In The Division, a “game networking” expert discusses the servers of Massive’s MMO shooter and answers the question of whether cheats and hacks can ever be avoided.
Many agents have been complaining about glitches, exploits, and cheats in The Division since its launch. This is especially true for the PC version.
This raises the question: Will Massive ever be able to eliminate all the exploits and cheats?
Networking expert looks skeptically at the cheat issues of The Division
This question has been addressed by Glenn Fiedler, a former lead network programmer at Sony Computer Entertainment. As he himself states, he can view exploit videos from games as a networking expert and relatively quickly determine what they are about.
He has seen numerous exploit and cheat videos from The Division on YouTube and can reassure agents that most can be fixed relatively easily; it’s “not the end of the world”.
However, he has also found videos that would mean “super bad news“, such as the following:
This concerns a client-side cheat program that can give users infinite health and ammunition and teleport them across the game world.
This would suggest that The Division is most likely using a “Trusted Client Network Model”. And if that is the case, Glenn Fiedler’s answer to the question of whether cheats can ever be completely fixed is: “No!” At least not on PC. Unless the developers rewrite most of the net and game code completely.
Afterward, Fiedler becomes very technical and speaks about FPS networking and the importance of server-side checks. You can see Fiedler’s full statement here.
At the end of his remarks, he states that he hopes the developers of The Division do not use a “Trusted Client Network Model” and still have an ace up their sleeve. He hopes they have an adequate networking solution based on server-side checks that can somehow address the issues. However, he concludes:
But unfortunately, all signs point to No.
Fiedler predicts a bleak future for the PC version of The Division regarding cheats and hacks. At least not unless Massive makes major changes. But who knows, perhaps the networking expert is wrong with his analysis.
Here we deal with the question of which assault rifle is the best in The Division.
