Griefers, beware! Those who are a little too trigger happy with their team members in Rainbow Six Siege should heed a new update that's coming to the game.
In the next update, Operation Vector Glare, those who tend to shoot their own team - known as "friendly fire" - will be penalised (via PC Gamer). Serial friendly fire offenders will activate a reverse friendly fire state, so that shots fired and damage caused to teammate will be reflected back at the offender. While reverse friendly fire existed before now the effect will continue into further matches automatically.
Rainbow Six Siege director Alex Karpazis termed the new rule "preemptive reverse friendly fire". Friendly fire is one of the most common forms of griefing in Siege but with this new feature the game will not let those punks off the hook so easily. In a video Siege's developer showed that RFF would turn on for an offender for the next 20 matches (!) but that it would turn itself off after "multiple matches without injuring teammates". However, Karpazis told media that the 20-match number might not be the same once the feature goes live.
Rainbow Six Siege prides itself on being one of the more realistic shooters around, and this extends to friendly fire but it can be very frustrating for players since just a single bullet to the head results in an instant kill for either team members or enemies. This means some unruly players have used friendly fire to cause havoc and mess up games, but the preemptive reverse friendly fire should hopefully prevent such offenders from now on.
While players have besieged Ubisoft with requests to tone down the damage to team members or to disable friendly fire, the developers have insisted that learning not to shoot your own team is a skill players should know. But the studio did implement reverse friendly fire in 2019. But since the RFF was wiped clean with each new match, it meant that players could still kill at least one of their own team every match before it turned on. But now that it's preemptive, this should deter the griefers.
The only potential problem is if someone accidentally kills their teammate, and the penalty is handed down for such an occurrence. Hopefully, those victims won't be so quick to select the "on purpose" prompt. Meanwhile, in other news a couple of Yakuza characters are making their way to Siege.