There are more ways than ever to spend money on "Rainbow Six Siege": $25-$30 annual passes, $15 premium cosmesis, paid Renown boosters, paid seasonal alpha packs, $10 battle passes, etc. Six Invitational When I sat down with game director Leroy Athanassoff at 2020, I wanted to know if "Siege" would be free.

To my surprise, Athanassoff told me that he wanted it to be, and that he believed many on the Siege development team wanted it to be, too. However, Athanassoff is not the only one who decides the price of "Siege," he said. It's a company decision," Athanassoff said. As a development team, we hope to do that at some point. We want this game to be accessible to everyone.

Athanassoff stated that making Siege free-to-play is more complicated than adjusting the price tag. To succeed as a free-to-play game, "certain features need to be in place," and Athanassoff explained that one such feature is an excellent solution to smurfing. Smurfing is the act of purchasing a new account in order to reset one's skill rating and play against less skilled players.

The ethics of smurfing has long been a debated topic in multiplayer gaming. Last year, Valve reset and banned over 17,000 accounts for smurfing in Dota 2. Epic has a zero tolerance policy against smurfing in Fortnite. in Overwatch, players with multiple accounts are not punished, but knowingly losing an account or "boosting" an account by playing with a highly skilled friend is subject to a ban.

"Siege" also does not ban the use of separate accounts, but Athanassoff's stance is clear. Smurfing creates an unfair environment for players and should be prevented whenever possible. Ubisoft's team of player behavior specialists is working on new solutions to reduce the impact of smurfing." The key for us is to discover as soon as possible that players are highly skilled at what matters." The problem now is that you can play a certain amount of matches with Copper players while you are a diamond."

Currently, Siege determines skill groups by MMR, a scoring system that is heavily dependent on winning percentage; Smurf's account intentionally loses matches to lower MMR This makes it easy to dodge detection; Athanassoff's team plans to counter this by taking more stats into account and reacting quickly to skill disparities. For example, a new account with a kill/death ratio of 4 and a win ratio of 0.2 will automatically be recognized as a smurf account that is intentionally losing matches.

This proposed improvement sounds very similar to the system Valve implemented in Dota 2 in 2019 to artificially raise the MMR of overperforming players until they stop overperforming. While this update has helped, Valve has also taken other measures to make smurfing and hacking more troublesome. Players must log 100 hours in-game and link a unique phone number before they can play Ranked; Siege has required two-factor authentication to play Ranked since late 2018, but Athanassoff He did not mention it.

Even the most sophisticated stat tracker is not expected to stop smurfing altogether. If impure minds crave the empty satisfaction of stomping new players, they will find a way. Still, there are ways to reduce smurfing to insignificance. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was released for six years before finally going free-to-play in 2018; it was four years before Team Fortress 2 stepped into free-to-play in 2011. Siege, now in its fifth year, may follow a similar trajectory.