What's the Highest Rank and MMR in Rainbow Six: Siege and how to get to it

The fact that you’re reading this probably means you’ve been trying to find the secret sauce to getting that elusive rank-up. You’ve likely heard countless sources tell you to perform well in your placement matches at the start of the season to boost your MMR, but how important, and just how credible is that statement? Well, we’re going to dive into just that.

We’ll start by describing the overarching aspects of the ranked system’s MMR algorithm. While we won’t get into the complicated mathematics of it, you should be able to get a basic idea of how the MMR system places players into the seven ranking tiers. This is useful to know regardless of whether you’re a hard-stuck Silver or trying to push towards that coveted yet mysterious Champion rank.

What is the Highest MMR in Rainbow Six: Siege?

The highest MMR reached in R6 so far is around 31,000. Unsurprisingly, we didn't have to go too far to find this out since the highest MMR ever reached was during Operation Brutal Swarm. It makes sense since as more players join the game, there's more MMR to go around, hence higher peaks every season.

But you know what was surprising?

This.

One player, "Debiting," probably possessed by a demon (Pretty sure that's against the Ubisoft code of conduct), managed to peak at 30,000+ MMR. If you haven't grasped how insane that is, just look at the person after them. "TheOnePistolGuy-" couldn't even manage a third of what this Ranked fiend had achieved. Well, to be fair, TheOnePistolGuy would probably have fared better if he hadn't handicapped himself to one pistol, but still! 31,740 MMR in 1263 Games played! The dedication this player had to have is astounding.

It's also important to clarify that there is a possibility of this being a case of MMR manipulation, something that has been in the talks all over the Siege community. However, the developers have taken note of such instances and are committed to counteracting them, to the point that hopefully, we'll look at these statistics one day and not doubt any player's dedication.

How Much MMR does Champion Require?

To put Debitings feat into perspective, let me remind you what MMR you need to reach to get the Champion rank. You're only eligible for the Champion Rank once you achieve an MMR of 5000.

While Debiting makes it look like a stroll in the park, it's not. The Champion rank is the most decorated in all of Siege, and players spend months polishing their skills to reach the game's highest echelons.

Where Does Champion Fit in the Distribution?

If you’re still not convinced over how astronomical of an achievement getting to 30,000 MMR is, just take a look at the most recent ranking distribution.

Only 0.2% of the entire player base manages to get to Champion. To gain 25,000 MMR on top of that, whilst playing in the top 0.2% of players, is something completely unheard of.

How to Get the Highest MMR in R6?

Now you're probably wondering how you can replicate these results. We all know the basic answer to climbing the ladder; just win all your games. Alas, if only it were that simple. Considering you get around 20-30 Ranked ratings on average per game, even a 1000 MMR gain would mean you need a 40-game win streak (That's around 15 hours of continuous playtime!). It's just not realistic to rely on traditional methods if you want to make your MMR skyrocket.

So we've looked up the best ways to climb to the top as quickly as possible. Siege has certain elements that govern your MMR, and all we've done is dug up the methods with which you can abuse them. Here's what you want to do:

1. Play extra-sweaty in your placement games. As we mentioned, your matches at the start of the new season hold more weightage compared to regular games. If you can win the bulk of your placement games after the seasonal Ranked reset, you've guaranteed a headstart in the race to the top.

2. Play out of your league. Another way to accelerate your MMR gain is to queue into lobbies much higher than your current skill. The only reliable way to do this is to find people just under 1000 MMR above you and 5-stack with them. If you're capable of winning games while punching above your weight, you're awarded more MMR

3. High Skill Uncertainty. A factor that's mostly overlooked by most Siege players, skill uncertainty is the amount of data the game has on you. Think of it as the MMR algorithm assessing how much weight you can lift. When you start as a newcomer, the game has zero information on which rank you deserve to be in. For this reason, each successive win awards you more MMR since the algorithm wants a good idea of your skill ceiling. Once you finally lose a game, the game will have a rough idea of your skill ceiling, so the MMR you gain will be lowered. The key takeaway here is that it's a lot easier to climb (and drop) when you come back after a long break or start a new account.

Putting It All Together

The best way to figure out how to skew all the aforementioned factors in your favor is to look at someone whose already done it before, and for that, we’ll have to take a quick look at the leaderboard from Year 5 Season 1: Voids edge.

If it’s taking you a while to digest the image above, don’t worry, we’ll dissect it for you. Yes, people achieved the highest MMR in Rainbow Six Siege’s ranked system while only having completed ten games in a single season. How did they do it? We didn’t have to probe too far into the players' profiles to find out.

These are the players' statistics from the season they topped the leaderboard - ten games were played, and ten games were won. What about their individual performance in these games? Well, a 7.31 KD is absolutely unheard of, so they certainly checked the part where they had to convince the algorithm their individual skill was of a far greater rank. And finally, we’ll look at their performance in the season exactly prior to the one we’ve studied.

Four games played, four games lost, and way too little data for the games ranked system to figure out whether this was the result of a bad day or a genuine display of their actual skill. Considering a season lasts three months before the advent of a new season, these four games were spread out across too significant a time span to be seriously considered.

This wasn’t a one-off incident, either. The top three players (two of them were just alternate IDs of the same person exploiting the MMR algorithm) for that season followed the exact same trend. Ten games played, insane stats, and enough uncertainty in their match history for the ranked system to only consider their season placement matches.

Incidents like this did cause the developers to tune their matchmaking system, but the underlying aspects of the ranked rating system remain more or less the same. Several players have reported that they’ve managed to achieve ranks as high as Platinum III by winning all 10 of their placement games, despite being placed in far lower ranks in previous seasons.

So, even after diluting the effect of these ten placement games, you can still employ the strategies mentioned above to great effect. All you need is some skill, good teammates in your games, and probably a decent bit of luck.