In the months since its release, Amazon Game Studios' New World has been as controversial as it has been commercially successful. Players may already be familiar with the game's usual selection of issues, which include bugs, questionable game design, and problems with server transfers. However, New World has recently begun suffering from overwhelming numbers of bots--a problem that's gotten bad enough that Amazon has explicitly committed to fighting it.
Bots are found in an increasing number of video games, but New World players have noticed a swell of high-level bots swarming the game of late. Some of these bots have been harvesting New World's materials before the actual players can get ahold of any.
"We’re aware of player reports about increased bot activity in New World. Bots pose a persistent challenge for MMOs, and our team has deployed dedicated resources and tooling to identify and combat them," stated Amazon in a recently released statement confirming where the company stands on the matter of New World bots. "We are committed to continuous improvement in our fight against bots, and yesterday alone, we banned over 7,700 accounts for using bots. Our goal is to ensure New World is fun and fair for all players. We’ll post updates to the New World forums and Twitter as we have them."
Amazon's declaration that it intends to fight the spread of bots comes on the heels of greater pushback against bots in the video game industry. These robotic players are well known for flooding into games and stealing resources, advertising real-life services, or just making the game difficult for anyone else to play. One popular solution to the bot problem is to simply attack and kill identified bots, but this is just a stopgap measure. To truly address the issue of bots in games like New World, the developers must solve the problem at the source, as Amazon is promising to do. This means either banning bot accounts or finding ways to make creating bot accounts more difficult.
The assertion that Amazon will be combating the bot problem may be reassuring to players, particularly those who have had resources stolen by bots. However, Amazon already has a number of other serious issues to tackle in New World, including the lingering effects of the gold duplication bug. The developers recently resorted to dramatically lowering New World's housing tax as part of their most recent efforts to contain the outbreak. Furthermore, just as the gold duplication bug originated from an issue with server transfers, it's possible that Amazon's efforts to clamp down on bots could lead to more problems down the line.
New World is available now on PC.