Tom Clancy's The Divison by Ubisucks Massive

I love gaming.  Uncharted and Assassin's Creed are my two favorite game series.  I like 3rd person shooters.  1st person shooters tend to give me PTSD nightmares, but, I like Battlefield Bad Company 1 and 2.

Lately I've been playing Tom Clancy's The Division by Ubisoft, the publishers of Assassin's Creed.  Awesome potential and incredibly bad implementation.

The game is a semi-massive multi-player.  Players start out playing a campaign game while interacting with other players at various social sites called "safe areas".  There is no pause because various missions can be played by teams.  Playing campaign solo there is no reason for the game to stay connected to the Ubisucks servers, but, the game can't be played solo campaign unless it is connected to the Internet.

The first thing that is most obvious to me is a lack of overall management direction.  Every game is going to have multiple development teams working in different areas.  Division is so complex there are a crap load of different development areas with inconsistent goals.

The biggest problem is the elitist, "survival of the fittest", concept which is designed to eliminate less "fit" players from the game.

As expected, this works and reduces the number of people playing the "massive multi-layer".  We could call this a "minuscule multi-player" instead.

Of course, since their "survival of the fittest" concept worked players have been leaving the game in droves.  The other early morning I was running around the dark zone and didn't see any other players for about a half hour.  Of course, the first time I did it was a higher level rogue and it killed me.

The game actually rewards players who kill lower level players in the Dark Zone, which is all multi-player.  In the campaign game Non Player Characters, NPC, are generally the same level as the player.

If the game wanted to encourage player to player competition, players would be penalized for attacking lower level players and rewarded for attacking players of the same level or higher.  Instead, consistent with the "survival of the fittest" ideology killing off "weaker" players is encouraged.  How dumb is that?

There are tons of really bad and very inconsistent development ideology decisions being made are driving players away in droves.

Naturally, some of the players are really angry because they have essentially wasted money on a game that is self destructive.  Someone gave me the game so, I'm not out any cash money.  Think about that, trying to have a game that depends on lots of players where players are deliberately eliminated because they aren't as "strong" as other players.

Anyone interested has read about all the player complaints surrounding Division so I won't beat that horse.

Today, I'm just pointing out the stupidity of developing a "survival of the fittest" game" and expecting to attract and keep players.  The entire concept of "survival of the fittest" is to eliminate players until the last player, or few players, are left.  Everyone else "dies".  The game becomes a minuscule multi-player and Ubisucks loses their investment.

Anyone who invested in a game designed to eliminate the majority of players from playing is an idiot. 

Of course, I doubt if even Ubisoft actually realized what "survival of the fittest" really meant.  Ubisoft management probably threw the term around like a football never even thinking that eliminating players meant eliminating profits.

That is the kind of ignorance that really amazes me.