My Dive Back Into the Siege Trenches
So, I decided to jump back into Rainbow Six Siege recently. Been away for a good while, you know? Heard all the chatter online, friends complaining too, saying the community had gone right down the drain. Sounded pretty bad, honestly. Figured I should check it out myself, see if it was really that terrible or just the usual online noise.
First thing, got the game installed again. Took ages, as always. Fired it up, felt kind of familiar but also strange after being away. Decided to ease back in, started off queuing for some Quick Matches. Didn’t want to jump straight into the serious stuff. Just wanted to get the feel back, remember the controls, the maps.
The first few games? Surprisingly okay. Mostly quiet. People just played the game, nobody really talking much in chat, which was fine by me. Won some, lost some. Standard stuff. Thought maybe the complaints were overblown.
Then It Started Kicking Off
It didn’t take long. Maybe my third or fourth session. Landed in a match, and bam. Voice chat just exploded before the first round even started properly. Some guy just laying into everyone. Then, round starts, teammate gets instantly shot in the back of the head by another teammate. Like, zero hesitation. Just pure trolling. Text chat immediately filled up with garbage, back and forth insults, the usual suspects: slurs, telling people to quit.
Okay, I thought, maybe just one bad apple, one terrible lobby. Happens everywhere online. But nope. Over the next couple of weeks, I made it a point to play more. Tried different modes – Quick Match, Unranked, even dipped my toes back into Ranked, though I knew that could be rough. Played at different times, weekdays, weekends, trying to get a real sense of it.
What I Kept Seeing
Started making mental notes, even jotted some stuff down after particularly bad sessions. Here’s the kind of stuff that kept cropping up:
- Team Killing: Saw way too much of this. Yeah, accidents happen in Siege, tight corners and all. But a lot of it was clearly intentional. Shooting someone for picking “their” operator, killing the hostage on purpose, just straight-up griefing for laughs.
- Voice & Text Chat Abuse: This was constant. Non-stop yelling, people blasting awful music, kids screaming, racist comments, sexist remarks, telling teammates they were trash, demanding people clutch or kick. Just a wall of negativity sometimes.
- General Griefing: Beyond TK’ing, there was plenty of other nonsense. People intentionally destroying friendly gadgets (Mira windows, Bandit batteries), reinforcing walls between bomb sites just to mess things up, blocking teammates in corners. Stuff designed purely to annoy their own team.
- Vote Kicking Abuse: Getting kicked for no reason, or seeing groups kick the random player right before the match ended. Happened quite a bit.
But Was it 100% Awful?
Here’s the thing, though. It wasn’t all terrible, all the time. That would be easier, in a way. Mixed in with all that junk, I did stumble into some genuinely good matches. Got into squads where people were actually using their mics for proper callouts, coordinating pushes, reinforcing correctly. Had a few games where even after a tough loss, people would type “gg” or “nice try” and mean it. Even found a couple of decent randoms one evening, teamed up for a few hours, and had a blast working together.
I also spent some time browsing around places like Reddit, forums where players hang out. It reflected what I saw in-game. Lots of clips showcasing absolutely toxic behavior, people rightly complaining. But also, people sharing strats, amazing plays, fan art, asking for genuine advice, looking for chill teammates. So the community outside the game isn’t monolithic either.
My Take After All That
So, after putting in a fair few hours, maybe 50 or 60 over those weeks, really trying to see what it’s like… my conclusion? Yeah, there’s a definite, significant toxicity problem. It’s not just a few bad apples; it feels more widespread than that. The negative interactions definitely seemed more frequent than the positive ones, especially in voice chat.
You absolutely need thick skin to play regularly, or you just get used to muting everyone the second things go south. Which kinda sucks for a team game that relies on communication. You can find good games and good teammates, but it often feels like you have to wade through a swamp of unpleasantness to find those clear patches.
It’s tiring. I get why people complain so much. I had some fun moments rediscovering the game, for sure. But the amount of sheer deliberate nastiness I ran into definitely put a damper on things. It’s a great game, mechanically, but the player environment can make it really hard to enjoy consistently. You gotta be prepared for the worst, hope for the best. That’s the reality of playing Siege right now, from what I saw.
