Is Ubisoft thwarting cheaters with “100 versions” of Rainbow Six Siege?
Enlarge / One side of this image is the cheat-makers' and one is the Ubisoft developers', but we're frankly not sure which is which...
Last week, Ubisoft announced an "important security update" to prevent cheating on the popular Rainbow Six Siege. And while Ubisoft said it "cannot share details of the update in order to protect its integrity," anti-cheat watchers think the developer might be thwarting cheat-makers using an interesting form of code obfuscation and frequent, semi-randomized game updates.
The popular Anti-Cheat Police Department Twitter account (ACPD) noted last week that "every 2 hours, a new unique build of R6 shows up," citing SteamDB tracking data showing dozens of updates over a matter of days. The game's frequent Steam updates seem to have stopped just as Ubisoft temporarily rolled back its new security features in order to implement fixes Wednesday, further establishing the link.
Prominent Rainbow Six data-mining account ScriptLeaksR6 also explained last week that Siege "has a new system in place where some [PC players] get custom builds of the game." The proliferation of dozens of different versions of the game in a short period means "cheat devs effectively need to update 100 versions of the game to get their cheat to work," as ScriptLeaksR6 puts it.