Massive Entertainment's "The Division 2" launched in 2019, and while it's not the type of game that gets talked about every week, it has done quite well since then thanks to regular seasonal updates and the promise of more to come from the series. The most recent update, however, was a catastrophe of a magnitude that has yet to be fully revealed.

In a perfect illustration of the butterfly effect in coding, the latest season was delayed due to localization issues. This past Saturday, in the process of creating an update to fix the problem, we ran into an error that brought down the Division 2 build generation system. As a result, we will not be able to update the game until this system is rebuilt."

The severity of this problem is evident by the fact that Massive was unable to simply extend the current season's activity, as it had previously done for the postponement of the new season.

In other words, the entire system for updating the game was tilted in an attempt to fix the problem with a new update. In other words, Massive has to fix the system for updating the game before they can update the game to fix other problems.

The question is what is the build generation system and how bad is this? I spoke to a senior industry coder who explained that this could be really bad. It's like a cat and a dog living together. A build system is a bunch of machines and scripts that convert source code and assets into something that runs on a client machine, like a console.

One problem could be hardware failure. But from what they are saying, it doesn't sound like it, and they are saying that they had to rebuild the build system from scratch.

What is surprising from an insider's point of view is that either there were no failsafes or the failsafes failed." Hardware failures should be anticipated with a recovery plan in place. Rebuilding a built system from scratch means scheduling and planning, maintaining what is existing, and switching seamlessly. Something very unusual is happening, and we seem to be less prepared than we need to be."

This may be due to an underestimation of the knowledge, skills, and above all experience required to maintain a live code base, as Massive's main focus is undoubtedly on future Division titles. [I hope this is an opportunity to settle this situation with minimal disruption and grow the team's knowledge base and not a contrivance to bash the team.

To be clear, Division 2 is still up and running, at least for now, and on the Subreddit, the community is taking the news with black humor, or at least what Massive should expect from what is happening We are grateful that Massive is being transparent about what is going on. Unfortunately, this means that current issues, such as the crash bug when returning to the DC location, remain and some players will be permanently unable to return to the center of the game until a fix is applied.

"We are working to resolve this situation as quickly as possible. We have made good progress in the last 96 hours and have been able to restore critical parts of the system."

They have promised to update again later today and provide some form of in-game compensation once the problem is resolved (fingers crossed). Until then, Division agents faced problems that even they could not overcome.

Player HotSpicedChai said, "I knew we were screwed when they didn't immediately rewind and extend the season. But I didn't expect it to be this bad."