HiGame

Cheating in multiplayer games is nothing new and every launch title suffers its share of problems, but Ubisoft’s The Division has had more than most. While the game launched to positive reviews and high initial sales, it’s had serious technical and cheating issues since. A significant number of glitches have allowed players to quickly gain access to endgame gear that was supposed to take months to achieve, and Ubisoft has been perceived as chasing problems rather than getting in front of them.

Now, new analysis from game network consultant Glenn Fiedler suggests that Ubisoft’s latest title isn’t just buggy — it’s written in a way that’s going to permanently prevent the company from fixing its own problems unless they commit to a total network code overhaul. The problem, according to Fiedler, is that Ubisoft’s game appears to be based on a trusted-client model.

A broken paradigm

As the name implies, a trusted-client model means that information relayed from the client is assumed to be accurate and is implemented as such in the game world. In its simplest form, this allows for hacks that would fire ludicrous numbers of bullets per second or assign billions or trillions of health to a character that might ordinarily have a few hundred hit points.



But hey — at least the art is really pretty.

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