Rainbow Six Siege 'Smoke nerf' an unneccesary change, leaves many disappointed

Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft’s tactical FPS game, continues to maintain a strong player community even though the company already released a new installment in the saga this year.

Unlike previous installments, Rainbow Six Siege does not offer a single-player campaign. So, it is a game totally focused on multiplayer mode.

That said, an only-multiplayer game means that everything related to the netcode and the balancing of weapons, items, abilities, and operators should be free of issues.

In an attempt to improve match balance, Ubisoft applied a nerf to the Rainbow Six Siege Smoke Operator. But, this decision has divided the community, disappointing many players (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).

According to Ubisoft, the nerf to Smoke Operator is intended to attract more casual audiences to Rainbow Six Siege. The nerf in question is that now the operator will be vulnerable to his own toxic gas.

For those who don’t know, each Rainbow Six Siege operator has unique abilities that allow players to approach matches in different ways. Smoke Operator was invulnerable to his toxic gas grenades.

However, many Rainbow Six Siege players disagree with the Smoke nerf. After all, the unique abilities of each operator are among the main differentiators over others.

Smoke Nerf

I’m not going to make my opinion on the Smoke nerf clear (based on my flair it should be easy to tell how I feel) but I’m calling it now; this nerf is going to split the community again like other major nerfs in the past. It does kinda feel funny that this nerf even occurred though. In all my years of playing Siege I’ve never really seen many people having issue with Smoke’s being immune to his own poison.
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As some reports point out, one of the key aspects in Rainbow Six Siege gameplay is that each operator is unique, with their strengths and weaknesses.

So, removing the special ability of some operator will lead to doing the same with others.

Low ELO opinion on Smoke Nerf

Honestly, no one is going to care about a gold-plat after all this years playing but have my two cents.

It’s a bad idea.

Operators in R6 are unique, each one have their strengths and weaknesses and that makes them unique. If moving forward we are getting no unique passives, or the actual ones getting deleted, there’s an amount of changes about passives and interactions we should be facing because are side unique or some “special” interactions
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Also, many believe that the nerf is unnecessary due to Rainbow Six Siege being a game focused on the competitive crowd. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to make that kind of change with the casual audience in mind.

How Smoke nerf is meant to cater casual players?

Genuinly curious about this. No one. I mean no one has complained about it in like 7 years it being ”too confusing”. This clearly a targeted nerf to PL and maybe Ranked. Smoke is not a casual game meta op. There is absolutely no reason to nerf him, because of it.

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At the moment, there is no official response to player complaints from Ubisoft. We will update this story once new developments about the situation arise.

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