A new patch for Rainbow Six Siege is incoming, and it's a significant one. Set to arrive on PC on March 30 and consoles April 5, Patch 2.3 brings a slew of tweaks and improvements aimed at improving the experience in ranked matches and balancing the overall experience. Front and center in this are tweaks to the two newest Operators, Frost and Buck.
Frost's Super 90 shotgun was judged to be too powerful when paired with her Welcome Mats and Nitro Cells, so its effective range has been decreased a little, with the damage falloff now starting at 3.5 meters instead of five. Buck, meanwhile, has received a big improvement in that his Skeleton Key shotgun can now punch Buck-sized holes through walls, enabling him to vault through after just one shot. In more general terms, the recoil on the SMG-11 has been increased, lessening its effectiveness when paired with an ACOG scope, and pushing players to use it like a secondary weapon, instead of a primary one.
That's just the beginning of Patch 2.3's long list of tweaks, which include new spawn-killing countermeasures, matchmaking and hit-registration improvements, and more:
Ranked reconnection mechanics have been improved
- Multiple reconnection bugs have been fixed. In most cases, when players disconnect involuntarily, the reconnection flow does not function as intended. We're pushing lots of fixes in this update that we believe should address the biggest part of those bugs. We will keep monitoring and pushing this further.
- The reconnection flow has been reworked to triggered more frequently and easier to access. Our objective is to let players reconnect to their Ranked matches as long as they're still running and encourage players to play them till the end.
- Reconnection now possible in all circumstances: the new flow will allow players to reconnect no matter how they got disconnected – even if they left for the main menu or quit the game.
- Force player commitment to Ranked matches: if a player leaves a Ranked match that is still ongoing, he or she will not be able to queue for another Ranked match. Selecting "Ranked" in the Multiplayer menu will reconnect him or her to the ongoing match, instead of launching matchmaking for a new one.
- Abandon penalty to be re-evaluated: if a player leaves a Ranked match and fails to reconnect before it ends, they will get the already existing abandon penalty, which prevents from queuing for Ranked matches for 8 minutes. Note that we do not think this punishment is strong enough to be fully effective, and we intend on increasing it in the future – but we need the reconnect system to be satisfactory before we can move to this step.
For the full list, take a look at the complete patch notes on the Rainbow Six Siege forum.