Operation Heavy Mettle | Rainbow Six Siege | Ubisoft (US)

PLAYER PROTECTION

PLAYER COMMENDATIONS
Coming this season are Commendations, a new way for players to shout-out others for their positive behavior contributions to the team.
Every match, each player can give out 2 commendations to teammates and 1 to the opposing team. To keep things fair, a player can only commend the same teammate once during each 7-day period.

The available commendations are:

• Valor: a great teammate who stays cool and is fun to play with.
• Dedication: a reliable teammate who stays engaged, fills in roles, and actively relays intel.
• Guidance: a teammate who takes on a leadership role, helping the others by sharing knowledge and developing strategy.
• Players can vote as a team to commend the opponents for playing a fun and fair match.

Commendations also lead to rewards. Players with a Commendation Streak are those who are frequently commended. They'll be highlighted to others in-game unless this option is turned off in the privacy settings. Having an active streak grants increased Alpha Pack drops, and there will be exclusive rewards for commended players at the middle and end of each season.

REPUTATION SECTION UPDATE
With the addition of Commendations, the Reputation section has gone through some changes. These updates add two new pages to give players more visibility.

• The Commendations page keeps track of a player's commendations, their Streak, and Alpha Pack drop rate.
• The Misconduct page gives players visibility on behaviors that are affecting their Reputation Standing.

PRIVACY OPTIONS UPDATE
New options are coming to Privacy Mode this season which hide your Commendation Streak and add a link in-game to the Ubisoft Account privacy settings to allow quicker access.

PLAYLISTS UPDATE

Multiple changes are coming to playlists this season, including a Quick Match rework, a redesign of Unranked (now called Standard), and a brand new Arcade mode.

QUICK MATCH REWORK
Changes to Quick Match focused on making this playlist quicker than before. Round timers have been reduced, objective locations are now automatically revealed, and bomb sites are set up in advance with reinforcements and rotations.
Also coming to Quick Match is Attacker safeguard which grants a 10-second invulnerability to them at the start of the Action Phase to stop spawn peaking and allow Attackers time to safely get to the building. If an Attacker enters the building before the 10 seconds runs out, their invulnerability is removed and they can be injured or eliminated.
Players must now be Clearance Level 10 to join Quick Match games, but matchmaking has been tweaked to decrease wait times, and a soft Skill reset has been applied.

STANDARD PLAYLIST
Replacing Unranked from this season onward is Standard, a playlist which offers the core Siege experience without Operator or map bans. This change aims to be more welcoming to all players by further separating it from the competitive nature of Ranked. To help with this, the competitive Play section has been renamed Tactical, to make finding both Standard and Ranked more intuitive.
With Standard being designed for players of all experience, the Clearance Level has been set to 0.

WEAPON ROULETTE ARCADE
Get ready for some chaos and fast action with Weapon Roulette this season, a new game mode coming to the Arcade playlist. In this new game mode, respawn is active and all players start with the same weapon, which automatically swaps to a new one after a set amount of time.

BALANCING

GRIM BUFF PT. 2
The second part of Grim's buff adds a new firing mode to the Kawan Hive Launcher, letting players select whether the Kawan Hives stick to a surface or bounce off of them. This new bouncing firing mode lets players specify the location in which they want to activate the Hive, without needing a line-of-sight.

FUZE
Fuze can now deploy Cluster Charges on Deployable Shields and Osa's Talon-8 Shields. This change aims to create a new synergy with Osa by allowing the deployment of Cluster Charges in new places at the cost of shattering glass of the Talon-8 Shield.

SHOTGUNS
Standard shotguns have been reworked so they are more consistent and easy to learn, by normalize the firing range based on the average kill distance. The goal here is to reward good practices such as aiming for the head or holding angles, and decrease the value of spray-and-pray.

PLAYER COMFORT

MATCH REPLAY & SPECTATOR MODE
Players can now enter Free Camera mode in spectator mode to watch the action from any distance or angle. In both Match Replay and spectator mode, players can also hide the HUD to capture footage with a more cinematic experience.

SQUAD MANAGEMENT
The Squad Leader can now remove players and promote another player to Squad Leader from the in-game player profile, accessed from the Squad panel or scoreboard.

IN-GAME PATCH NOTES
Patch Notes can now be read directly in-game from the Notifications section, ensuring players can remain up-to-date with game changes. This new feature also directly links to R6Fix, making it quicker to report bugs or provide feedback on reported issues.

ONBOARDING

This season, newcomers to Siege will get a brand-new first-time experience.

This new flow leads newcomers through playable Tutorials, where they will learn the basic, core mechanics of Siege before going on to learn about the Attacker and Defender roles. After completing all Tutorials, players are rewarded with 10 Operators to play with and practice their learnings. If any of these Operators are already owned, they will earn the Operators value in Renown instead.