In August 2021, we released an article outlining the top issues and community concerns among the Rainbow Six Siege community in which we informed our intention to provide a complete solution to protect our content creators. In this update, we will provide insight on what we will soon be doing for the protection and privacy of _all_ our players, including our streamers.
Player Protection
The protection of our entire player community is important and key for our game. In addition to the importance of this subject for our content creators, we believe that it is also everyone's right to be protected while playing.
Therefore, we are working on establishing sustainable solutions to protect all of our users, not only at the game level, but also at the account level with several Ubisoft partners and teams.
We are motivated by the same goal: improving our users' protection. Whether it's by giving more control over their personal data or public identity, we believe that our users require and deserve an improvement on this matter. We are aware that changes must be done within the Ubisoft environment and externally (external third-parties).
For this reason, we are working on three fronts:
- Preventing stream sniping with options that are on the Rainbow Six Siege dev team’s side. The options will prevent malicious players from using another player’s live stream to gather information and get an unfair edge, or to act in a disruptive manner to sabotage and harass the streamer.
- Controlling and limiting the data shared from your account to third-party sites/apps/overlays.
- Ensuring the protections for account data and game telemetry are respected by those third parties.
Consequently, it is no longer only about protecting our streamers, but all of our player base and, even more globally, all users of Ubisoft services.
Rainbow Six Siege & Privacy
Players will see a new section in the Options menu called "Privacy" which will contain all the current options related to queue sniping that were deployed with Y6S1.1.
Status: Available at Y6S4 launch.
To discourage and prevent disruptive players from using streamers' public information in a toxic way, we improved and created a new set of options that will allow players to increase their gameplay privacy while being able to keep their legacy name without the need to create multiple accounts or change their account name to avoid stream snipers.
Hence, here is the set of options that will compose this new protection:
- Appear as Nickname: This will allow our players to create and use a custom temporary display name to be used directly in-game without losing their legacy name. These will not be cross-linked and can be changed at any time, which will add more friction to malicious players’ process of grieving.
- Appear as “You”: Both your legacy and alternative generated names can be a primary indicator used by malicious players to follow you from match to match. To reduce any collateral effects, this option will replace the player's name on their screen with "You" so that somebody viewing their live stream, for example, cannot determine their displayed username.
- Hide Other Players: The use of surrounding information is also part of the problem and can contribute to the identification of a specific match. To alleviate this, this option generates pseudonyms for all usernames on the streamer’s screen in a match session except their own. This applies to both teammates and opponents in the match.
- Account Identity Privacy: Additionally, we’ll be testing an experimental iteration of account privacy settings to conceal the Ubisoft account name (with a randomly generated username) and profile avatar of users to protect their name on the platform. This will prevent stream snipers from using third-party tools to reveal streamer identities. Note: depending on the success of the test, this may not be available for public release.
Status: Planned to release during Season 4, but not at season launch.
Account Privacy
Privacy and Data Sharing at the account level remains a particularly key point.
We are currently working with internal service partners at Ubisoft to establish and provide sustainable solutions from the short to long term. We are aiming to better protect our players and global users by increasing the protection and control over their data at the Ubisoft level.
- Data Shared by Ubisoft: Extend the protections for players’ account data and game telemetry to third-party partners outside of Ubisoft.
- Legal Actions: Exploring consequences for entities that undermine our efforts to respect players' personal data and game telemetry. People accessing our data for community use must abide by our rules and guidelines.
Release Plan
Our end goal remains to protect anyone in terms of identity in Rainbow Six Siege, but to ensure a smooth deployment and to gather key players’ feedback, we will first release to a small pool of content creators, who remains one of the user groups most impacted by identity-based harassment in-game. Our plan is to roll out this feature in a gradual way, which will allow us to stress-test the functionality of each setting and allow adjustments to be made before a wider release.
To summarize, these first sets of privacy settings described above (including part of the account privacy settings) will be deployed initially on Rainbow Six Siege on PC via a soft-launch release to a limited audience during Season 4. Following the results of the soft launch, these features will roll out publicly to our entire PC community. As noted above, the “Account Identity Privacy” option is more experimental, and is possible not to ship publicly with the rest of these options. We are also planning to extend these privacy features to console players in the future.
Conclusion
Rest assured that this topic remains a top priority on the Rainbow Six Siege development team and across Ubisoft. The Player Behavior team and the different stakeholders involved are committed to protecting our players' personal identities and providing a safer environment for our players.
We will release a roadmap around the launch period of Season 4, followed by further planned updates to be released iteratively. We will continue to inform you of the long-term plans including console release.