The ongoing queues and frustrations surrounding New World haven’t gone away in the week since the game launched. As we noted over the weekend, Amazon surpassed 900K concurrent players at one point and announced that it was shutting down character creation on nearly 30 servers with queues that were too long. That was all in addition to doubling the servers and increasing server capacity next week. The second server I rerolled on to avoid the four-hour queues on my first server now has a queue. That’s where we are right now.
And part of the problem was that when people were done playing the game, they weren’t actually logging out to give up their spot to someone else in line; they were finding ways to keep themselves logged in so that they’d not have to wait in a queue again when they returned from real life. If you’re like me, you cheerfully reported these cheaters whenever you spied them auto-running endlessly into a corner. Apparently, Amazon is cracking down on them too.
“We have seen a lot of frustration around individuals who may be artificially remaining active enough in servers to avoid the automatic AFK mitigation that is built into New World,” the studio told fans over the weekend.
“We certainly agree that this is not acceptable behavior, especially when there are droves of individuals who are waiting patiently to get into a world. We have created a new solution to help us identify and action against bad faith AFK players. We will not disclose the details of how the solution works, but we will say that we have every confidence that players who are playing New World normally will not experience any issues. Initially, being caught by our detection solution will result in a quick kick to the main menu. If the behavior continues, more harsh penalties will be applied.”
The studio does say the countermeasures will be “rolled out over a period of time,” so keep your eyes peeled.
