Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege is Ubisoft's competitive 5v5 tactical shooter. Like plenty of games that focus heavily on competitive multiplayer, it takes a ton of time and effort to get good at the game and climb up the ranks.
While the game does force you to rank up to level 30 before hopping into ranked matches, there are some easy things you could be doing to make the experience easier on yourself that you probably didn't even think about. Here are 10 ways you are probably making the game harder on yourself.
10 Having Only One Main
The game features a pretty higher quantity of operators for both attack and defense. While having a main for each role is fairly normal and not super frowned upon in similar character-based games, like League Of Legends and Overwatch, it can be far more problematic in Rainbow Six Siege. The maps and their objective locations can vary in ways that make certain operate skills more or less effective. Team compositions also should fluctuate based on these conditions, so unless you are already a Diamond level player with a single main on both sides, you should look into switching it up.
9 Solo Queueing
Most people will tell you that solo queueing in any team-based ranked game is a terrible idea and the same holds true for Rainbow Six Siege for ranked or any of the other mode in the game. It's a fairly tactical shooter and part of the community is pretty toxic at times. The game is at best when you are playing with friends or a set team instead of randoms who may decide to gun you down for any number of reasons. Seriously the team killing gets out of hand pretty regularly.
8 Not Using A Headset
It's understandable wanting to play an online game and not wanting to be bothered by wearing a headset and talking to strangers but it does help. Not only does it make it so you can communicate with your teams, allowing for better coordination, it also helps avoid the extreme members of the community that take playing without a headset as a personal offense.
Again, the game is easier and more fun if you can avoid getting team killed for all the silly reasons that people team kill. This one just has an upside too of being able to make callouts and coordinate attacks.
7 Not Setting Up Loadouts
While the game offers the ability to tinker with an operator's loadout during the load before each round, it only offers thirty seconds and that includes the time to pick spawns and your operator. The game now has every attachment unlocked and usable for any operator you have unlocked, which wasn't always the case. This lets you deck out all the weapons so you can pick whatever suits the situation. It's best to have any operators you intend on playing ready to go by setting the loadout up ahead of time that you can save the precious pre-round time for making last-minute swaps on sights and other things.
6 Not Knowing Bomb Locations In Ranked
Rainbow Six Siege has a couple of modes in it, but the ranked playlist is exclusively bomb, meaning that learning the locations for the maps in ranked is entirely doable. This is useful because on attack it makes it easier to find the objectives since you know the four places it could be and on defense knowing the locations can help determine what gadgets and operator skills would be useful for the different spots. Knowing is half the battle.
5 Not Using Impact Grenades
You should just have impact grenades equipped on defense if your operator has them available. The reason for this is that since the bomb game type features two bombs, they are separated by walls in some locations.
Having impact grenades allows for an easy way to put a hole in the wall between the two objectives, giving a tactical advantage. Not every operator has these and not every player equips them, so it's better to just be prepared and have them ready to go whenever possible.
4 Not Learning Camera Locations
Cameras are a big deal in Rainbow Six Siege because they allow the defending team to be able to anticipate where the attackers are going to come from. Knowing where the cameras are on attack lets you knock them out before the other team has a chance to spot you coming in. While they might still have an idea of where you are based on destroyed cameras, it will still keep them guessing. This way you don't get caught with your pants down trying to breach the objective.
3 Not Playing The Situations
The game features 11 situations that can be played to both learn the basics of the game and earn a bunch of Renown right out the gate. Learning the game mechanics, especially against the somewhat challenging AI, better prepares you for online battles. Earning a bunch of Renown lets you unlock characters that you haven't purchased, or by cosmetics if you buy all the operators with real money. Either way, getting some extra training in before getting stomped online is always a good idea.
2 Not Playing Unranked
The ranked playlist is locked until level 30 but the unranked playlist is only locked until level 10. The unranked playlist features the same setup for matches as the ranked playlist, minus the ranking.
While people don't take this playlist as seriously as the ranked playlist, learning how ranked matches go before playing ranked is extremely useful, since ranked functions fairly differently from casual. This way you can head into ranked mentally prepared.
1 Not Knowing The Meta Ban Picks
In ranked and unranked each team gets to ban one operator for both attack and defense. While unranked is less consistent, ranked pretty consistently sees the same sets of bans. While this changes with each new operation and new operators, knowing what operators typically get banned helps you not put tons of time into learning a character that you could seldom get to play and to know what bans to vote for. Currently, operators Blitz, Jackal, Clash, Echo and Caveira see a high frequency of bans but the upcoming new operation could see this change.