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On Sunday, New World from Amazon Games surpassed 913,000 concurrent players. The new MMO has been going quite strong ever since its release on Tuesday of last week. However, the servers are still suffering a bit.
Since release, Amazon has taken some great strides to try to reduce the player queue times around the world. They have added a lot of additional servers. They have also increased the server capacity for some servers from 2,000 players to 2,250 players. Even with those changes, some of the more populated servers are still seeing queue times of several hours, with at least one server sitting at a 12+ hour long queue.
A big issue is the fact that players that manage to get past the queue and actually in to the game, just don't want to leave once they're in. There is an AFK system in the game that will kick players out after about 25 minutes of no activity. Of course, players found a way to bypass that system by enabling auto-run and just running up against an object or building. This has, so far, tricked the game into thinking these people are still playing when they're really not.
New World community manager going by "HardcoreHenry" wrote on the New World forums that they are working on a new solution to detect and kick AFK players.
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.
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.
The fan response, at least on Twitter, seems kind of counter to what you may expect. People are saying that the AFK players are the result of the larger issue of multi-hour long server queues. They are saying that a lack of server capacity is largely to blame and that Amazon Game should focus on increasing that before tackling this perceived AFK problem.
I will admit that the servers being at capacity and the long queue times were very annoying at launch. I was unable to play on my first chosen server as a result of this and instead had to make a character on another server in my region. Since then, however, I have not had any issues with logging in and playing on the new server. Granted, I have been playing rather late at night for my region, which may help matters a bit. I do worry that this may change as time progresses and more players attempt to create characters on my current server.
Though I will not be doing a review for the game, I will say that I have enjoyed my time with it so far. It is certainly not like most other "conventional" MMOs out there. It's more of a sandbox style MMO that I have seen compared to games like Star Wars Galaxies and even Black Desert Online. There is a massive focus on crafting in New World, and the entire economy is player-driven.
