Last Tuesday, Amazon launched their new MMORPG New World to massive amounts of attention–the game saw almost a million concurrent players this past weekend. Despite this–or perhaps, because of it–legions of people wanting to try the game have been unable to do so, due largely to the stress being put on the title’s servers. To help combat this incredibly unfortunate issue, Amazon is now making a few tweaks to its AFK detection system in an attempt to detect and boot chronic AFK abusers.
While it isn’t clear exactly how long you can just park your character somewhere without setting off the alarm, reports are that at 25 minutes, players are booted back to the main menu. And what does that mean? More waiting in those hell queues to claw your way back into the fun. Unless, of course, you’re one of those cool players to figure out how to avoid detection while away from your PC, typically setting something on the keyboard to keep a specific button pressed, keeping your character moving around. (No, auto-run isn’t good enough.)
These bad-faith AFK players are in Amazon’s sights, and the company is working on a tougher detection system to root out the bad seeds. No details on this new system have been released, but apparently, those caught will be booted to the main menu, and if their bad behavior continues, a ban could be in their future.
While you’d expect the reaction to be favorable, the New World Twitter feed was filled with less-than-enthusiastic feedback, telling Amazon that the problem wasn’t AFK players but the lack of server capacity overall. We’d be inclined to agree—how one of the most profitable companies on Earth didn’t add more servers, we’ll never know.
New World is currently available to play on PC, and we hope that Amazon’s new tactics will have a positive outcome. Hopefully, there will also be some relief for those experiencing pesky GPU issues.