On Sunday afternoon, there was a severe shutdown at The Division 2. The servers went down almost without warning, and players were kicked from their activities. Massive wanted to fix an exploit that only a few people seemed to have found. It provided extra loot upon login.
That was the emergency brake: On Sunday afternoon, April 7th, at around 4 PM our time, the servers at The Division 2 suddenly went offline. There was a minimum warning of 3 minutes.
Then the servers were supposed to go down and come back online 15 minutes later. Massive wanted to deploy a fix. An emergency restart of the servers was necessary.
However, the fix did not work, and the servers were back online shortly after. Since a fix could not be deployed, the daily and weekly projects were disabled.
These include daily quests, completing two missions on “Challenging” and one on “Hard”.
What kind of exploit was that? It was alleged that the exploit allowed players to submit daily and weekly projects multiple times, thus securing additional rewards. This is what Massive stated.
On reddit players said: The exploit could be used by simply logging out and logging back in after completing the daily missions.
It was also possible to get additional rewards through matchmaking.
One player said: When the 3 daily missions were completed, each time one logged back in, one would receive about 3 high-end items and decent XP.
So, no malicious intent was necessary to exploit this – simple relogging was enough.
How known was the exploit? The surprising thing is that the exploit apparently had not spread widely when The Division 2 pulled the emergency brake.
The exploit is not explicitly discussed on reddit or YouTube, and there was no trace of it in the comments of MeinMMO.
The exploit seems to have flown under the radar for many.
How players are reacting: The first reaction to the emergency brake on Twitter was quite angry:
- Many complained about being ripped out of the middle of a mission: they were just in the midst of the boss … and oh
- Many evidently did not know about the exploit. Therefore, they did not see the urgency for the emergency brake
- Some complained: Massive is quick to “fix generous loot”, but does notaddress their personal issues
- Of course, there were also long wait times when everyone wanted to play again at the same time on Sunday afternoon
- But some also say: people, if this was a game-breaking bug, then it has to be fixed quickly
This is what’s behind it: If the exploit was as described on reddit, then it indeed had serious implications, and one can understand why The Division 2 pulled the emergency brake.
One must be curious when the projects will return.
In The Division 1 there were similar loot exploits after launch with the Bullet King.
