Rainbow Six Siege’s test server removed cross-chat in order to prevent toxic behavior, but then immediately put it back based on player feedback.
Rainbow Six Siege has had a toxic player problem for quite some time. Ubisoft actually acknowledged it way back in early 2018 when they instituted a new toxicity management system that would actually ban players for making hateful or racist comments. In July of 2018, they started a three-strikes rule that would get your permanently banned for repeated offenses.
There were also some clever players that started using the system to their advantage. Before the match, a clever player would goad an opponent into saying something awful in chat, causing them to get auto-banned and then giving his or her team an advantage.
While these systems certainly helped tone down the amount of verbal effluent spilling into the game, it didn't exactly stop the problem in its tracks. Ubisoft has been struggling for over a year with toxic gamers, so yesterday they tried another tactic: removing cross-chat between teams.
Plenty of games have taken this route to combat toxicity. Destiny 2, Heroes of the Storm, and World of Tanks all removed team cross-chat so that players couldn't send messages to anyone except on their own team.
Rainbow Six Siege briefly did the same on the December 5th test server update, but according to the patch notes on the Six Siege subreddit, the development team immediately put it back based on player feedback.
"After discussing with the team, and based on feedback, we have decided to focus on implementing an on/off toggle option for cross-chat in a future update," Ubisoft wrote.
This seems to acknowledge that Rainbow Six Siege players actually prefer a bit of cross-team smack talk before and during matches. League of Legends has a similar toggle function for cross-chat, so if a player wants to hear what the other team is saying, it can be enabled in the game’s options.
So far, there’s no word on when such a toggle will be enabled in Rainbow Six Siege.
Source: Reddit