Ubisoft’s Mousetrap system lengthens the lag to punish ‘Rainbow Six Siege’ cheaters | Engadget

Cheaters are why we can’t have nice things. All the time, money and effort that could be going towards expanded DLCs and improved gameplay mechanics is instead spent staving off the legions of mediocre players who mistake aimbots for actual gaming prowess. The entire exercise is exhausting and Ubisoft isn’t going to take it anymore, the company announced Monday. Come the game’s next update release, any ‘Rainbow Six Siege’ player found cheating through the use of input spoofing — that is, using a third-party device to run a keyboard and mouse on their console instead of a controller — will see their lag times drastically extended. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

These devices — which include the XIM APEX, the Cronus Zen, or the ReaSnow S1 — allow players to leverage the heightened sensitivity and increased reactions that a keyboard and mouse offer over console controllers. They also incorporate aim assist, autoreload, and autoscope features which have long (and rightfully!) been scorned by the larger gaming community and banned from anything even loosely resembling official competition. But that hasn’t stopped folks from increasingly relying on such devices to artificially boost their scores in online shooters from ‘Destiny 2’ to ‘Overwatch.’

That will no longer be the case with ‘Rainbow Six Siege.’ The company revealed its Mousetrap system on Monday, a detection suite built specifically to sniff out accounts running these illicit hardware devices. Mousetrap is already live, has been for a few seasons now as the company honed the system’s detection capabilities and built out a database of known cheats. Also, yes, they’re very much onto you and your pedestrian FPS machinations. 

“We know exactly which players are spoofing and when they were spoofing,” Jan Stahlhacke, gameplay programming team lead for ‘Rainbow Six Siege,’ announced in the Y8S1 reveal above. “We also know that at the highest ranks spoofers become much more common.”

Should the system spot one, that account will see a notable increase in its response times, more than enough to cancel out any ill-gained advantages. The user will have to unplug the device, then play a few more rounds with the “al-ping-tross” chained to their neck before the lag penalty will (eventually) dissipate. Activision took similar — and equally inventive — measures in 2022 against Call of Duty cheats with its Disarm measure. 

The company does acknowledge that such devices are used legitimately by gamers with disabilities and Ubisoft urges those players to reach out with feedback about how these changes might impact them. Huh, seems like the sort of thing you’d want to get squared away before enacting a sweeping policy such as this but, then again, Ubisoft isn’t exactly famous for its culture of inclusivity.