Rainbow Six Siege will punish fans of friendly fire, for multiple matches at a time

Rainbow Six Siege is all about playing tactically. As tempting as it may be to shoot that one teammate who reinforced the wrong wall at 3am (seems that this is what our own writer, Connor, likes to get up to), Ubisoft are enacting harsher sanctions for players who abuse the ability to fire at their allies.

Players of Rainbow Six Siege may already be familiar with Reverse Friendly Fire, a mechanic added to the game by Ubisoft back in 2019. Those who repeatedly fire at teammates will eventually encounter RFF, and when this happens, any damage inflicted on teammates is reflected back to the player. It seems that RFF isn't enough to stop some players from griefing their teams, however.

As a result, Reverse Friendly Fire will be changing when the next Siege update, Operation Vector Glare, rolls out on June 7. RFF will still be in place, and for offenders, it'll remain in place for much longer than the remainder of that match. Instead, the RFF sanction will last for multiple matches.

While an example shown to the media displayed the sanction lasting for 20 matches, game director of Rainbow Six Siege, Alex Karpasiz, advised PCGamer that this might not necessarily be the case with real sanctions. For now, there's no telling how long the RFF punishment will last, or whether it's duration will vary. However, we can hope that this will stop those terrible teammates from firing away at you and your allies.

It's also uncertain yet whether or not Ubisoft will have striked a delicate balance with this sanction. Ultimately, the last thing we want is to be punished for the next twenty matches because our accidental friendly fire got voted as being done 'on purpose', which is regularly the case when your teammates are unforgiving. However, we also don't want griefers to be one-shotting us as we go into a match either.

I guess we'll see exactly how the changes to Reverse Friendly Fire are when Operation Vector Glare rolls out on June 7!