Cheaters are the reason we can’t have nice things. All the time, money, and effort that could go into expanded DLC and improved gameplay mechanics is spent avoiding the legions of mediocre gamers who mistake aimbots for actual game prowess. All the exercise is exhausting and Ubisoft is not going to take it anymore, the company announced Monday. When the game’s next update is released, any ‘Rainbow Six Siege’ player found cheating by using input forgery, i.e. using a third-party device to run a keyboard and mouse on their console instead of from a controller, you will see its delay. drastically extended times. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
These devices, which include the APEX XIMhe zen chronoor the ReaSnow S1 — Let gamers take advantage of the increased sensitivity and feedback offered by a keyboard and mouse over console controllers. They also incorporate aim assist, auto-reload, and autoscope features that have long (and rightfully so!) been despised by the broader gaming community and banned from anything resembling official competition. But that hasn’t stopped people from increasingly relying on these devices to artificially boost their scores in online shooters from ‘Destiny 2’ to ‘Overwatch’.
That will no longer be the case with ‘Rainbow Six Siege’. The company revealed its Mousetrap system on Monday, a detection suite built specifically to detect accounts running these illicit hardware devices. Mousetrap is out now, and has been for a few seasons as the company honed the system’s detection capabilities and built a database of known traps. Also, yes, they are very interested in you and your pedestrian FPS machinations.
“We know exactly which players are cheating and when,” Jan Stahlhacke, lead of the Rainbow Six Siege gameplay programming team, announced in the Y8S1 reveal above. “We also know that at the higher ranks, counterfeiters become much more common.”
If the system detects one, that account will see a noticeable increase in their response times, more than enough to cancel out any ill-gotten advantages. The user will have to unplug the device, then play a few more rounds with the “al-ping-tross” chained to their neck before the delay penalty (eventually) wears off. Activision took similar, and equally inventive, steps in 2022 against Obligations cheats with his Disarm measure.
The company recognizes that such devices are legitimately used by players with disabilities and Ubisoft encourages those players to reach out with feedback on how these changes might affect them. Huh, sounds like the sort of thing you’d want to fix before enacting a radical policy like this, but then again, Ubisoft isn’t exactly famous for its culture of inclusion.
All Engadget Recommended products are curated by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you purchase something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. All prices are correct at the time of publication.