Ubisoft under fire for rolling out game update during Siege Challenger League Playday

For the second month in a row, Ubisoft has deployed a patch during Rainbow Six’s Challenger League (CL) playday, completely interrupting the matches without informing CL staff.

The Problem

Normally Ubisoft would deploy updates to Siege during a period of time where the maintenance will interrupt as little as possible for the player base. Maintenance to deploy the Year 5 Season 1.2 patch was said to be 20 minutes long, which is pretty standard as far as Siege updates go. 

Read more: ‘Evil Geniuses, Luminosity Gaming, and Team Reciprocity all leave Siege Pro League scene’ 

While 20 minutes may not seem like much, it is more than enough to completely cut off the momentum of a match for some Pro League-hopeful teams. In the previous patch of Siege while there were no major changes to the game such as operator balancing adjustments, Ubisoft did introduce a bug which made the entirety of Consulate appear as if its lights had been turned off.

It proved to be a nightmare for the Latin American (LATAM) Challenger League teams to play on, and it led to quite a few headaches for the players impacted. 

The former patch interruption, while annoying for LATAM Challenger League, didn’t have any actual changes to operator balancing like the Y5S1.2 patch.

The North American (NA) Challenger League ground to a halt the moment Ubisoft put out their announcement stating the patch would be released during NA’s Challenger League broadcast.

• Read more: Rainbow Six: Siege’s most controversial patch is about to go live, featuring more changes from the last patch notes

So far CL organizers have tried their best to keep the broadcast on schedule despite the fact that if they hadn’t pushed CL back, the teams would have to combat with some key operators getting changed such as Jäger becoming a 2-speed and Buck losing his frag grenades.

A Lasting Impact

Ubisoft seemingly cannot catch a break from criticism as of late.

First, they were called out by some (now former) members of Siege’s Luminosity Gaming roster for an accused “lack of communication” leading to their jobs being terminated. In a half-response from Ubisoft, they announced that three of the most beloved teams in North America would no longer be playing in Siege Pro League, Evil Geniuses being among them.

Most recently, Ubisoft has garnered the ire of the entire Siege community by removing the much-beloved developer skin from former devs of the game, seemingly out of nowhere. 

• Read more: Ubisoft under fire for removing developer cosmetics from former devs 

North American Challenger League thankfully seems to be adapting, but the circumstances Ubisoft has put them in are certainly less than ideal. Allegedly they had no idea the patch was being deployed soon, giving participating CL teams no time to adapt their strategies to the changes.

As it is, the applied patch notes were mostly despised by the community, and the developers seemingly saw no interest in adapting to player feedback. Ubisoft appears to be digging their own grave in terms of community acceptance, and it will take quite a while to get back on the fans’ good side.