The MMO New World (Steam) is suffering from a gold dupe. An exploit from the new server transfers creates coins out of nowhere. Amazon has now disabled the server transfers that just recently came and has announced that it will ban exploiters and remove the duped items and gold.
What kind of exploit is this?
- As MeinMMO reported last night, a “gold dupe” exploit is circulating in New World. This exploit creates coins “out of nowhere” – it 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. This was the most desired feature during the release: people wanted to switch servers to play with friends or to avoid queues.
- The exploit was relatively easy to produce and spread quickly through social media.
New World bans gold dupers, speaks of “small number”
This is what Amazon says: In a statement (via newworld), community manager Luxendra said Thursday night: A “small number” of characters were in an “invalid data state” after the server transfer. Some of these players transferred gold or items while their character was in this state.
All these items and transactions are in Amazon’s records. They are now looking closely at which players exploited their state to gain an advantage and will ban them for exploiting.
Items and gold will be removed if deemed appropriate.
Additionally, logging in will be temporarily prohibited for characters in this “invalid data state”.
Server transfers temporarily disabled
This is what Amazon is doing: This morning, Amazon stated that around 150,000 characters used this transfer. Some had problems with an “invalid data state”. Although they had already fixed a lot on Thursday evening, the error still occurs.
Therefore, they temporarily disabled the character transfer on Thursday evening.
The server transfers were regarded by GameStar as “the most desired feature” of New World (via gamestar). It had just gone live for all regions on Thursday morning. According to Amazon, it had already been disabled on Thursday evening – it was live for only about 12 to 16 hours.
The MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online had similar problems in its early days:
This is what it is about: A “gold dupe” is one of the worst things that can happen to a new MMO. Such an exploit must be nipped in the bud immediately. If such exploits remain undiscovered for too long, a “rollback” threatens, causing all players to lose invested time. This would be a catastrophe.
The radical manner in which New World is approaching this shows that they are well aware of the problems. It also seems important to them to assure the players: “We know which items are affected – we are removing them from the game.” It is extremely important for the integrity of an MMO to act so radically, quickly, and clearly.
Amazon must have carefully considered the step to disable server transfers.
