The Division Now Bans Cheaters Permanently on the First Offense

Ubisoft has taken steps to deal with cheaters in The Division since its launch in March. Today, it announced the strongest measure being taken to date: permanent bans on the first offense.

Cheating is especially problematic in The Division. Its Dark Zone area allows players to kill each other and loot any gear they've recently collected, making the idea that someone has an unfair advantage even more frustrating than it already would be.

In a blog post today, Ubisoft talks about how it took action last month against more than 30,000 accounts for cheating, banning 3,800 accounts permanently in the process. "This led to a significantly improved experience, particularly in the Dark Zone," it says. But it hasn't been enough.

"Following this campaign of suspensions and bans, it also became clear that while huge progress has been made in terms of cheat detection, our 14 day suspension on first offense policy has not been dissuasive enough," its post continues. "Judging from your feedback, and based on what we witnessed when cheaters came back to the game, we have now decided to push our policy one step further: we will now start applying permanent bans on first offense when players are caught using cheat engines and we will communicate clearly when new ban waves are taking place."

Another Ubisoft game, Rainbow Six Siege, also recently made this change.

It also vows to "take all steps necessary to track down cheaters and make sure they cannot spoil your enjoyment of the game."

The PC version of The Division had serious issues with cheating during the closed beta that Ubisoft said it would address. Among other changes, it added a player-reporting feature and warned of permanent bans, though the initial ban would last only three days. This was later bumped up two weeks alongside the introduction of new anti-cheating measures.

Whether this latest change will be enough remains to be seen, but the threat of a complete ban will hopefully be enough to dissuade at least some potential cheaters from ruining the game for other players.