How do Rainbow Six’s Alpha Packs work? We open 100 to see what you might get

Loot boxes dubbed Alpha Packs have breached Rainbow Six Siege in the latest update, giving players the opportunity to earn a variety of cosmetic items.

But don’t turn your nose up just yet. Every player gets an Alpha Pack for free, and you can buy them for 5,000 renown, the currency earned in-game for playing matches and completing challenges. Previously, this renown has been used only for buying operators and fancy skins from the shop, so this is a new way to burn your cash. Season Pass owners get their 10% discount here too, so a 5,000 renown pack will cost just 4,500.

You can also win a pack. When you complete any match, victory or defeat, your percentage chance of getting an alpha pack in a drop increases, and can be seen on the main homepage (with a tiny bump in chance, 0.30% for Season Pass owners). When you win a match however, the dice are rolled for a drop, if you don’t roll successfully for the drop your chances carry over until your next win.

In short, the system is supposed to be a reward for playing more often, as the more you play the more renown you get and the higher chance of winning Alpha Packs you’ll get. You can’t buy Alpha Packs with cash, either.

Anyway, we opened a whole bunch of them to see what’s inside. We opened 100 packs from a few different sources (because you can’t buy them with cash.)

• 42 common
• 20 uncommon
• 16 rare
• 18 epic
• 4 legendary

It’s key to bear in mind here that we can only make rough generalisations, because while it sounds about right for 42% of all Alpha Packs to reveal a common tier item, it’s way less likely that you have a better chance of getting an epic tier item than a rare. This is probably anomalous however, and of the first 5 packs that I opened, three were epic tier items. However, in a general sense this should give you an idea of what you might expect to get.

A single item was a duplicate, however as this information was taken from 4 different sources it’s hard to tell whether or not duplicate items are deprioritised as loot from the Alpha Packs if you already have the item.