A new bug in Rainbow Six Siege's matchmaking created a nightmare scenario for console players of the game: the PC players are invading console lobbies and wiping the floor with controller players.
For weeks, PC players have reported being placed in matches in which everybody else is playing on console, something that's supposed to be impossible. Siege was one of the last holdouts for crossplay among older FPSes, and when Ubisoft finally made it happen, it included one key stipulation: Xbox and PlayStation can play together, but PC players remain in their own bubble. The community accepted, because pretty much everyone agrees that PC players have a major advantage in a no-respawn FPS that doesn't feature aim assist.
The earliest reports of the bug I can find date back to late April, suggesting it might be linked to the Year 8 Season 1 midseason patch released on April 11. Judging by the experience of PC players who have been inadvertently matched against console players, cross-platform matchups are going down as poorly as you'd expect.
"Uhhh so I just played about 5 games in a row and was wondering why it was so easy (I’m a Diamond on PC)," user iceyfire17 wrote on the Siege subreddit. "Nobody would answer in chat and the times people had mics it would be open mic and worst aim imaginable. My team let me know they were all on PS5 and either from copper-silver ranks."
Im a PC player and I am playing agaisnt console players from r/Rainbow6
User LazyWash also managed to matchmake into console lobbies and claims to have gone on a 10-game winning streak. Most of the reports I've seen say this is only happening in casual matches, but it does seem possible to cross-queue in Ranked and Unranked.
There's been a degree of uncertainty around how this is happening, and whether or not PC players can intentionally exploit the bug to find easier matches. Siege YouTuber Coreross tried to recreate the bug for himself and successfully matched into console lobbies on PC (video below). Coreross didn't share what he described as the "exceedingly easy" method to exploit the bug, but he did tell me about it privately, and it sounds legit.
Maybe the most troubling aspect of this exploit is that PC players who accidentally trigger the bug might be stuck in console mode for a longer period, not just for a single match. Corecross told me he's still ending up in console lobbies after undoing the exploit.
The unfortunate bug has arrived at the same time that Ubisoft is enjoying an anti-cheat win with MouseTrap, a new technology designed to detect when console players of Rainbow Six Siege are using hardware spoofing devices to allow mouse and keyboard and impart input lag on their controls until they're forced to switch back to controller. Ubisoft is clearly taking peripheral parity seriously in its competitive shooter, so I expect the cross-queue problem to become a top priority.
Coreross submitted a bug report to Ubisoft before publishing his video and the topic is starting to pick up steam on the Siege subreddit, so hopefully this gets hotfixed soon.
In the meantime, watch out for opportunistic PC players trying to easily turn their Silver IV rank into Platinum. If you suspect a PC player has infiltrated your console lobby, there's one surefire way to pick them out: if they're able to lean without aiming down sights, they're using a keyboard.
