Amazon Goes To War With New World AFKers

If you're a New World player, you've undoubtedly encountered many players in town who were doing nothing but autorunning into a wall. Of course, anyone who has played a popular MMO before knows that these players are attempting to defy New World's AFK timer, which kicks players from the game after a certain period of inactivity. Autorunning into a wall may not help players bypass AFK detection anymore, as Amazon has implemented new tools to help it determine when players are trying to sidestep the AFK timer.

Amazon announced as much in a post to the New World forums over the weekend. "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," Amazon said. "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."

What is this solution? We don't get to know, as Amazon wants to keep its detection method top secret. "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."

The company went on to say that at first, punishment for trying to avoid AFK detection will be light, as players will simply be kicked back to the title screen. However, players who continue to try dodging the AFK timer will face increasingly harsh penalties, though Amazon doesn't say how severe those penalties will get.

You're likely to encounter these AFKers on popular servers, as those who are in the game likely don't want to get kicked for inactivity and face a potentially long queue to get back in. Amazon says that this solution will be rolled out over an undefined period of time, so we may still see some AFKers avoiding detection for the time being. Later this week, Amazon is expected to roll out free server transfers to spread out the player base a bit more, so hopefully, that will help the AFK situation as well.