A new Rainbow Six Siege exploit is turning Blitz into a monster (update: fixed)

Update: The bug has been fixed on PC—unclear whether it's been addressed on other platforms at this time. About 24 hours after we published this story, Ubisoft took servers down today for emergency maintenance in order to address the issue. That was quick!

Original story:

If you've been playing Rainbow Six Siege this week, you might've found yourself dying to German shieldbearer Blitz a little more often than usual. A recently discovered exploit makes Blitz aim like John Wick without having to leave the safety of his shield.

In an email response to PC Gamer, Ubisoft had no timeframe to share for a fix, but said it has become a priority for the developers.

The exploit allows any attacking operator with a breaching charge to execute a simple series of commands, boosting their hipfire accuracy significantly for that round. For ordinary attackers like Twitch, Finka, or Jackal, this isn’t a big advantage—you’re still better off aiming down your sights to fire accurately. But apply this exploit to a shield operator like Blitz and suddenly you've got a character who can reliably tag you with their pistol without exposing themselves from the front.

Aided by this bug, some Blitz players are scoring consistent kills from the hip at 15 meters without having to to expose their body or head. As you may guess, these fights feel one-sided.

The exploit was reported by one player on the game’s subreddit in late March, but gained steam this past week as videos showing how to execute it have begun to spread.

The Blitz bug echoes another devastating exploit that permeated Siege following the launch of Operation White Noise last December. The infamous “Jäger shield exploit” allowed the defender to affix a deployable shield to his waist and protect his entire body in a few easy steps. He could still shoot through the shield, but from the attacker’s perspective, he was a simply a bulletproof shield with legs sprouting out the bottom. Good times.

There's a strong parallel between these bugs in that they both favor a particular character, yet counter-intuitively, they can't be solved with a fast fix. Last year at the height of Jäger shield mania, community developer Craig Robinson took to the subreddit to explain why patching in a solution for issues like this is harder than it seems. “There is quite a bit that goes into the game beyond just an on/off switch for an Operator or a gadget . . . Disabling or removing a launch Operator (Jäger, Castle, Doc, etc), would lead to a cascade of other issues, and these would significantly sacrifice the stability of the game. This is why we do not remove Operators or gadgets when a glitch is discovered, and instead focus on fixing it,” he said. 

A fix did eventually come during the mid-season reinforcements in January, almost a month after the bug was initially discovered.