Amazon Games developed a solution to the currently on-going problem with New World AFK players who refuse to log out when they are not active!
Since its launch on September 28 Amazon Games’ MMORPG New World has been plagued by incredibly long waiting queues for many of the initially available servers.
AGS decided to limit the player amount per server to 2 000 people concurrently active at any given time. This along with the fragmented launch which allowed some regions in the world to get earlier access to the game than others, resulted in crazy long waiting lines to get to a server and play the game.
Now, a few days later, the problems are partially mitigated with AGS launching a lot more fresh new servers and working to extend the total limit of active players to 2 500 per server.
The biggest issue for many players, and the dev team, has been the AFK-kick-deniers (my own time). By the way, AFK stands for “Away From Keyboard”, if you were wondering.
New World has an automatic timer that detects if a player has been inactive in the game for some time (25-30 minutes currently) and if a character has not moved or done anything in the meantime, they get a warning message and shortly after that the system logs them off to allow another player from the queue to log in and play.
The login queues have been overwhelmingly long, however and a lot of players found a number of different methods to trick the system and avoid getting forcefully logged off for inactivity.
Among the most popular methods are jumping, running or any other form of action that can be incorporated into a marco.
AGS came up with an official announcement this weekend that they have developed a way to battle these actions from the players and are rolling out their solution to the live servers already.
Greetings Adventurers!
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. We have created a new solution to help us identify and action against bad faith AFK players.
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. Initially, being caught by our detection solution will result in a quick kick to the main menu. If the behavior continues, more harsh penalties will be applied.
This effort is going to be rolled out over a period of time, so results may not appear immediate, but this is something we are dedicated to bringing online as quickly as we feel comfortable.
Thank you for your support. We’ll see you in Aeternum!
Source: New World Forums
This is a double-edged knife. On the one hand people should not stay online if they are AFK and on the other people have other obligations in their daily lives than just sitting and waiting in a queue.
Everyone has the right to play on a server they chose and perhaps AGS should have closed the new character creation on the most overpopulated servers sooner.
I personally stand with AGS on this – even if they, as a studio, didn’t handle the solution in the most sophisticated way possible, AFK-kick-denial should not be allowed.
The long queues were happening during the Open Beta in September – a clear sign that the launch will be a queue-disaster.
The clear and legitimate ways to avoid queues and not risk any possible punishment from the devs is to simply not attempt to trick the AFK-kick mechanism.
From my personal experience so far on Hades (EU server, one of the heaviest servers overall) the queues are literally non-existent early in the mornings and if you queue up before mid-day, you have a good chance to log in and play some time in the late afternoon or evening.
In the first days after the launch the queues were much bigger in numbers, but the actual wait time was shorter. The system prioritizes new players over existing ones, apparently.
Right now my server along with several other over-populated servers do not accept new players any more. You cannot create a new character on them. There is no information how long this will continue, but I expect the situation to be like this for at least another week or two before we start seeing things calming down slowly.
Unlike some of the other games I have played in the past years from Day 1, New World’s only problem was literally this – the long waiting time to log in. And this is a common issue with nearly every new big MMO title.
If you are reading this while waiting in a queue, why not make time pass quicker and more interestingly by reading our New World Review. And for when you do need help developing your character in Aeternum, we have a large (and still growing, always growing) collection of Beginner Guides, Weapon Guides, Expedition Guides and more! Check regularly the VULKK.com to not miss any of our New World coverage – news, guides, tutorials and everything you could possibly need to make your journey better and more entertaining.
