Opertaion Blood Orchid Patch Notes

[coolcon2000]

Here is the Web-page containing all the information of the upcoming patch for Rainbow Six, including the much talked about Map removals.

2 new operators
Lesion and Ying

New Map
Theme Park

New Upgraded Servers Deployment
The new servers will be deployed with the launch of Season 3. These new servers bring significant improvements to stability, connectivity, FPS, rubberbanding, and overall performance. On top of the new servers, we have a new physics system in the works, which should further address issues with players teleporting and rubberbanding.

Improved Lighting When Looking From Inside To Outside And Vice Versa.
Initially, we wanted to use realistic values to have contrasted and realistic lighting, which works in the same way as a camera would in real life. Additionally, the bloom was intended to limit the effectiveness of Defenders peeking outside.
We are excited to tell you that we have completely reworked how exposure is handled on all maps, and reduced the exposure values. Bloom issues are now a thing of the past.

Sky Model Update (All maps)
We will now be using image based HDR skies. This allows us to have more artistic control of the ambient lighting, as well as increase the overall quality of lighting in general.

BDRF update (All maps)
Updates are being worked on for our shading model, also known as Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function, which calculates reflections. It now matches the same model as our external texturing tool, which improves the workflow for our artists. What this means for you is that you will see an improved reflection quality in some materials, particularly in terms of glossiness.

Data cleanup on map textures and meshes (kafe)
Over the course of the next year, we will be reworking the textures of every single map. We are starting with Kafe Dostoyevsky, our most expensive map in terms of memory-budget. We have been going through all the textures and meshes of Kafe, smoothing, optimizing, and standardizing everything we could. In essence, we are streamlining and reducing its overall memory footprint.

Optimizing Operators
In Operation health, we have done a complete pass on all of our Operators to make sure the total sum of their textures meet a consistent memory usage. This means that textures that were not adequately optimized are now remapped in the UV Mapping with greater efficiency so that they take up less amount of memory without reducing quality.

Because we’re meeting a consistent memory budget across all operators, it also meant that we could slightly improve the quality for some Operators. Lower budget Operators, like Sledge, will have a slight improvement of quality.

Face Rigging Cleanup Means More Consistent Facial Reactions
By doing a pass on the facial rigging of the Operators, it means that they now have a more consistent reaction with the shape of their face. This will result in more accurately aligned points of movement in the face.

 

[coolcon2000]

Hibana’s Gadget Will Now Be More Consistent.
After months of hard work, we’ve streamlined the handling of Hibana’s net objects. We started by reducing the overall number of net objects we need to monitor. By doing this, the potential conflicts between Host Authority and Local Authority timelines are reduced, and thus players will not run into the complications that result from a desync between the two.

Additionally, we’ve meticulously gone over the scenarios in which we saw other outlying issues occurring, such as pellet placement, and visual errors, and corrected those as well.

Hit Registration, and High Ping
Over Season 3, we will be testing fixes and improvements that will aim to address Hit Registration issues and poor network conditions. We are currently testing something we’re calling Latency Alignment, which will make 1v1 encounters feel more consistent. The result should be that the server will more accurately mirror the reaction time of players with unstable connections, giving a fairer reaction time to their opponents.

We are also working on adjustments to our shot validation to further favor players with more stable connections. This will be a lot more punishing on shots that happen far away. There are other improvements for hit registration, headshot registration, and ping that we will be trickling into deployment.

Introducing New Smoke Grenade & Bolt Animation – Dual Perspective Replication
Smoke grenades and Capitao’s smoke darts have been fully revamped. They are now completely opaque and will be displayed the exact same way on every client, which will make them much more reliable and consistent. We’ve welcomed pro players to test them in our Montreal studio – they’ve found these new smokes to be so strong that we’ve decided to follow their recommendation and lower their amount to 2 per operators that can chose them. This change will also temporarily make Capitao’s smokes grey, instead of blue.

New game design update on ACOG’s for defenders
As a standard from now on there will not be a 2 or 3 speed Defender with the option of using the ACOG sight.

While we like the fact that defenders can challenge attackers on long distances on their approach, we believe this strategy should come with a higher risk. The possibility for 3 speeds operators like Jäger and Bandit to challenge on the longest distances while being able to relocate very quickly is currently too strong. As a consequence, Jäger and Bandit lose their ACOG, and the only new defenders that will get ACOGs will be the heavy armored ones. However, this does not mean all heavy armor operators will have ACOG’s and will be decided on by the Game Design team.

Weapon falloff damage redesign
Our old damage model had several inconsistencies, which has made it hard for players to understand where each weapon loses damage efficiency. With the new model in Year 2 Season 3, we have tried to keep the weapon balance intact while setting hard values for where the damage falloff begins and where it ends per weapon category.

With Season 3, we have standardized the fall-off value across all weapons classes; except for the shotguns and the sole sniper rifle for Glaz. We believe this will help everyone have a better understanding, of when their weapon loses efficiency.

• Designated Marksman Rifles: Fall-off starts at 25m and ends at 40m.
• Light Machine Guns: Fall-off starts at 25m and ends at 40m.
• Assault Rifles: Fall-off starts at 25m and ends at 35m.
• Sub-Machine Guns: Fall-off starts at 18m and ends at 28m.
• Machine Pistols: Fall-off starts at 18m and ends at 28m.
• Pistols: Fall-off starts at 12m and ends at 22m.

The reason why we did not want to give the shotguns the same treatment is that they need to have this level of granularity to balance them properly and have enough variation between each other to keep them interesting.

Ammo balancing
We have made a pass on the amount of ammo of every gun, and added a few magazines to several of them. Here is the complete change list:

• AR33 +1
• 417 +4
• 556xi +2
• C8-SFW +2
• MK17 CQB +2
• CAMRS +2
• PARA-308 +2
• Type-89 +2
• SMG-11 +2
• P9 +1
• P226 Mk 25 +1
• M45 MEUSOC +2
• P90 +1
• SASG-12 +1
• SPAS-15 +1
• ITA12S +2
• FO-12 +1
• T-96 LSW +1
• SR-25 +2
• OTs-03 +2

Two drones deployed at a time for attackers
Attackers can now deploy a second drone without destroying the first one. This works just like Twitch who can already deploy her two shock drones. The mechanics are also the same where launching a new drone will place the attacker in the new drone’s camera, and they can re-access their first drone view by scrolling the observation tool list.

We hope that this change will reinforce the importance of the preparation phase by making it possible to position a drone inside the building, and then deploy a new drone during the action phase to scout ahead without losing this first drone.

Kanal Spawn Kill Exploit
Using the shield vault exploit, Defenders can place themselves on the windowsill of North windows of Control Room aiming at Floating Dock spawn location, and North windows of Server Room aiming at Construction Site. We have fixed this so defenders can no longer use this spawn kill exploit.

First-Person camera position will now be closer aligned to third-person
We identified and fixed several cases where players’ first person camera position did not match third person eyes position. This sometimes led to getting killed by opponents that you couldn’t see.

Shooting feedback systems is now more accurate
The shooting feedback systems like bullet tracers, hit reactions like decals on the environment, and threat indicators in the UI were based on a trajectory that started from the weapon muzzle. This led to inconsistencies, as the real bullet trajectory in Rainbow starts from the 1st person camera. Shooting feedback systems are now fully consistent and based on real bullet trajectories. We need to make a shoutout to ExecCS, who is the community member who alerted us on that with a youtube video.

Non-replicated debris
There are often times when there is a piece of debris that can be viewed by one player, and not the other. This will no longer block sightlines when shooting.

Debris will no longer block the deployment of gadgets.
Debris from the wooden windows frame can hinder or block deployment of gadgets. Sometimes the debris will get stuck in the Armor Panel of Castle and are impossible to be destroyed blocking completely the deployment of any gadgets. This fix should allow for more consistent debris physics.


Player Comfort
Defender vision filter is removed when going outside
We have removed the red filter that make defenders’ vision uncomfortable when they run outside the building. We think the red warning in the middle of the screen should be clear enough feedback that you are doing something dangerous.

Priority on observation tools for alive players
If an alive player browses the observation tool list, he will now have priority over dead players for camera controls (in attack and defense). While this should not make much of a difference in organized matches, we think it should help in public matchmaking in case a dead player is AFK while controlling a camera and prevents alive players from getting info.

Crosshairs don’t turn red on enemies anymore
It could sometimes happen that you spotted an enemy because your crosshair turned red – not because you actually saw them.

Finding our enemies is core to Siege gameplay, so we have decided to remove this mechanic. Note that your crosshair will still turn green when aiming at a teammate.

Enemy ID only triggers on successful scans
Similarly to the crosshair turning red, it happened sometimes that you spotted an enemy because you triggered the “enemy ID” event, which reveals an operator’s identity in the HUD header and gives score points. This was problematic for the same reasons: it could tell you that an enemy was in your field of vision, even if you had not actually seen him.

The “enemy ID” event will now only trigger from scanning successfully with drones, cameras, Valkyrie Black Eyes or Jackal footsteps scanning.

 

[coolcon2000]

Playlist Changes
Ranked playlist becomes more competitive
In order to allow our players to hone their skills in the most competitive environment available, we are reducing the total number of maps in the Ranked map rotation. The following maps will be included in the Ranked playlist rotation for Season 3:

Beginning this season, the Ranked playlist will include the same nine maps that we selected for the Pro League. Moving forward, we will introduce the new Ranked and ESL Pro League playlists at the same time we perform the rank reset – and all of that will occur at the start of the new season. The Ranked playlist, much like the ESL playlist, will be rotated each Season, offering a different selection of available maps.

Additionally, we will exclude maps added in the new season from both Ranked playlists and Pro League selection. This is being done to ensure that players have time to explore and learn the new maps in Casual and in Custom Games, and to make certain that we are able to eliminate any glitches or exploits prior to entering new maps into the competitive map pool.

New Casual Map Playlist
In Season 3 we will be reducing the Casual map playlist to fifteen maps. Reducing the total number of maps available for play in the Casual playlist make the process of learning the maps that Rainbow Six has to offer easier for new players. We have identified the steep learning curve that our new players face in terms of map knowledge, and this is one of the ways that we plan on addressing it.

Additionally, some of the maps that are removed will be reworked by our Level Design team. To be clear, not all maps that are removed from the Casual playlist will be reworked, but some of them will be over the course of the years to come.

We are quickly approaching the limit of our data sizes, and this will require a rework of how our maps are stored. As a result, we are currently planning on removing maps from the game entirely down the road (not in Season 3).

Here are the maps we will have available in Casual playlist rotation for Season 3:

Map Preferences
After revisiting the mechanics of the Map Preference system, we have elected to deactivate this system for all PvP Multiplayer (we will keep it for Terrorist Hunt so you and your squad can select specific maps). We don’t have an ETA for the return of this feature to PvP as we are exploring some alternative implementations we believe can improve the experience.


Game Balancing
Barbed Wire easier to walk through and one less hit
The Game Design team considers Barbed Wire to be a problem in the current meta-game. Barbed Wire is a great standard gadget, but it has gotten to a point where any solid defense needs to pick at the very least four of them, often six or eight.

This seems problematic for two reasons. For most defense operators that can pick barbwires, they are a must-pick. Must-picks is something we try to limit, as they do not provide real choices for players. Secondly, Barbed Wires are so efficient at what they do that they need to be hard countered (i.e. broken from a distance) by attackers. That also contributes to reducing choices on the attacker’s side, as it gives too much importance to frag grenades and operators like Ash.

Barbed Wires still prevent sprinting, but they now slow down walk speed by 45% down from 50% and they are destroyed with two melee hits down from three.

Jackal’s Hunter’s Mark pings location more frequently
Jackal’s Hunter’s Mark now marks a target’s position every 5 seconds (down from 10) for 20 seconds (down from 30), for 5 position pings (up from 4).

Bandit can now destroy Hibana pellets while they Fuze.
Hibana is probably too good of a choice right now, for several reasons. We have deeper modifications planned for reinforced wall breaching operators in the long term, but we are not ready to share those details. For now, we hope that making the Bandit trick much easier against Hibana will make the strength of her gadget a bit more situational than it currently is.

Bandit’s Batteries 1-shot drones
Objects electrified by Bandit’s batteries used to 1-shot drones when they made contact with them. This was changed a few patches ago two be 2-3 hits, and we are reverting the change. Drones will be 1-hit when interact with electrified objects.

IQ Doesn’t Detect Friendly gadgets anymore & detects Echo’s arm pad while using the Yokai
IQ’s sensor detecting friendly gadgets caused all kinds of confusion, so we are removing friendly objects from her hub. Additionally, when Echo is using his yokai Drone, IQ will now be able to detect this, similar to Pulse.

Fuze’s Cluster Charge Pathing Is more predictable
The path taken by Fuze’s cluster charge pellets was calculated by precomputing the whole trajectory, but then switching to a physics driven model as soon as a puck hits an object and disregarding the remainder of the precomputed trajectory. This, as we all know, translated to unpredictable and desynchronized behavior across clients. The new version ensures that the pucks follow the precomputed trajectory until the end, which should yield a much more reliable (and teammate friendly) behavior.

No more crosshair hit markers on Blackbeard’s shield
Shooting at Blackbeard’s shield doesn’t trigger hit markers anymore. On some occasion this mechanic allowed defenders to spot his position without seeing him, which was not the intended behavior.

All Drones and Twitch’s Drone can aim upward more easily
All drones can now pitch their camera to a higher vertical angle, which mostly impacts Twitch: it’s now easier for her to shoot at high cameras with her shock drones.

Glaz’s blood splatters are now more correctly displayed
Blood spatters are now correctly displayed when using the thermal scope. They used to not display in red when they displayed above the yellow bodies.

Additionally, dead enemies do not display as highlighted any more.

Sledge’s hammer is more consistent
It should now be easier to connect where you want with the sledgehammer, especially on windows while rappelling.

 

[ShadowFax75]

Does this mean you are going to play this game again @coolcon2000 ?

 

[coolcon2000]

Ahahaha, I really want to get back into it, aye. Hopefully the new area has a more stable connection at least.

 

[ShadowFax75]

Lets hope so!

 

[Quic]

Ahahaha, I really want to get back into it, aye. Hopefully the new area has a more stable connection at least.

GET IN GAME!