'Rainbow Six Siege': Ubisoft Considers Free-To-Play, Wants To Solve Smurfing First

Ubisoft’s “Rainbow Six Siege” director Leroy Athanasoff has recently confirmed their interest in pushing the first-person shooter as a free-to-play title soon. This means that newer players won’t need to pay for “Rainbow Six Siege” to play it soon. However, the director is also facing one of the major problems that comes with free-to-play competitive titles: smurfing.

According to the director in PCGamer’s interview, the director is interested in pushing the game as a free-to-play title soon. “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,” Athanosoff said. “Rainbow Six Siege” has been a growing first-person shooter esport title and opening its gates for free would allow more players and fans to try the new title.

While the team is stoked on making the title free-to-play, Ubisoft sees smurfing as a problem that will worsen in “Rainbow Six Siege” once they allow everybody in. Smurfing is a practice in competitive titles when high level players use another account to play against less experienced players. This situation allows the high level player to dominate through the match as the lower level players struggle to fight against them.

The practice hurts the game’s longevity as newer players are discouraged from playing further as stronger players prey on them. The whole practice also breaks the matchmaking system which is designed to keep players of similar skill to fight each other. In other online competitive titles, smurfing is a bannable offense if discovered and proven.

As of now, Ubisoft and the “Rainbow Six Siege” development team is working on a solution to curb smurfing first before going free-to-play. The developers will need to work on preparing the servers first to make sure that the matchmaking systems are still healthy once it happens.

Currently, Ubisoft has just finished up with the major Six Invitational 2020 international competition and fans are just waiting for the next “Rainbow Six Siege” update, Operation Void Edge. Fans will need to wait a little bit more to see Siege go free for everybody.