Did you know that in a lot of countries, it isn’t illegal to break out of prison? In Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Germany, and several others, it’s perfectly legal to escape from your cell and go out on the lam. They’ll still try to catch you and force you to serve out your sentence, of course, but as long as you don’t break any other laws in your attempt to get away, you wouldn’t be charged and no extra time would be added to your sentence. These countries recognize that trying to escape is just human nature. If a guard leaves a door open and escapes through it, that’s the guard’s fault, not the prisoner’s.
I don’t think Ubisoft would share that philosophy, were it to run its own country - which is a premise I don’t particularly want to entertain any further. Recently, Ubi took measures against The Division 2 players that were caught exploiting a bug in the Descent that allowed them to farm XP and resources much faster than intended. Instead of being understanding and recognizing that people are always going to want to take the path of least resistance, Ubisoft issued two-week bans to first-time offenders, and promised even worse consequences for any repeat offenders. Ubisoft may be a French company, but that sounds like some good old-fashioned American punitive justice to me.
I understand that Ubisoft needed to do something to deal with the exploit. Not only does something like this give players an advantage in the PvP, but the amount of resources that can be gathered while utilizing this exploit could upend the entire in-game economy. If there exists a loophole in the XP grind for players to exploit, it’s Ubisoft’s responsibility to fix the bug and stabilize the game. I think rolling back accounts to remove the extra earnings is reasonable too, and punishment enough, considering the time those players will have wasted doing the exploit. What I don’t agree with is treating these players like cheaters and punishing them with a two-week timeout for trying to do the thing that games have always conditioned us to do: grind efficiently.
Exploiting a bug is not cheating. If the game allows you to do something, then it’s part of the game and exists within the parameters created by the developers. Cheating is when you introduce outside software like aimbots and add-ons that give you an unfair advantage, and I have no problem with severe punishments and even legal action taken against cheaters. But a bug is something created by the developers. It shouldn’t be the player’s responsibility to determine which things in the game are meant to be there and which ones aren’t, and no one should ever lose the right to play the game they paid for just for playing the game in an unintended way.
Again, I recognize that the exploiters need to be stopped for the overall health of the game, but that doesn’t mean they were doing anything wrong. RPGs have always incentivized us to grind as efficiently as possible, and The Division 2 is no exception. Just Google ‘division farming guide’ and you’ll find countless videos and articles about the fastest ways to earn XP in The Division, and some of those methods probably wouldn’t qualify as Ubisoft’s intended way to play. If you expect your players to log on every day and grind XP, you can’t also expect them to ignore a truck that spawns enemies infinitely. Every live-service RPG deals with this, but only The Division punishes players for it.