It didn’t take long after this week’s State of the Game stream on Twitch that the developers of Tom Clancy’s The Division have responded with a deeper and clearer insight of how new exploits and cheaters will be handled in the future. The new article on the official website reveals the steps and measures of how they want/will improve the overall player experience. A short summary of it can be found below.
Cheat Engines
New cheat detection methods are already in place and allowed them in the last couple of days to identify more cheaters than with the originally implemented methods. Yesterday, Community Developer Hamish Bode was even banning cheaters live on Twitch, with the comment that “a big [ban-]wave of that is incoming”.
We have already caught more cheaters in the last few days than we had in total during the previous weeks. As a result, we will be handing out the biggest wave of suspensions and bans to date over the course of the next few days.
Punishments
Cheaters will no longer be banned for only 3 days at the beginning. This amount has been increased to a 14 days ban on first offense, while further reports of the same player will result in a permanent ban. Meanwhile they keep improving their anti-cheat systems.
First Ban Wave Just Hit
Besides the short server downtime today that fixed the “The Ladder of Death”, Hamish Bode has announced an hour ago that the first ban wave just hit and “it’s not over”. Source.
Bug Exploits
What is a bug exploit?
An exploit is the active triggering and use of a bug or glitch to bypass established game rules in order to gain a significant advantage or skip progression steps otherwise necessary.
Everyone of us should be aware of the fact that millions of players are playing the game for hours every day and that, although the game is tested by professionals, they cannot find every single bug or glitch during their test sessions. It’s simply impossible. However we don’t want to whitewash the current state of the game, as we are also just gamers like you out there!
Anyway, the development team is currently reviewing their dev- and testing processes so that things like “The Ladder of Death” can be prevented in the feature. Furthermore they want to be clearer and more concrete about how bugs are classified or considered as being an exploit or not. A public list of those will be clearly listed in a public forum thread and across their communication platforms.
We want all players to be informed. This will ensure that those caught after an exploit was confirmed are aware of the consequences and actions that can be taken against them.
Sanctions
Not only cheaters will be punished for their actions, but also players who are specifically looking into ways to exploit the game. Taking their gaming profiles and interactions into account, possible sanctions include
- character rollbacks,
- account suspensions
- and permanent bans.
It’s not over yet, so please keep those things in mind, be a bit more patient (if possible) and be prepared for the next content update coming in May.
We are fully committed to providing an enjoyable and fair environment for all our players, and will take all steps necessary to achieve this goal.
