Love it or hate it, The Division has done wonders for Ubisoft, breaking sales records for the company and becoming the highest-selling game (for physical copies) among titles released in the first quarter of any year during its release week.
For the most part, the player base is indicative of that success, with many still playing the game even with the constant stream of bugs, glitches and exploits threatening an otherwise solid release.
However, if one were to take a look at the PC version in recent weeks, they would never know that. In fact, they would likely conclude that the game might be one of the worst games Steam has to offer in its entire library.
Over the past 30 days, The Division's rating on Steam has taken an epic beating, and as of writing, only 16 percent of 1,573 user reviews within that period view the game favorably. In other words, 84 percent of them gave the game a poor review, resulting in the reviews being ranked as "Overwhelmingly Negative" overall.
Interestingly enough, the reviews outside of that 30-day period are better, though the numbers still wouldn't be anything about which to brag. Overall, the game has received mixed reviews, with 54 percent of the 27,400 members of the player base viewing it positively.
It's not necessarily uncommon for a game to get negative reviews, but the problem in this instance is that The Division has been getting better with time, and even has added content to show for it. As opposed to the earlier versions that only really had the Dark Zone when it came to the post-game, Ubisoft has been steadily pumping out raids and daily/weekly missions, with more content to come in later months.
So, if that's the case, then how is a game that has been getting better content-wise been doing worse in user reviews? As it turns out, it's one problem that has been around since day one: cheating.
Yes, Ubisoft has vowed to take the fight to cheaters and promised to ban them whenever and wherever they're found. However, Ubisoft has been losing this fight, and evidence of that can be seen in a sub-reddit for The Division from about a month ago, where someone detailed the various flaws of which hackers could take advantage.
"I used a package which included a Silent Aim," the post read. "You could configure it to shoot players, or just AI. You could configure the [percentage] of Headshots to bodyshots to look legit and you could set the angle of activation, from straight up 180 field of fire to having to aim at them to activate.
"This was coupled with a cheat that, rather than change RPM, edited the [damage] value, from 2x up to 25x. With varying effects on game stability. As you can imagine, this would be very hard to detect and is easily mistaken for Sentry/overgeared players."
Now, with Ubisoft failing them, players are letting their frustrations out by giving the game horrid reviews. Many fans on the PC are not happy, and it doesn't look like Ubisoft has anything in store to fix that anytime soon.
