Ubisoft has canceled plans to increase the gear score cap in Tom Clancy's The Division 2 after taking advice from players.
The developers had originally planned to implement higher level weapons and gear, which they'd decided to brand "515 gear," as part of next week's Title Update 3. However, they've opted to backtrack on that decision following widespread calls to bin the idea from the community.
Fans seemed to be wholly against this change, as it would have basically rendered all high-tier character builds obsolete by outdating all level 500 weapons and gear, and, fortunately, Ubisoft is in agreement with the notion.
"Our intention, as always, is for players to enjoy the content they love and continue to make progress with their Agent," the devs stated in an update on The Division 2's website. "After talking about loot and Gear Score in a lot of meetings, chats and video calls, and many whiteboards being filled with thoughts, notes, and graphs, we decided that with all the changes coming with TU3, increasing the Gear Score at this point would have created a couple of issues.
"Gear Score 500 items would have been outdated immediately, and all the effort you put into min/maxing and farming your builds would have been wasted just as the Raid goes live.
"We don't want to invalidate your progression and we heard that feedback loud and clear from our community. Your gear and your builds are important to you and to us.
The statistical increase in stats would have made gear better but we don't want the focus to be on constantly chasing a higher Gear Score when it should be about finding a playstyle and build that you enjoy."
Taking into consideration that the game encourages players to construct a gear set that suits their preferences and playing style, 515 gear would have thrown this out of the window as players would have been forced to abandon the model in order to retain a top gear score, something that wouldn't exactly correspond positively with the launch of the game's first raid.
There was also concern over the fact that the new gear would drop in The Division 2's Dark Zones, although Ubisoft had hinted that it might also be available in other locations.
In any case, though, 515 gear won't be coming in the game's next update, much to the relief of players.