I'd be apprehensive about pre ordering this, especially after how The Division was at launch. Tons of bugs, tons of exploitable glitches (and pretty much all of them directly impacted PvP/Dark Zone gameplay).
Raids dropping without any of the previous exploits patched was the icing on the cake - all of asudden you had people with ridiculous gear running around the DZ wrecking without any sort of tactical gameplay.
I hear things became better, but that's the story with all "A1" titles these days - the people building the base game are rarely the people implementing these fixes and updates so I'd fully expect another broken game at launch.
These are all very true, unfortunately, and I'm speaking from experience as well.
When I first played it on PS4, I was overwhelmed --- the story and the ambiance of New York was really something in this game. Yes, it was barren, but the story was so good to undermine those flaws.
And when we finally hit the Dark Zone, it was nothing but a frantic race to get Division Techs, most of which you'll only get in blue rarity. If you equipped anything other than a Vector SMG or M1A rifle, you're pretty much screwed since other players have those with god rolls. Still, it was a good distraction when we got tired of Destiny.
And yes, the raids came pouring in while there were still a lot of bugs. That dreaded shield that allowed you to bypass solid walls, and players raising their DZ ranks by using a dummy account to kill over and over again haha.
Yeah, the game became insanely much better later on. During the initial drop of the armor sets, everything was pretty much skewed in favor of a few armor sets that were undeniably better over the rest, but after some dry runs they were able to fix every armor set and weapon class to the point that everything was viable to use, and they sorted out all daily and weekly rewards to make them really appealing.
By then, though, people were already preparing for Destiny 2 and frankly the game has already lost its magic. And I dunno, the net code is really bad. You could raid in Destiny 2 where all members of your fireteam are from different corners of the world and still make the whole thing work, but get a brief lag spike in The Division, and everything falls over like a set of dominos. It's really weird.
Still, I'm hopeful The Division 2 will learn from its past mistakes and finally stand toe to toe with Destiny (I keep on referring to Destiny as a point of comparison because on consoles, you don't really have much in the way of comparisons haha).
