There’s nothing strange about an MMO having bots. Even the golden child of the genre Final Fantasy XIV recently made changes to combat these irritating drones, but for every one taken down, it seems that a dozen more spring up. Given its rocky few months of history, it’s no surprise that New World has seen plenty of bot-related issues, initially causing annoyance by swarming ore nodes and fishing holes. As if that weren’t already irritating enough, these bots aren’t slowing down–in fact, they’re getting stronger, with users reporting some over level 30. This implies that the bot in question has been active for a very long time, and New World players are wondering if anything is being done to address the problem.
A post on the official New World forum highlights a particular problem with Amazon Games developers seemingly lying to the playerbase. The user ralisti writes “What I cannot figure out is why AGS lied to the players saying bots are being banned in a dev post when players obviously see the same bots running the same circuits, and being reported multiple times daily. Do they think that the players are so stupid as believe bots are being dealt with when the players can see they are not?”
Those who do manage to gather resources are immediately met with plunging prices given the amount of bot-gathered items selling on the marketplace. User Chance_Waters writes “There is a fishing bot on my server that sits in the same spot at least 18 hours a day. [It] has single-handedly destroyed the price of multiple items, ruined fishing on the server, has received hundreds of reports and still isn’t banned.”
The bots certainly aren’t an oddity, but the response from Amazon Games certainly is. This is just another hit for the studio’s PR, and it will be interesting to see if they detail a plan to start addressing this game-breaking issue.
New World is currently available to play on PC and recently received some helpful fixes and updates. It’s still unclear whether the title can ever restore its initially massive player base, which dropped by 70% in the first month. Just a few days ago, players on EU servers were accidentally gifted 300,000 by developers, so it’s safe to say that there’s more hilarity to come in the New World saga.