Rainbow Six Siege Y10S1 Designer's Notes: Balancing updates, community feedback, and more

The Rainbow Six Siege Y10S1 Designer's Notes are out and they are quite special. This is because the developers at Ubisoft have decided not to push out any balancing changes for this season. Rather this particular Designer's Notes focuses on sharing some insight into the balancing process undertaken by the team.

The developers have collectively decided to let the game settle for a while in preparation for everything that's coming up so that the new Siege X era begins with more stable data overall. They took this opportunity to instead shed some light on the thought process that goes behind game balancing.

In this article, we shall take a look at the Rainbow Six Siege Y10S1 Designer's Notes, its balancing process insights, how community feedback works, and more.

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Rainbow Six Siege Y10S1 Designer's Notes: Game balancing insights

PC rank distribution shown in Y10S1 Designer's Notes (Image via Ubisoft)

Defensive win percentage

The devs communicated that in a tactical game like Rainbow Six Siege, defensive teams often have an advantage. This is because defenders get to choose and modify the objective site, whilst attackers only have the prep phase and the round duration to assess and execute a new strategy based on the information collected. This is why R6 devs aim to keep a defensive victory percentage of 55% (with a 5% tolerance).

Balancing process initiation

Siege has several segments that provide information concerned with balancing which includes different ranks, playlists, platforms, and maps. The R6 dev team stated that noticing an outlier value initiates a discussion, but not an urgent action. This is solely because Rainbow Six Siege has numerous layers of mechanics that rely on each other. Making a small change somewhere early can trigger a catastrophic change somewhere else.

This is why they constantly analyze both new and old balancing changes, as the impact of something in Siege can vary from patch to patch. They also explained that buffs and nerfs almost always work together. If one buffed operator gains popularity, others in similar roles lose pick rate value, which has a similar impact to nerfing them. While nerfing an operator makes other similar ops more desirable.

Operator presence and effectiveness

In the Y10S1 Designer's Notes, developers stated that their ideal presence rate for an operator is roughly 13%. This is because they feel that playing and facing the same few operators can make the game feel repetitive and boring. However, if every operator was in their sweet spot data-wise, it would imply that everyone is viable, rendering operator selection useless.

This is why they want to keep operators situationally good, so that the specific map, objective site, available information, and the team lineup determine the best option. Operators with extremely low presence, are seen as less impactful or not a good fit meta-wise. This makes the dev team consider individual reasons for balancing individual ops.

Win delta graph

Win deltas in Rainbow Six Siege never portray an operator's inherent strength. But rather reflect how the operator has been performing in the current meta. This is supported by examples that state that Maverick cannot be considered weak if he has low win Delta even though he can open any reinforced electrified wall. Alternatively, Kapkan cannot be considered too strong just because an Ash decides to rush and die to his traps. Every win-delta graph speaks differently in various metas.

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Rainbow Six Siege Y10S1 Designer's Notes: Community feedback

Console rank distribution shown in Y10S1 Designer's Notes (Image via Ubisoft)

In addition to the hard data gathered from various sections of the game, the Y10S1 Designer's Notes states that the dev team also examines player feedback from different channels to stay up to date with the current meta and what players think is going on.

There are two ways the R6 dev team gathers player data. They take community feedback on various social media platforms into account. They also gather data from experienced players and community members with targeted investigation. This data is converted to a format that better explains the concerns thoughts and ideas floating around in the community.

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