Rainbow Six Siege rolls out its mid-season v1.2 tweaks

I do not envy the job that Ubisoft Montreal have set themselves with Rainbow Six Siege, balancing their increasingly popular FPS to esports standards. Counter-Strike's gameplay can be upset with a single tweak, and that isn't a class-based, multi-phase game like Siege. Still, the past few major updates for the game have felt confident, and no massive community uproar has resulted, so clearly they're doing something right. Today, patch 1.2 rolled out for the game, tweaking, tuning, and buffing several LMGs .

More Dakka is order of the day with this update. While Tachanka's mounted gun looks like it's still functioning as normal, several other operators have found their mainstay weapons notably buffed. In the full patch notes you can find charts showing exactly how they've rebalanced LMGs, but in summary: More bang for your buck in most cases, with each bullet doing more damage up close, except in the case of the 6P41, which saw a fractional drop in power.

Outside of the sweeping changes to LMGs, six operators have had their abilities and loadouts adjusted. Lion's scanner has been hit especially hard, with him only able to see outlines while players are moving, his scan charges reduced from 3 to 2, and those charges coming back even slower now at 20 seconds a pop, instead of the previous 10. That's rough - my condolences to Lion mains.

A few bug fixes and map tweaks are included in this update too. In the bug-squashing category, some hip-fire accuracy exploit (which I'm sadly unfamiliar with) has been removed. Level-wise, it's mostly sealing up minor exploits and holes, such as players being able to plant the Defuser in weird places. One bug I wish I could have seen in action is on the map Kafe, where character models would become two-dimensional lying prone next to a certain set of stairs.

'Why? Why buff/nerf my favourite character, you monsters?' I hear you hypothetically ask. Well, the developers expected questions, and so were kind enough to provide their full reasoning for each tweak and change here. I'd love to see developers notes like this becoming an as-standard thing for competitive games, letting players understand the reasoning behind why their favourite gun might not be doing so much damage today. If nothing else, it saves on some hot-tempered Q&A sessions.