinction to this. When marked with a red exact location ping, the person marked received a bright red “YOU HAVE BEEN SPOTTED” warning on their screen.
Shadow Legacy brought in “Ping 2.0,” which gave the drones and cameras an important ability: the ability to give a yellow, inexact but spammable ping—and most importantly, one that doesn’t let your enemy know they’re spotted.
The early assumption was that Ubisoft would add an option to remove the stealthier yellow pings from drones and cameras in custom matches, like they do with the “points” that appear at the right of your screen when you do things that impact the match. The points are removed in competitive play to emphasize intel and the use of sound cues to tell the player what they’re doing.
The blog post indicated that Ubisoft won’t be adding the option to turn the new yellow pings off—and the competitive community is not happy.
“I am usually not so far on one side or the other about changes etc.,” EU commentator and analyst Jessica “Jess” Bolden said in reply to Ubisoft’s announcement. “But this is one I am ADAMANT you are wrong about. The yellow ping does not serve the purpose you are trying to achieve and whilst gadget pinging is great, you have lost your way with the free ping.”
Ubisoft is taking Rainbow Six Siege in a slightly new direction—that much is clear from the additions in Operation Shadow Legacy. But it’s unclear if the new direction is one that will help or hurt the game in the long term. What is certain, though, is that by pushing this change in how intel is gathered and dispersed to teams, Ubisoft has fundamentally changed the intel economy.
