New World’s Efforts To Compensate Players For In-Game Tax Losses Results In Rollbacks On EU Servers

This past weekend has not been a great one for New World players on the EU servers. The good news – I guess – is that this time the problem wasn’t really an exploit. Although, I suppose you could say players foolishly took advantage of the situation without checking things out first. About five days ago, Amazon pushed a patch to the EU servers intended to compensate players for in-game tax losses that occurred following the November feature release. Unfortunately, there was an error and some players received an excessive amount of gold – and, as often happens when one receives large sums of currency, they spent it, purchasing large quantities of items via the trading post.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before Amazon realized their mistake and had do to something about it. Since the currency in question was spent and in the ecosystem, they couldn’t just roll back characters – which they did do. They also rolled back companies and, over a longer period of time, the trading post contracts. This meant more trading post downtime. On the positive side of things, it didn’t require them to take down other forms of wealth transfers.

As of two days ago, everything seems to be back up, but the end result is still that a lot of people selling on the trading post lost a whole lot of profit and have to wait for everything to sell again – probably at a slower rate seeing as all that extra gold is no longer available for people to spend.

So, what’s the moral of the story? If you see a whole lot of money appear in your account, check out what’s going on before spending it and causing yourself and everyone else a whole lot of misery. (This works in real life too.)