The Division’s big, first player-tested patch is now live

Tom Clancy’s The Division has had a rough couple of months, but its latest patch comes with several changes that already seem to be beckoning back the players who have long abandoned it. Update version 1.4 is available on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One today, and Massive Entertainment promises that “nearly every facet of the core Division experience” has been addressed, based on feedback from the public test server.

There’s a long list of changes detailed on the game’s blog. Here are a few of the highlights:

Removed scavenging from the game. Scavenging is removed as a secondary stat on all gear pieces. New gear pieces can no longer roll scavenging.

Added a delay between leaving a group and signing up for matchmaking.

All NPCs will now have chances to drop High-End and Gear Set items, [and] tougher enemies (veteran, elites) have higher chances to drop.

Player grenade damage now scales with the current World Tier to ensure consistent efficiency against NPCs across World Tiers.

Upon reaching level 30, players are now able to select a World Level Tier that controls the level of enemy NPCs encountered and the quality of the loot they drop.

The last feature, World Tiers, is new to the game as of the latest update. Both World Tiers and several of the balancing-based updates are meant to make The Division a more accessible game, as the developer has explained in previous posts.

Whether the update will actually make The Division easier to jump into — or back into — remains to be seen. Members of the game’s subreddit sound positive about the changes thus far, a change from the community’s typically negative tenor.

In response to an abbreviated version of the patch notes, one longtime user wrote that the update “could be the tipping point for a player that has long since hung up their Reckless chest piece and moved on.”

There are several reasons that many have abandoned The Division since its gigantic launch back in March. A big one are the severe glitches and major cheating problem that plagued the game. Players criticized Massive Entertainment for releasing update after update that introduced more problems without solving the existing ones, and the developer responded by opening up more feedback channels. The team began logging common glitches in a public forum, and the launch of the public test server in August proved to be a culmination of its renewed attention to players.

For The Division’s naysayers, the update that their fellow critics helped tweak may be a true turning point. The game’s next big expansion, Last Stand, will launch early next year. Publisher Ubisoft delayed its late 2016 release back in August so that the team could continue to improve upon the game.