New World is still going strong even after a whole month since release, which is not as common for other MMOs in their early stages simply because they tend to run out of content rather quickly. Still, one of the most enticing things about New World is that there are no classes in the game, and players can do everything on a single character like unlocking all weapons and leveling them up to max or becoming expert crafters to make some precious Gold out of the trade. This approach is healthy, and it helps keep players engaged throughout the whole experience, eventually carrying them into what the endgame for New World currently is.
Still, New World is also suffering from a number of glitches that make it pretty hard for players to fully enjoy the game. Some bugs are minor and bear little importance in the grand scheme of things, but other issues can truly break the game in various ways, especially if they can be reproduced and then exploited by the entire community. Unfortunately, this is much easier to achieve than one would think, and the reason for it is that all the main glitches, even the most severe of them, are up for anyone to see.
New World's Glitch Reports are Unhealthy for the Game
The way things work is that when players find something that's causing a bug within the game, the only option to do something about it is to report it to the developers at Amazon Game Studios. However, New World doesn't have an in-game feature to allow players to report any glitch they find, but rather the preset procedure is to head over to the official New World forums and post a public report in the appropriate section. Because of how hard it is to spot glitches just by hearsay and figure out how they were triggered, Amazon Game Studios encourages players who are reporting them to also include pictures or videos and, most importantly, to share all the steps used to reproduce those issues while logged into the game.
Normally, this is extremely helpful and very convenient for the developers, as it allows for a much quicker identification of the problem and, possibly, of the root cause that generates it. The underlying mistake here is that anyone who visits the New World forums and, specifically, the section including all the reports of bugs and glitches, can potentially have malicious intents and use those reproduction steps to exploit an issue or cause more to other players. An example comes from the invincibility glitch, or again from one of the most recent glitches to be discovered, which is that the chatbox within New World allows players to type HTML code in it.
Of course, without prior knowledge of HTML and how it works, this is mostly harmless and can make for a few memes, like the giant sausage pictures that are running rampant in New World. Nevertheless, this can also be used to add bits of code to specific items when linking them in chat, and they would be completely undetectable from the outside. Players could type anything, from a request for the game to find a specific non-existent file that would cause a crash—and potentially disrupt PvP encounters and Faction Wars—to worse things like malware.
Posting a report about this issue to the New World forums would seem the most logical thing to do, and yet, because anyone can see the steps to reproduce it, it can also be potentially harmful in the wrong hands. Information is easily found on the internet, but providing access to all the glitches reported thus far—even severe ones like the Gold duplication exploit—is the biggest mistake one could make. Instead, the proper solution would be to allow players to send individual reports that can only be read by AGS. Ultimately, it's likely that bugs will remain an issue until Amazon changes the forum approach, and this can have many repercussions on gameplay.
New World is out now for PC.