New World developers are creating a new system to detect and punish players who artificially stay AFK in the game’s servers.
Amazon-developed Fantasy MMO game, New World has been a rousing hit with the gaming community. WIth over 860,000 concurrent peak player numbers, New World is already the second most popular game on Steam. However, its popularity has also resulted in extremely long queue times, in some cases, running into several hours.
Players have been innovative in trying to avoid these long queue times. Some players are choosing to stay in the servers, even when they are not actively playing. This allows them to skip the long queue times when they get back to gaming. New World’s servers have automatic AFK detection systems, but players are gaming the system and tricking it into thinking they are active.
How did Players Game the AFK Detection System?
New World players leave something on their keyboards’ movement buttons. Placing something on the W key while facing the wall is one of the simplest tricks to avoid AFK detection. As a result, their characters would continuously walk into a wall for the entire time that the player is AFK. Players use this method to trick the system into thinking that they are active, even though they are not.
It is not uncommon to run into AFK rooms with several players (sometimes hundreds) running into walls to avoid the AFK detection systems. Hundreds of players would gather together in rooms, walking into walls and staying ‘active’. There were also characters that would run around in circles or just walk in a straight line, turn around and walk back. The New World Developers have now implemented a system where such activities will be much less common if not completely impossible to implement.
New World Cracks Down on AFK Detection Systems
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.
To prevent gamers from coming up with some other unique counters to the AFK detection systems, the developers are not releasing information about the new system.
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.
If a player is caught by the detection solution, the system will kick the player to the main menu. Repeated offenses will result in harsher penalties, although the blogpost does not mention what these punishments will be.
The new system will take some time to implement and weed out the AFK players from the servers. The developers hope this will open up space in the New World servers. They are also adding new servers to shorten the long queue times.
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