Balancing and Ranked 3.0.
It’s understandably quite hard to generate buzz for a game pushing into its eleventh year, though if the roars in Adidas Arena during Rainbow Six Siege’s yearly reveal were anything to go by, then the excitement has never been higher.
Stevivor recently sat down with Rainbow Six Siege’s newly-minted Creative Director, Joshua Mills (above left), alongside Live Content Director Christopher Budgen (above right) in Paris to discuss what changes were in store for Year 11.
Hamish Lindsay, Stevivor: Let’s kick off with the balance changes you touched on – there’s multiple updates per season now, so how do you think that will change the way players approach things?
Joshua Mills: One of the big things is that players can come in and really adjust their lineups — like, throughout the season — instead of just spending the first couple of weeks understanding what those changes are. Kind of digging into it, then having that be the set meta for the rest of the next three months.
The goal there is to shake that up and keep that kind of fresh so that players can come back, change those lineups, and look for that new opportunities for creativity, ultimately.
Stevivor: So I guess this is a way to combat the nature of Siege being solved each season?
Mills: Yeah, that’s the thing. I mean, players are incredibly intuitive and they search out the meta as fast as possible. I think that’s the thing that we want to try to avoid, but we also want to try to showcase — we call it highlighting — operators, bringing them into the light and letting them shine for a while to kind of spark new attention to them.
Maybe it’s an operator you’ve never played because they’ve not been in meta, and now they’re showing up. You’re like, “I’m gonna try them out,” and then you might have a new main. That’s really the kind of the expression of it, to have that kind of roster depth applied.
Stevivor: How then do you avoid the trap of changes for the sake of changes?
Mills: Part of our philosophy is the fact that we do not make changes just for the sake of making changes. It’s not something we have ever really pursued, which is why we’ve been so surgical and actually very conservative about our changes in the past.
It’s something we hold true for this as well. Anything — whether it be a change in balancing or a new feature coming to the game — it only gets to make it that to that point when we know it has impact. And that’s true to the core.
Stevivor: Do you think that this increased cadence of changes will increase the risk of some operators losing their identity?
Mills: I could definitely understand that being a concern, but the thing is the core aspect of our operators is kind of like the through line that we don’t want to mess with; we don’t want to change. So, if they have a strong role that they were essentially designed around, we want to try to enhance that.
I’ll give you a couple examples. I think Capitao is an interesting one, especially because in Pro League, they love Capitao because of the amount of utility he brings. We did that on purpose because we wanted to have the kind of, “I’m going to bring everything and the kitchen sink” operator, and see how all the different aspects of the community would gravitate to them. Turns out, higher end takes Capitao, the lower end not so much. which then means we’ve got a clearly defined need there, but also keeping him to be very flexible. Enhancing versatility was kind of the approach there, and it’s the same thing we do with all ops.
Stevivor: Another big change announced today was Ranked 3.0 – to me, it sounds a lot like Ranked 1.0. What’s different?
Christopher Budgen: One of the biggest aspects in Ranked 1.0 that we didn’t like, was when we did the soft reset we brought everybody into the centre. Which meant 50% of our community actually got soft reset in a higher rank than they deserved.
After they did their placements, they would get a rank that was higher than their actual rank, and they were incentivised to stop playing the game because they were actually just going to go down in rank if they continued to play. So our soft resets are gonna be looking at what their final rank is for the season and then adjusting them down dynamically. If you’re a higher rank, you might get pulled down a little bit more. If you’re a lower rank, maybe you won’t get pulled down quite as much.
Stevivor: You mentioned there’s revamped rewards coming with 3.0, too?
Budgen: Yeah, in addition to that, after you do the placements, a new progression reward track will unlock. It’ll have a lot of rewards that will last the whole season. It also opens up rewards to lower ranked players that they never had access before.
In Ranked 2.0, for example, if you wanted more competitive coins, the only way you could earn that is to just get good, and just, you know, rise the ranks, which is easier said than done for a lot of our players. So now with this new progression rewards track, we’re incentivising players of all ranks to play, see if you can and level up.
Even if you get hard stuck bronze, there’s all these rewards if you just play the ranked playlist, and that’s ultimately how you get better. Just play those matches, earn those rewards, and then by doing so, maybe now you can get yourself into silver, maybe even gold.
Stevivor: Do you think this is an admission that maybe 2.0 didn’t land the way you wanted it to?
Budgen: We’ve heard from the community for quite a while now that 2.0 is really… the messaging was a little bit wrong. Our content creators, for example, they’re champion ranked, but at the start of the season they have a lot of people coming into their streams and they say, “hey, why are you playing in copper lobbies?” So just that whole miscommunication is something that’s always been a friction point, especially for our content creators and players.
Also, the way that the hidden MMR and the rank worked, there was a little bit of a rubber band that was trying to catch you up, and then try to keep you around your hidden MMR, which sometimes was very confusing for players, and created some different friction.
There were some benefits for 2.0. We brought in new rewards, we opened up this kind of copper to champion aspect that came with that season. By doing that for the last three and a half years, we’ve been able to learn different elements, which helped inform how we want to approach Ranked 3.0.
Stevivor: Finally, you’ve also announced that you’re looking to bring the Hostage game mode into Ranked – how are you approaching this to stop it just being a less competitive fragathon and force objective play?
Mills: We really want to focus on it for two primary reasons. One, our community has been asking for the mode itself to be reintroduced and reinvigorated. So we wanna meet that at the gate. The second one is it is part of the core identity of a CTU to go into a hostage situation, and to be able to enhance that fantasy and be able to have that be something that players can actively choose to engage with is something that is really important to us.
Budgen: Ultimately, what we’re looking at is how do we bring that competitive aspect? Maybe it won’t be as competitive as bomb. So how do those sit alongside each other? Is it a different playlist? Is it, you know, a playlist that comes only every couple seasons?
We’re looking at different ways that we’re going to bring that in for Season 4. What we’re focussed on is different prototypes. What does that gameplay look like? And then with that gameplay, how do we surface that to players? I think what we’re open to is that, yeah, maybe there is a bomb rank and a hostage rank, and maybe it’s okay that they’re not necessarily on the exact same level.
Rainbow Six Siege is currently available on Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PS4, and PS5. Snake goes live with Year 11 Season 1 today.
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Rainbow Six Siege1 December 2015PC PS4 PS5 Xbox One Xbox Series S & X
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Hamish Lindsay travelled to Paris, France in order to cover Rainbow Six Siege. Travel and accommodation were paid for by Ubisoft.
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