The developers of Amazon Games have introduced a new system that allows you to identify the players who artificially do pretend not to be AFK, with sanctions for the most repeat offenders.
For the uninitiated AFK, it means “Away from Keyboard” and basically indicates when a player is inactive for an extended period of time. Everyone has to interrupt their game session for a few minutes, for example to answer a phone call, but in this case we are talking about a very different scenario.
Many players, in fact, to avoid the long queues for access to servers, prefer to stay logged in, even if inactive, even for hours. To counter this phenomenon and thus give the opportunity to enter the waiting players, New World has a timer 25 minutes duration, which starts as soon as a player stops giving any input and after which it starts the character’s automatic log-out. This is a solution also adopted by other MMOs, for example in Final Fantasy XIV there is a 30-minute timer.
However some users manage to get around this timer while remaining completely inactive for hours in an artificial way. For example, simply block the “W” key on the keyboard with an object to make your character walk towards a wall for hours, and in this way the game will consider him as active. In the video below you can see about ten players adopting this method. Obviously the consequences are the users waiting to enter the servers.
To combat similar tricks, the developers of Amazon Games have begun rollout of a new one system that will identify the crafty ones. As we learn from a post published in the official forum of New World, initially the system will limit itself to making the log-out of those who pretend not to be AFK, but if users are repeat offenders, harsher penalties will be applied. No further details have been revealed regarding the functioning of the system, but Amazon Games promises that over time it will bear fruit.
Meanwhile, Amazon has also blocked the creation of characters on full New World servers due to overcrowding.