You might not know it from the current community surrounding the game, but Tom Clancy’s The Division was a very fun experience when it first launched. While many still appreciate everything that the game has to offer, cheaters have become a massive problem, and have led to many players abandoning the game entirely.
While Ubisoft did a massive round of cleanup, giving over 30,000 accounts different punishments, the cheating has not totally subsided. Today, Ubisoft takes the next big step is killing this problem once and for all, announcing that in the future, cheaters will be permanently banned on first offense.
“Following this campaign of suspensions and bans, it also became clear that while huge progress has been made in terms of cheat detection, our 14 days suspension on first offense policy has not been dissuasive enough. Judging from your feedback, and based on what we witnessed when cheaters came back to the game, we have now decided to push our policy one step further: we will now start applying permanent bans on first offense when players are caught using cheat engines and we will communicate clearly when new ban waves are taking place.”
This seems to be the new way for game developers to handle cheating, with Blizzard announcing something similar for Overwatch before that game hit. Cheaters are a major problem for a competitive online game like The Division, so it’s a great sign that Ubisoft is tackling the problem head on.
The real question now is, has too much damage been done already. With a lot of players, the grind to get better loot and gear is the major draw for The Division. Seeing high end weapons and gear in the hands of those who didn’t earn them might have turned them off the game entirely. Lots of updates and new content are coming though, so maybe this will offer a fresh start for a lot of players.
