Titanfall Developer Doesn't Think The Division's Hacks Can be Fixed

       

   

Glenn Fiedler, formerly the senior programmer at Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment and the senior network programmer at Sony, has written a blog post that's extremely critical of Ubisoft's network code, saying that "my opinion of can this be fixed is basically no".




The video appears to show hackers using software on their own computer to teleport their character around the map, to give themselves infinite health and ammo. That client-side cheat program shows that The Division is trusting information from our computers that Fiedler says other games wouldn't.

"This indicates that The Division is most likely using a trusted client network model.

"I sincerely hope this is not the case, because if it is true, my opinion of can this be fixed is basically no. Not on PC. Not without a complete rewrite. Possibly on consoles provided they fix all lag switch timing exploits and disable players moving and shooting while lag switch usage is detected (trusted client on console exclusive games is actually more common than you would think…), but not on PC unless they completely rewrite most of their netcode and game code around a server-authoritative network model."

Fiedler looks to competitive FPS games to show how other developer design networking to avoid hacks. Those games "don’t work by having clients send a bunch of actions to the server for validation such as: I moved over here <position>, I reloaded my weapon, I fired my gun, I hit this guy and did X damage. The server does not sit there and run checks over the stream of actions sent to them by each client, validating each action, checking to make sure each action is safe, magically detecting cheaters and banning them from the game." Instead the server is treated as the true game and based on inputs from the player their updated location is then fed back to the players computer and updated on their screen. This makes it much harder to both fool the game and hide that you're trying to cheat.

If this is the case, that The Division is using a trusted client model and that is what the players are exploiting, then Ubisoft is in a difficult spot to resolve this issue.