Rainbow Six Siege Dev Team Wants it to Go Free-to-Play One Day

Rainbow Six Siege's development team would like the competitive shooter to go free-to-play one day.

That's according to game director Leroy Athanassoff who spoke to PC Gamer at the Six Invitational 2020. "It’s a company decision. I think on the development team we want that at some point. We want the game to be accessible to everyone,” Athanassoff said.

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However, he added that while the desire is there to make Siege free-to-play, Athanassoff reckons the game isn't ready for it yet. “You need certain features ready to be a good and successful free-to-play game,” he said.

One of these features according to the game director is a solution to smurfing in Siege. Smurfing is when an experienced player creates a new account in order to play against players of lesser skill. "What’s important for us is that we find out as soon as possible that a player is highly skilled in the things that matter,” Athanassoff said. “The problem right now is that you can play a certain amount of matches with Copper players while you’re a Diamond.”

Ubisoft has a team dedicated to making smurfing less of a problem in Rainbow Six Siege. If that team is able to lessen its impact then Siege will be a little closer to going free-to-play. One of the ways to do this is to change how a player's skill is worked out.

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Currently, Siege's ranking system looks at a player's win rate, but Athanasoff's team is looking to bring in more stats so smurfs aren't matched with lower-skilled players as often.

More on the future of Rainbow Six Siege was recently revealed during the Six Invitational 2020. New operators Iana and Oryx were announced, alongside a player reputation system, and confirmation that Siege would be coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

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Chris Priestman is a freelancer who writes news for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

source https://www.ign.com/articles/rainbow-six-siege-dev-team-wants-it-to-go-free-to-play-one-day