Every Rainbow Six: Siege player knows that feeling: you were absolutely sure you landed the headshot. But you stare at your own killcam. What went wrong? The servers are to blame, for sure! The game’s hit detection is bad!

In a video, ex-R6 developer Dominic Clement now shows very impressively how much one can be deceived with such a hasty judgment and takes apart the most common myths around hitreg, ping abuse and tick rate.

Myth No. 1: Hitboxes are cheese

Clement explains how Rainbow Six Siege’s hitboxes changed with Operation Health in 2017. While the entire player model used to count as a hit zone, since then only actual human body parts are affected.

So if your bullet hits things like bags, backpacks, helmets, weapons, and other equipment, no damage is done. A prominent example of this is Blitz’s protruding hearing protector, which was used before Operation Health for a large headshot hitbox and a lot of frustration.

Myth – No. 2: Ping abusers have an advantage

It is often claimed that players with a high ping would gain an unfair advantage in the game, e.g. by landing hits before the hit person even sees them. In the video Clement explains why this assumption is wrong. Lastly, the backrest animation was reworked with a new camera perspective to avoid lean-spam.

Simply put, ping is nothing more than the latency of a player/client, the time it takes to send information to the server and receive a response.

The higher the ping, the longer the delay in communication between the player and the server. One player with a lower ping always has the advantageas Clement proves with his example of a race.

Myth – No. 3 : The tick rate is too low

You often hear that Rainbow Six Siege’s server tick rate is too low to allow smooth gameplay. However, the game runs at a tick rate of 60 Hz, comparable to other big multiplayer shooters like Overwatch, CSGO or PUBG.

At 60 Hz, simply put, the server can send data packets to the player/client 60 times per second, or roughly every 16.6 milliseconds. Conversely, this means: Only players with a Ping of 16.6 or lower exhaust the server capacity at all. For all players above 16.6 milliseconds, the server waits for a response from the client – and not vice versa!

Conclusion: You just didn’t hit it!

Dominic Clement’s conclusion is quite clear: In most cases, the player either simply did not hit or a bad connection. Loss of data packets due to Internet problems (and thus high bad ping), is one of the main causes of unranked hits.

In the video, Clement shows some examples of players who were upset about supposedly not scoring hits, but in the detailed analysis either missed very narrowly or had short-lived data losses due to ping spikes. But also the downright brutally precise hitboxes can ensure that a shot is perceived as a hit even though it just missed its target.