Indirectly, this occurrence had formed a massive cloud of negative feedback due to the increased queue times in New World. After countless reports of players running in place, circles, or maneuvering in some weird pattern repeatedly, New World’s developer Amazon Games had to change something. One way to change that was by altering the AFK detection system, which Amazon Games did on Sunday.
The results are imminent. Shortly after the recent AFK detection system was tweaked, we noticed popular servers being less populated than usual. I am talking about servers with a considerable margin of players. Before this change, every morning at precisely 7 AM, the player queue was already packed with above 1000 reserved slots. This would often result in a long queue time with a leisure drop-off, prompting the consumer to wait for hours.
Even the blind would sense this betrayal and its cause. I know multiple friends who have taken their initiative and started taking pictures of players impersonating an AI—exactly, mimicking a human NPC which motion never stops.
Today, we can finally confirm that the queues are lower by around 70%. Not only lowered but also more effective too. Players would not need to wait for days to join their designated server, unlike so far.
We have seen a lot of frustration around individuals who may be artificially remaining active enough in servers to avoid the automatic AFK mitigation that is built into New World. We certainly agree that this is not acceptable behavior, especially when there are droves of individuals who are waiting patiently to get into a world. We have created a new solution to help us identify and action against bad faith AFK players.
We will not disclose the details of how the solution works, but we will say that we have every confidence that players who are playing New World normally will not experience any issues. Initially, being caught by our detection solution will result in a quick kick to the main menu. If the behavior continues, more harsh penalties will be applied.
This effort is going to be rolled out over a period of time, so results may not appear immediate, but this is something we are dedicated to bringing online as quickly as we feel comfortable.
Thank you for your support. We’ll see you in Aeternum!
