I have played a couple of hours of the PTS. Here are my initial thoughts.

I am playing solo on challenging with 4 global directives providing +100% XP. I find this the most efficient way to farm XP and gear.

I crashed twice in the first half an hour; the same freezes that happen frequently on the current live version. I understand that it has been stated clearly that crashes are to be expected though.

Having done Lincoln Memorial a couple of times, about half a dozen elite resource convoys and the same number of control points, along with about 4 or five bounties, my proficiency rank on my Momento backpack is up from 0 to 1.25 out of a max of 10. I see a mountain to climb and the only way to do it is to play the same content thousands of times more.

Now, before I go any further, this is only my first initial reaction after a couple of hours. There may be a faster way to do this. But as I understand it at this moment in time, I feel that I will not be playing longer term simply to upgrade gear. It feels like a punishment rather than anything else. Those that have put in literally hundreds, maybe thousands of hours to max out their builds have essentially been told that their beloved builds are no longer not maxed out. That is not a bonus, that is a punishment.

Now, I understand there will be players who will react with scorn because of this opinion, and I understand there will players who are willing to grind for another thousand hours or more to upgrade hundreds of items, but I am not one of them. I have already put a couple of thousand hours into this franchise and simply raising the upgrade limit and making everyone grind to upgrade hundreds of gear items is simply not a fun prospect for me. I would have genuinely accepted the same game, without any new features but with the major bugs completely fixed and the disaster that is PVP secured to use hashed build specs and server side validation to prevent hacking. I do not understand how or why new features are being added to a fundamentally broken product.

That being said, I will give it another few hours to see if I am missing something but it all looks the same, except you now have a mountain of grind to upgrade previously maxed out gear, and as I said earlier, that is like a punishment not something to look forward to. In fact, it may have just forced me not to play any more.

In short:
1) I would rather the game technology was fixed before any new features were added.
2) The new upgrade features seem like a severe punishment rather than a gift, so much so that it is probably the end of the road for me in this game.

@robincitin23

"if this update comes out I will leave the game."

I believe that is what they want. It is the only rational explanation for pushing this utter cr*p on the players.
After all, too many people stuck on an old game is not good business; they must 'persuade' the players to move on to a new game and spend some $$$.
The publishers and the developers of the Division 2 on PC are an absolute disgrace.
The game is a mess and has been for years now.
So many bugs and exploits that it is not worth listing them again.
The technical ineptitude of the implementation.
The literally unplayable PVP, it is a vehicle to sell cheating software and nothing more. It is an abomination.
The same goes for providing loot to 'team players' only; solo players are second class citizens. Who thought it a good idea to give a player a gun that can kill a whole team of 4 without mitigation (unless everyone has an EB)?
It has to be said, it is just garbage, garbage that I have spent thousands of hours playing, but no longer.
I will never spend a single penny on any game from these people again.

@latenitedelight
Firstly, I was replying to someone else.
Second, who said I 'focus' on PVP? I did not say that.

The Division provides a set of missions that must be replayed in order to grind out gear that will complete or improve your build. So why do that?

Well in my opinion, and the opinion of many of the YouTubers that I have on my list, you grind to make a build and pit that build and skills against each other in PVP or make PVE easier. It is that simple.

You can attempt to trivialise PVP to back up your point of view if you want to, but to a great many players it is the whole point of grinding for better gear. Dark zone and conflict are PVP aspects of the game that are in both prominent Division 1 and 2. Trivialising them and attacking those that play PVP is not an argument or solution to the poor technical state of the game.

Putting aside your petty attitude and keeping to the facts, the Division 2, from a technical viewpoint, is very poor and has been for a very long time.
The cult like following that always leap to the defence of the game and developers are free to do as they want, but the facts remain, the game is technically full of bugs, exploits, very poor standards and unfinished sections like the numerous missing animations and scripts on bounties and gear apparel vanity item slots that do nothing. As I said in another post, the developers actually re-broke the game by pushing to the players an update that removed previous fixes, that is just pathetic and shows the low standards of the project. Do they even use source control? (something that as a developer myself is absolutely a requirement).

Now they look to push new content before fixing any of the glaring issues with the game, and more than that, they are nerfing gear and messing with the gameplay in a way that many people do not like at all (just look at the YouTube content creators loyal to the franchise).

In the end, it is just a game, but I will never trust Ubi or the devs again.

I have a simple question I have not been able to find a solid answer to:
Are the developers going to leave all of the existing bugs in the game AND add new content?

@robincitin23

"if this update comes out I will leave the game."

I believe that is what they want. It is the only rational explanation for pushing this utter cr*p on the players.
After all, too many people stuck on an old game is not good business; they must 'persuade' the players to move on to a new game and spend some $$$.
The publishers and the developers of the Division 2 on PC are an absolute disgrace.
The game is a mess and has been for years now.
So many bugs and exploits that it is not worth listing them again.
The technical ineptitude of the implementation.
The literally unplayable PVP, it is a vehicle to sell cheating software and nothing more. It is an abomination.
The same goes for providing loot to 'team players' only; solo players are second class citizens. Who thought it a good idea to give a player a gun that can kill a whole team of 4 without mitigation (unless everyone has an EB)?
It has to be said, it is just garbage, garbage that I have spent thousands of hours playing, but no longer.
I will never spend a single penny on any game from these people again.

I have played a couple of hours of the PTS. Here are my initial thoughts.

I am playing solo on challenging with 4 global directives providing +100% XP. I find this the most efficient way to farm XP and gear.

I crashed twice in the first half an hour; the same freezes that happen frequently on the current live version. I understand that it has been stated clearly that crashes are to be expected though.

Having done Lincoln Memorial a couple of times, about half a dozen elite resource convoys and the same number of control points, along with about 4 or five bounties, my proficiency rank on my Momento backpack is up from 0 to 1.25 out of a max of 10. I see a mountain to climb and the only way to do it is to play the same content thousands of times more.

Now, before I go any further, this is only my first initial reaction after a couple of hours. There may be a faster way to do this. But as I understand it at this moment in time, I feel that I will not be playing longer term simply to upgrade gear. It feels like a punishment rather than anything else. Those that have put in literally hundreds, maybe thousands of hours to max out their builds have essentially been told that their beloved builds are no longer not maxed out. That is not a bonus, that is a punishment.

Now, I understand there will be players who will react with scorn because of this opinion, and I understand there will players who are willing to grind for another thousand hours or more to upgrade hundreds of items, but I am not one of them. I have already put a couple of thousand hours into this franchise and simply raising the upgrade limit and making everyone grind to upgrade hundreds of gear items is simply not a fun prospect for me. I would have genuinely accepted the same game, without any new features but with the major bugs completely fixed and the disaster that is PVP secured to use hashed build specs and server side validation to prevent hacking. I do not understand how or why new features are being added to a fundamentally broken product.

That being said, I will give it another few hours to see if I am missing something but it all looks the same, except you now have a mountain of grind to upgrade previously maxed out gear, and as I said earlier, that is like a punishment not something to look forward to. In fact, it may have just forced me not to play any more.

In short:
1) I would rather the game technology was fixed before any new features were added.
2) The new upgrade features seem like a severe punishment rather than a gift, so much so that it is probably the end of the road for me in this game.

@honestlyok1986
Man it is hard to accept, but you are probably right.

Mainly that The Division, which was originally slated for console only, used what is know as a "trusted client" model rather than a server-authoritative model. This means that the information sent by the client is taken as true and passed on to other clients. No validation is performed to make sure the action is possible.

This is what I suspected, absolutely unbelievable. Even if the client is passing movement and damage data to the server, the server has the knowledge of all players and their builds, so it should understand immediately when anyone is attempting to do something outside of their build specification and performance envelope.

I will never invest time in another game of this type again. After Division 1 I said to myself that I would not buy Division 2, but I did, although on an offer. People said that cheating was not as bad in Division 2, this is absolutely untrue. The game is not playable. The game is fundamentally broken, that is a fact. Very sad, disappointing and depressing that it is deemed acceptable.

Genuinely, I would like them to actually fix the cheating problem and iron out the glaring bugs. I can do without the new content until the game is technically fit to play in PVP.

Literally every game of conflict I have played in the past couple of hours has had at least one cheater / hacker in it.
The effects I have encountered:

• Shooting through the walls across the map into spawn point
• Hugely overpowered AR's that kill a fully shielded and blue build in a fraction of a second.
• Players that can take almost a full clip of a Black Market AK-M, all red a 'focus' build (1.3 million body shots) and then pull out their AR and kill in 2 bullets
• Players that can moonwalk at crazy speed
• Players that jitter around making it impossible to hit them
• Players that can drop bombs, fire or hive on you when no one is around
• more...

I am not even expecting a reasonable response. The fact is that this is simply not a playable game in this state. As a developer myself (although not a professional game developer) I can not understand how this is allowed. How is this acceptable to the developers and other players?
Does the server not understand or validate the damage that an individual player can do? If a player has a specific build then the server should know the valid performance gamut and easily know when cheating is going on? In fact, the amount of damage should be determined by the server based on the build and chosen weapon of the player. Is the amount of damage a player inflicts determined on the client and then passed to the server? If so that is insanity. That is asking for hackers to take advantage. If not, how can a player with an AR essentially run around with a weapon of the power similar to a rapid fire sniper rifle?
There must be a reason why hackers are not being stopped. What is it?
All in all, this is very sad and quite shocking to me. This is no way what I would consider a polished professional product. It is beautiful, yes, it really is, and the concept of grinding to make a build that is then put to the test in PVP is awesome, but it is technically so bad it is untrue. The game is not playable and thousands of hours of grind are simply a waste of life.