Ubisoft penalizes 19,000 accounts that used mysterious exploit

Ubisoft has sanctioned nearly 19,000 accounts for using an unspecified exploit, Rainbow Six Siege developer revealed rather cryptically on Twitter earlier today.

“Recently we have identified accounts using a fraudulent exploit in our titles,” wrote the Ubisoft Support Twitter account. “Ubisoft has zero tolerance for fraudulent practices in accordance with our Code of Conduct. As a result, we will apply account-level sanctions to the nearly 19,000 accounts involved.”

Kotaku reached out to clarify which titles were affected by the exploit, but did not hear back in time for publication. Support Twitter also did not respond to users’ requests for more details Rainbow Six players are speculating that it was their game that was subject to mysterious “fraudulent practices” in the form of “duping”.

“Duping” is a fun way to refer to duplicate errors Rainbow Six players have taken advantage of at least eight years—a recent version involves linking and unlinking Xbox accounts to save multiple iterations of the same skin. When a version of the exploit probably going down, another appearsoften gets people copies of expensive Elite skins free.

It’s not the most egregious cheat, I don’t think, but people has been banned for using it for as long as it’s been around, and it’s possible that Ubisoft has decided to finally get strict with its crackdowns. Also possible and also concerning Rainbow SixUbisoft developers said earlier this week that it would seriously discourage input spoofing (using an adapter to disguise the mouse and keyboard as an imprecise controller) with an initiative they cutely call “mouse trap”.

“We wanted to build our own system that could sniff out mouse and keyboard players on the console, so we could build a better picture of who is using these devices,” said Jan Stahlhacke, head of game programming. Rainbow Six‘s Year 8 season 1 reveal panel. “We’ve been very quiet about it, but actually it’s been running in the background in shadow mode for several seasons. We’ve collected data and analyzed the results, and now we have a much better picture.”

So Ubisoft’s proud 19,000 sanctions may be the ripe fruit of that labor. But without any confirmation from Ubisoft itself, there’s no way to know. The sanctions may not even involve Rainbow Six in all – perhaps 19,000 players were flagged for loving the company’s version of Unothat has been crashes on Xbox for past two yearstoo much.