Rainbow Six Siege's newest feature to try and minimise the problem of team-killing in the competitive shooter has gone live this week on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.
When first announced, the team-killing punishment system was quite simple. If you damage a teammate by shooting them, or through other means, you were entered into a "griefer reflection mode". This meant that any further damage the offender would deal with their allies would instead be reflected on themselves. It was a simple fix, but one that meant the griefers couldn't remove others from the game and make playing Rainbow Six Siege unsatisfying.
Now the live version of the friendly-fire system has dropped, and it's a little more nuanced than when it was first announced. Now, primary and secondary weapons still function in the same way and will see the griefer dish out damage to themselves instead of their friendly operators.
When it comes to splash damage and explosions from gadgets, grenades, and equipment, however, it becomes a little more complicated. Some gadgets and grenades are designed to deal out damage to teammates, to make them harder to use and a little less safe than just pelting a 'nade into a mix of allies and enemies and knowing it will only clear out the baddies.
Generic explosives like grenades, C4, and breaching charges are exempt from RFF and will continue to damage anyone caught in the blast. The same is true for area-of-effect damage dealers like Capitao’s asphyxiating bolts, Smoke’s gas grenades, and Fuze’s cluster charges.
In simple terms, reverse friendly fire is activated when an offender kills a teammate or deals a certain amount of damage to them. Future damage dealt will instead be reflected onto the griefer, hence the name. This is true for primary, and secondary weapons.
Gadgets, however, are a little bit more complicated. Some of them have always been intended to affect teammates and enemies alike, so balancing which gadgets trigger RFF has been tricky.
Generic explosives like grenades, C4, and breaching charges are exempt from RFF and will continue to damage anyone caught in the blast. The same is true for area-of-effect damage dealers like Capitao’s asphyxiating bolts, Smoke’s gas grenades, and Fuze’s cluster charges.
Check out the below graph to get a good idea of what is going to activate the Reverse Friendly Fire feature, and what is just your own bad luck if you frag your friends with:
When the RFF feature went live this week, Ubisoft confirmed they would continue to monitor the system and decide what other tweaks they could bring to the management system. These will likely take place over the next season, with some changes already in the pipeline.
Developers suggested the next major change to the RFF system would be that it would activate for the entire squad if an offender team-killed. For now, it just works between the murdered operator and his griefer.
What do you think of the change? Is this going to fix the toxicity that has been rife in Rainbow Six Siege recently, or will griefers just find another way of ruining the competitive game for others?