There is finally some respite for players fed up of hackers in Tom Clancy’s The Division as Ubisoft is finally doing something to fix their game, but will it be enough to get anyone back into the game? Ever since the launch, players have been exploiting bugs to get ahead in The Division as they scramble for the best loot in the aftermath of a deadly virus attack in New York City.
At first it started out with something as harmless as farming better gear by finding loopholes in respawn mechanics that led to named bosses continuously spawning every 15 seconds to drop exceeding rare loot and the ever so precious phoenix credits. As soon as that patch was fixed, ubisoft enabled a ‘balance’ that allowed all high end bosses to drop better gear which ended up bugging out into all of them dropping end game gear, something that was soon rectified.
However, in the middle of all of this players figured out bugs in the games PvP with unlimited health regens, unlimited critical hits maxing out cooldowns and increasing damage. While these were all bugs within the game, there was nothing inherently “illegal” about players using them, just like how players “exploiting” a bug in the game’s code to bypass the new “raid” like final mission to farm it more easily is not illegal per say, but just not in the spirit of what the developers intended.
So it’s a little harsh for Ubisoft to be bringing down the hammer on players taking advantage where a big time developer like Ubisoft messed up by leaving loopholes in the game. But then there’s always the hackers and aimbotters who inevitably found their way into The Division and all but ruined PvP with instant one hit kill headshots. This is where I feel players cross the line After rumours that fixing PvP would be too extensive, Ubisoft has finally rolled out a new cheat engine to help detect these hackers.
The method is proving quite successful as they have already found and banned more players in the last few days. Ubisoft highlighted the new changes in an extensive blog post where first time offenders would be receiving a 14-day ban and second offences would invite a permanent ban from The Division’s online world.
Unfortunately Ubisoft will also be clamping down on players exploiting the many bugs in the game to spam farming missions, higher regen and damage to name a few with punishments depending on the severity of the abuse and the players history. Hopefully they can manage to stabilise their games PvP soon, otherwise I feel Tom Clancy’s The Division might just end up as one of the biggest What ifs as it fades to obscurity.
