Ubisoft Threatens Cheaters with Perma-Bans

It seems like Blizzard ain't the only one playing hardball with cheaters: Ubisoft, too, is stepping up to the plate, and has recently announced that any person using third-party modifications to get an 'unfair advantage' in their MMOFPS will be given exactly one strike before receiving a lifetime ban from The Division. This new boost in confidence largely comes from a new cheat detection software they introduced into the game in April, which apparently has been doing a bang-up job catching cheaters in the act - catching 30,000 cheaters over the past few months, leading to 3,800 permanent bans.

And now that they have the technology to catch cheaters consistently, they plan to use it to its full effect:

"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 days suspension on first offense policy has not been dissuasive enough. 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."

Now, here's something very important to take note of: the blog post specifically says that cheating with "engines" and "third party software" is what will lead to bans. Exploiting the games many bugs, while it still may lead to punishment, probably won't result in a permaban. So, that's nice, I guess.

Still. Between Blizzard and Ubisoft, it's a bad time to be a hacker or cheater. Arguably, between the two, Blizzard's threat is more severe, as they can also ban you from their other popular online titles like World of Warcraft or Starcraft 2, but if you're a dedicated Division fan, this could be bad--imagine losing all the hours of your life spent in the game in one instant?

I mean, maybe you don't have to imagine it, but still.