Rainbow Six Siege reverses Ying Candela buff following backlash

What you need to know

• Ubisoft has rolled out an unscheduled patch for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege.
• The update reverses a controversial earlier change to Ying's Candela count, introduces a hard restriction on XP gains in Training Grounds, and fixes an MMR rollback bug.

Ubisoft has deployed an unexpected patch to Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, reversing changes made to Ying with last week's Y5S2.1 balancing patch. The controversial update brought major reforms to several Operators earlier this month, despite widespread community concerns over their impact on the tactical shooter. That included substantial changes to the Hong Kong attacker, quickly perceived as overpowered in the days that followed.

The midseason patch introduces three shakeups to Ying, increasing her Candela count to four, switching claymores for smoke grenades, and buffing her T-95 LSW light machinegun. While the latter adjustments remain present in the game, Ubisoft has now reversed the added Candela to improve balancing. That follows widespread backlash among the community, with a combination of four Candelas and two smoke grenades quickly clouding defender vision.

The update also introduces a daily level XP cap for the Training Grounds (formerly Terrorist Hunt) mode, where Ubisoft hopes to reduce the presence of bots and "smurfs" across the game's level-locked Ranked playlist. We see receive a fix for a former MMR bug, which incorrectly displayed the MMR rollback values in the presence of a cheater.

The hotfix is now live on PC, impacting players with copies purchased via Steam, Uplay, and the Epic Games Store. Ubisoft frames today's update as "PC Only," with Xbox One and PlayStation availability likely to follow over the days ahead.