Amazon Has A Plan To Take Care Of Those New World Annoying Auto-AFKers

As is often the case with MMO launches, the hardest New World boss to defeat comes before even getting into the game. The queue monster is the unholy creation of a combination of things including player demand and the game launching with less than enough servers to meet it. Of course, it can be compounded by other things, such as the developer setting a rather low limit on the number of people that can be logged into the server, and then there’s the final blow, players who once in, absolutely refuse to give up their spot to anyone else lest they have to fight the queue all over again, so they find workarounds, such as auto-running while AFK.

This is what we call a “dick move”. Although, in Amazon’s case, they’ve decided to refer to it as “bad faith AFK”. Whatever you want to call it, the important thing here is that other players don’t appreciate it and Amazon is determined to do something about it. In addition to the normal log-out that happens in just about every MMO, they’ve decided to add another “solution” intended to help them locate these AFKers. The finer details of said solution haven’t been provided – likely to keep players from finding ways to work around them. What we do know is that they’ll use this solution to identify auto-AFKers and quick kick them to the main menu, putting them back in the queue. Should the player continue to auto-AFK, “more harsh penalties will be applied”.

There are two important things to note here: First, Amazon doesn’t believe players not engaged in this behavior will experience any issues as a result of the new system. Second, the system will roll out over time, so don’t expect to see results immediately.

Another important move the company has made to combat overloaded servers is to limit character creation on full servers. Currently 28 servers have been put on "Full" status, meaning players can no longer create characters there. This doesn't affect characters that already exist on a server, and players will still be able to log in. But, if you want to create a new character, you're going to have to take it elsewhere.

Update: Thanks to Damien, we now know that nearly 300 servers have hit the full mark and been made unavailable to create new characters on. This is constantly changing, so if you'd like to keep track, check the server status on the New World site.

We are implementing a new feature to indicate if a world is full.

You can check if a world is full on the server status page!

🧭 https://t.co/ApBPXyPC90 pic.twitter.com/ai8GzNmQ1y

— New World (@playnewworld) October 2, 2021