Because here we have a client-side cheat program that is poking memory locations and giving players infinite health, infinite ammo, and teleporting players around the level.

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.

When I present such a bleak outlook people often people ask: why can’t they just implement more server-side checks? In fact the developers prior to release seemed to say something along the lines of: Oh, don’t worry. We haven’t implemented server side checks yet. Everything will be fine. Don’t worry. We’ve got this! Hmm.

To me this displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how FPS games are networked. It’s actually a fairly common misunderstanding so I’m going to spend some time in this post debunking this myth.