New World Implements Stricter Anti-AFK Measures For Artificially Active Players

It’s been a week since New World officially launched on PC but the launch rush has yet to die down as more and more players flock to the newly-released servers. It’s also been a week of ridiculously long queues and login issues with over 900,000 players struggling to actually get into the game.

To address these issues, Amazon Game Studios has doubled their available servers, increased server capacity, and have disabled character creation on full servers. The team have also implemented anti-AFK measures that will automatically boot players out of the game if they’ve been inactive for a certain amount of time. A number of crafty players, however, have found ways to circumvent this feature, including but not limited to somehow holding down the auto-run button while they proceed to do other stuff in real life.

Unfortunately for them, Amazon has improved their anti-AFK measures to crack down on this behavior. “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,” said the studio. “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,” they said.

The new measures will be rolled out “over a period of time” says Amazon. Details can be found on the New World official forums.