Rainbow Six Siege: Starter Edition ethics

[ZGR]

https://support.ubi.com/en-GB/faqs/000025116/Starter-Edition-FAQ

I went ahead and bought it. It is the full game, but it "requires additional grinding to unlock the remaining 16 original Operators".

I had 600 credits to buy discounted operators, or 1 new operator at the start. The big downside for the $15 version is that the EXP/Renown you get is far less per game than the $60 version.

I accepted that. But what I didn't realize was that the game the FULL ranking system integrated in SINGLE PLAYER. The game has virtually no cheat protection in SP. This means that virtually anyone with CheatEngine can make gaining XP a breeze! I spent about an hour watching Netflix gaining several thousand Renown to buy another character. At this rate, I can easily unlock everything as if I owned the normal version.

Now I'm sure Ubisoft is against this idea of easy rank-ups. I've seen players call the Starter Edition as the non pay-to-win version of Rainbow Six Siege. The game's content is rather small for a $60 game (but it is a great game nonetheless). CheatEngine is a very basic tool. It is easily blocked in virtually every online game. It is also blocked in a lot of single player games now. Is this an oversight on Ubi's part? The best part is, I KNOW Ubisoft doesn't care. They had extremely lax modding in Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and 2. I know, because I used to mod friend's characters for fun! As long as nobody is cheated against, no harm will be done.

Modding rank seems to be a pastime in grindy games. But does this change when the price tag does as well? Would anyone buy the $60 version which has bonus XP, when the $15 version can leapfrog to max rank just as fast as the $60 version?
I bought the $15 version to play casual Terrorist Hunt. Now I have the knowledge I could just use CheatEngine to unlock everything instead of the $30 price Ubi asks for all the characters.

This reminds me of the first week of Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. Yes, I am a big Rainbow Six fanboy. But the first week had version 1.0 online enabled. In the first campaign mission, 2 players could start a glitch which would spawn an enemy behind a barrier. When killed, it would spawn him again instantly. This meant 2 players could take turns holding down the trigger gaining massive amounts of XP. Basically, my buddy and I hit Elite right away (unlocking all that delicious gear). Ubi patched it, but anyone could still remove the patch and play offline, which would then carry over the XP back to online. Ubi has never cared about rank.

If R6:V2 had a $15 version that required 4x more EXP to rank, it would still be easy to do that glitch and hit max rank. I hope Ubisoft continues with this practice of releasing a cheaper version that is harder to rank.

edit: This sort of reminds me of unlocking an R9 290 to a 290x or a 6950 to a 6970 without the risk.

 

[aigomorla]

sigh...

i have so many bad things i can say about ubisoft and the entire tom clancy franchise, but i'll refrain from saying so, because if i did, i would have to give myself a ban for inappropriate language.

In short, i am never trusting ubisoft again with competitive PVP.
I am never trusting Ubisoft when it comes to tom clancy especially if its a open world which has online servers.
I am never trusting Ubisoft unless its farcry and because thats the only game where i dont need to worry about someone using a aimbot/hack shooting me though walls 1/2 mile away.

 

[Imp]

Wish this game had a real single-player component. I can't stand playing online anymore.

 

[Elixer]

Wish this game had a real single-player component. I can't stand playing online anymore.

I have to agree, online gaming is one huge fail for most games these days, if it isn't the cheating, it is the trolls that frequent the games.

 

[ZGR]

I completely agree about the lack of single player. I have already encountered cheaters on the Multiplayer section. I also had a lot of problems with cheaters on Vegas 2 on the Xbox 360.

Rainbow Six Siege has far less going for it than the two Vegas games. It feels like a stopgap for a real Rainbow Six.

The reason I bought it was the Terrorist Hunt mode, and I do like it a lot. The AI is a significantly more intelligent than the previous R6 titles. The destructive environments and great gunplay make it a lot fun. Having a fun team to play with makes it well worth it.

It is lacking in maps, guns, and overall customization. In Vegas 1 and 2, your character could be unique in a lot of ways. The missing campaign is a big problem since Terrorist Hunt needs more maps. For $15 I cannot complain; it feels like "R6 Lite"

edit: I just beat the Situations. Article 5 unlocked. WOW! This is a coop mission (no squad allowed though) which feels like a Rainbow Six campaign mission.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I bought this the other night. I played the open beta for a few days and actually really quite liked the game, I thought it had a lot of variety but without a single player campaign and an asking price of £40 I was absolutely not on board.

They've launched this deal as £12 and you have to grind something in the order of 6x more for each operator which to me really isn't that bad, so I bought into the game and had a blast last night, I think I made about 5k renown in a few hours of multiplayer with randoms doing pretty badly, I was quite drunk and mostly useless, so unlocking characters isn't going to be that bad, especially considering that they seem to have offers on where they slash the prices of some of the operators by a massive amount.

 

[ZGR]

I bought this the other night. I played the open beta for a few days and actually really quite liked the game, I thought it had a lot of variety but without a single player campaign and an asking price of £40 I was absolutely not on board.

They've launched this deal as £12 and you have to grind something in the order of 6x more for each operator which to me really isn't that bad, so I bought into the game and had a blast last night, I think I made about 5k renown in a few hours of multiplayer with randoms doing pretty badly, I was quite drunk and mostly useless, so unlocking characters isn't going to be that bad, especially considering that they seem to have offers on where they slash the prices of some of the operators by a massive amount.

Exactly, ranking up is incredibly slow playing it legitly.You can make 5k renown in minutes with CheatEngine on Singleplayer. CheatEngine is confirmed blocked on multiplayer, which is GOOD. I farmed while watching netflix, then I hopped on to play with friends while making scrap for renown points. Very strange situation.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I don't consider it strange, it's a deliberate change to make the buy in price of the game cheaper for people who can't justify the high cost, in the hope they get bored of extra grinding and simply buy currency to unlock the weapons, it's just another spin on micro-transactions.

Yes you can cheat to unlock stuff, likely because they never planned on this business model from the start but decided to tag it on after development, I'm guessing sales aren't as strong as they were hoping for. Obviously you're not supposed to cheat and doing so might run the risk of you having your key banned if they detect people are doing it and charge up the ban hammer, do that sort of stuff at your own risk.

 

[Midwayman]

sigh...

i have so many bad things i can say about ubisoft and the entire tom clancy franchise, but i'll refrain from saying so, because if i did, i would have to give myself a ban for inappropriate language.

In short, i am never trusting ubisoft again with competitive PVP.
I am never trusting Ubisoft when it comes to tom clancy especially if its a open world which has online servers.
I am never trusting Ubisoft unless its farcry and because thats the only game where i dont need to worry about someone using a aimbot/hack shooting me though walls 1/2 mile away.

Same here. I'm done with online UBI games. They clearly don't give a rats ass about cheating. Two games in a row I've bought with rampant hackers.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

After playing this for a few days and reaching like level 10 really all I can say is it's probably not worth getting. They've not managed to make pub matchmaking balanced so it's extremely common for teams to have huge disparities in the skill of the players.

For example several people who are friends and newbs at say level 10 or under, get matched with teams who are all literally 100+ and then you get wrecked without getting a single kill, and this happens constantly over and over.

There is no balance to the match making it's just good teams of people who have obviously played a lot and have all the unlocks, all squading together and then owning pubs full of noobs, completely and utterly ruins the game.

*edit*

Also all the noobs have the same unlocks at the start which means there's no unlock diversity among the hordes of new players and there's optimal defense strategies against this using thing we can't unlock. That means losing most of your rounds and then this negative feedback loop kicks in where the new players are getting owned, getting hardly any exp and so can't unlock the counters to what the enemies have, keeps new players down and the good people on top. You can tell this is happening because squads of 5 men end up not even being able to pick characters and so they get lumped with a generic guy who is rubbish and it lowers the useful diversity of the team even more.

Oh yeah, and then the team being stomped ends up with players who leave and they don't bother to fill in that spot with people looking for games so it becomes even more stack usually 4v5 or 3v5. That's a very frequent occurrence.

 

[ZGR]

Have you tried Terrorist Hunt, Frosty? I love it! That is really all I play on Siege. I'm trying to work my way up to Realistic, but I'm having a blast on Hard right now.

edit: This video of R6 hackers had me laughing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv-VyfVu3Eo

Good news for PvP players: http://rainbow6.ubi.com/siege/en-US/news/detail.aspx?c=tcm:152-253722-16&ct=tcm:148-76770-32

It seems like profile modding is still a safe thing to do, but they are cracking down on cheaters on the PvP side. Good.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I've not tried terrorist hunt yet, I've been doing the single player tutorial things for a while to get some renown, most of our games today were awful only managed to squeeze a few good ones in after playing maybe 20 squads.

Not ran into any obvious cheating yet but have run into a lot of prats and seemingly good players who like to really bitch and moan about "roamers" who don't defend one area as defenders but like to run about the map.

 

[ZGR]

Not ran into any obvious cheating yet but have run into a lot of prats and seemingly good players who like to really bitch and moan about "roamers" who don't defend one area as defenders but like to run about the map.

Those guys are in Terrorist Hunt as well. They shout orders and are incredibly condescending. They are usually on the bottom of the scoreboard and rage quit. One big complaint I have is that the person who leaves after a match is usually the host. This means that everyone else has to search all over again! I often play in the early AM, and I find the search times are 3+ minutes.

I remember last night I accidentally took someone's kill. He then pointed his gun at me and shot me once (5% damage). At the same time, a terrorist killed him. This is one of the first games where I am not sick of the AI. They are often unpredictable and they will sometimes try harder in some matches. It is amazing seeing 5 enemy riot shields close in and annihilate everyone on the team. Or seeing 3 suicide bombers rush your position.... Love it! One of the best part is that my Ping is always really low. This is the first R6 game where lag isn't noticeable (and it still uses the old P2P system).

 

[StrangerGuy]

The problem with the general gamer crowd is whining about how they hate every P2W crap etc but fails miserably on the most important thing which is voting with their wallets.