Community managers Hamish Bode and Yannick Banchereau talk cheaters and exploits in The Division in the troubled shooter’s weekly State of the Game stream.
This morning, community developers Hamish Bode and Yannick Banchereau discussed cheating and exploits in The Division as part of a State of the Game stream on Twitch. While players will no doubt be pleased to see Ubisoft Massive respond to the recent wave of criticism, the studio’s reply fell short of subduing concerns.
The two hosts left the topic of hacking and cheating in The Division until late in the broadcast — which brought users discussing the stream in chat to boiling point. Unfortunately, there wasn’t too much detail on offer when Bode and Banchereau finally got around the elephant in the room.
“It’s not something we’re trying to deny, or hide from,” said Bode. “We know it’s happening. We want to fix it just as much as anyone else, probably more.” However, he would go on to say that the studio doesn’t want to risk false positives that lead to non-cheaters being incorrectly incriminated.
It was made quite clear that the team at Massive is treating exploits and cheating separately. To cut down on the latter activity, more anti-cheat measures are going to be implemented by the studio, although little detail was given as to what this will actually consist of.
Exploits are something of a different case, as they only spring up when there’s a deficiency in the game’s code, like the method of racking up cash found last week. The only way to remedy this kind of issue is to go back and fix whatever is causing the problem — which takes time.
On the other hand, it seems that cheaters are going to be under much more scrutiny than they have been up until this point. “We’ve not been clear enough on our stance in the past — we will have a stronger stance in the future,” said Banchereau. “We’re going to be harsher,” added Bode.
Bode wrapped up the statement on these issues by offering up a summary; “TL;DR good changes on the cheating front.” The lack of detail as to what exactly these changes will consist of, and the timescale players can expect to see them implemented on, will no doubt cause more frustration among its audience.
Just this week, an expert on networking in online multiplayer games suggested that fixing The Division at this point would require a “complete rewrite”. However, if that’s the only way to level the playing field once again, it might be worth doing — the game’s player count will surely drop quickly if cheaters are allowed to run rampant.
The Division is available now for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
Source: Twitch
