New World deactivated the most important new feature after a few hours

The MMO New World Boost suffers from a gold dupe. An exploit of the new server transfers resulted in gold out of nowhere. Amazon has now deactivated the server transfers that came only a short time ago and has announced that it will ban exploiters and remove the duped items and the gold.

What kind of exploit is that?

There is a “gold dupe” exploit on New World. As a result of this exploit, thalers are created “out of nowhere” – this has catastrophic effects on the economy. The exploit came with the new patch 1.0.3. on Wednesday and the ability to transfer a character from one server to another. That was the most wanted feature of the release time: people wanted to switch servers to play with friends or to avoid queues.

The exploit was relatively easy to generate and quickly spread via social media. A “gold dupe” is an exploit in which items or gold are duplicated. The Diablo game series in particular is known for such exploits. But “new” MMORPGs are also often affected. These exploits can have catastrophic economic effects if they go undetected for longer. The worst consequence of such an exploit is “rollback”: Then the servers are reset to an earlier status and the progress made in the meantime is lost.

New World bans gold duper, speaks of “small number”

This is what Amazon says: In a statement, Community Manager Luxendra said on Thursday evening: A “small number” of characters would have been in an “invalid data state” after the server transfer. Some of these players would have transferred gold or items while their character was in this state.

However, all these items and transactions are in Amazon‘s records. Now look carefully at which players have taken advantage of their condition to gain an advantage and will ban them for exploiting. Items and money will be removed when it is deemed appropriate. In addition, characters who are in this “invalid data state” will be temporarily forbidden from logging in.

Server transfers temporarily disabled

That’s what Amazon does: Amazon got in touch again and said that around 150,000 characters had used this transfer. Some had problems with an “invalid data status”. Although a lot had been fixed on Thursday evening, the error would still occur. Therefore, the character transfer was temporarily deactivated on Thursday evening.

The server transfers were described by GameStar as “the most requested feature” from New World. It only went live for all regions on Thursday morning. According to Amazon, it was deactivated on Thursday evening – so it was only live for about 12 to 16 hours.

That’s behind it: A “gold dupe” is one of the worst things that can happen to a new MMO. Such an exploit has to be nipped in the bud immediately. If such exploits go undetected for a long time, there is a risk of a “roll-back” and then all players lose the time invested. That would be a disaster.

You can tell from the radical way New World is going about this that they know exactly what the problems are. It also seems important to them to reassure the players: “We know which items this affects – we take them out of the game.” It is extremely important for the integrity of an MMO to be so radical, quick and clear here. Amazon has certainly considered the step of deactivating server transfers.