Ubisoft had to shut down Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and the Marketplace as a terrible security breach hit the game, and player accounts were sieved with billions of premium currency. The tactical shooter had been thrown into complete disarray on December 27, when it was reported by users that they were being credited massive amounts of R6 Credits and were able to unlock exclusive cosmetic items that are only accessible to Ubisoft developers. The exploit probably bypassed standard server-side validations, which led the studio to close all live servers as a means to limit impending economic and technical damage.
The disruption transcended bloated account balancing. Players who happened to be active during the incident reported odd messages in the game appearing on their sources, alongside a barrage of automated bans that quickly incited fears of a compromised anti-cheat system. Ubisoft quickly issued clarification stating that there was indeed a scheduled ban wave through its ShieldGuard system, although it was unrelated to the breach. A full rollback of the database was confirmed by the developers as being carried out at 11:00 AM UTC on December 27, rendering all transactions or achievements thenceforth void.
Such security threats come to the longest-running shooter at a rather tender time: the tenth-anniversary celebrations of Rainbow Six Siege are currently in process, with considerable player traction and continually incoming promotional content. The immediate aftermath concentrates on damage control-there is a recent statement by Ubisoft confirming that players who improperly used or spent the “hacked” credits would not be punished, since the company accepts that the fault lies in the infrastructure of the company and not the players.
While things are slowly moving back on to a functional basis as far as servers go, the incident raised pointed questions about the long-term viability of the game’s aged architecture. After ten years of service, Siege remains a linchpin in Ubisoft’s portfolio, and recent creative discussions may have even hinted at a possible single-player expansion. Still, for a title that places a high value on competitive integrity and a solid digital marketplace, this week’s utter collapse of the system stands to highlight certain concerns regarding the inherent vulnerabilities in running a live-service ecosystem at this scale.
