Ubisoft has been innovating recently in its anti-cheat efforts. In a community update for Rainbow Six Siege released today, the studio detailed two of its latest anti-cheat measures. MouseTrap, a widely known technology to combat devices that disguise the mouse and keyboard on consoles, and a mysterious feature known only as "QB," which apparently makes cheat development so difficult that some cheat developers have given up.

This first-of-its-kind MouseTrap has been a success, with a reported 78% reduction in daily abuse of the mouse and keyboard on consoles. We don't know exactly how many console players have used this technique, but the problem has been widely reported and complained about for years; Call of Duty has also cracked down on XIM cheaters.

But I'm much more interested in Ubi's secretive QB feature; all we know for sure about QB is the few details Ubi has shared since it went online in November 2022. It is a PC-only feature "aimed at making cheat development less cumbersome."

Ubi seems to want to keep that under wraps to "protect its integrity," but we have a pretty good idea what's going on. When QB went online last year, sharp-eyed fans noticed that the Steam version of Rainbow Six Siege was getting small updates every few hours with no apparent changes on the player side. At the time, the prevailing theory was that Ubi changed the Siege executable several times a day, making the current cheats incompatible and forcing cheat makers to keep pace by constantly updating the wrong tools.

Ubi has not confirmed whether QB is in fact this elaborate compatibility hopscotch game (or simply a part of QB), but neither denied it nor offered another explanation for the client updates that are still being pushed daily nine months later Nor has it done so. Ubisoft's status update today is consistent with that theory.

"This system [QB] has already helped ban over 10,000 cheaters with great results. (And we're just getting started!" )," he declared on his blog (if I had publicly executed 10,000 cheaters, I would use an exclamation point too)." We are also aware that several cheat vendors have stopped creating cheats for Siege after this update, and we have received a lot of positive feedback from the community regarding their in-game experience since the rollout of this feature."

Now, this is an impressive claim. We have seen developers attempt to discourage cheaters in all sorts of creative ways, from tormenting them with invisible enemies, to creating their own cheat detectors that run constantly in the background, to aggressively suing the individual who created the cheat as a message to those who would follow suit. We've seen this, but QB seems to cut even deeper; QB attacks cheat development on a fundamental level, theoretically making things tougher for all cheat makers at once.

Then one wonders what's up with all this secrecy; QB is an effective and secure anti-cheat method, enough for Ubi to credit its success, but apparently vulnerable enough to not tell us how it actually works. Perhaps Ubi is not confident that QB will still be effective even if hackers have more time to counter QB.

Whatever its strengths, QB is certainly not a silver bullet at this point. A quick Google search shows that several sites sell Siege cheats and claim they work, but every site I checked had at least one Siege cheat marked as "not working" or under maintenance.

I'm cool with Ubi keeping QB an open secret, but at least come up with a better name. Next to MouseTrap, which is objectively cool as an anti-mouse technology, "QB" is weak, unless it stands for Quantum Bayonet or something.