A rather serious trading exploit rocked the New World economy late last week, with Amazon Game Studios taking swift steps to hotfix it and deal with the perpetuators.
Amazon reported the exploit on September 22nd, disabling player trading and banning those participating in what appears to have been rampant duping. Responding to concerns that the studio wasn’t going to react strongly enough, Amazon said, “We are absolutely taking this extremely seriously.”
The exploits were addressed in a September 23rd patch. “We have identified individuals involved in two potential exploits — one a trade exploit, the other an unintended stack of house trophy bonuses resulting in better chances at high gear score items than normally available. The individuals abusing these (a few hundred accounts) have been temporarily banned while we double check our data,” wrote Amazon.
The studio said that the real exploiters will either see their gains taken away or suffer a permaban. Unfortunately, some of the automated tools that were used to handle this situation appear to have banned innocent players, leading to outrage and plenty of appeal tickets submitted.
Meanwhile, New World’s upward march continues, with the MMO achieving ever-higher player counts. The title even clawed its way into Steam’s top 20 game list over the weekend with over 45,000 concurrent players.
