Players are gleefully breaking New World with gold duping, chat exploits

At first glance, New World appears to be a standard MMO experience, with crafting, combat, and monstrous critters to slay. But there’s a hidden underbelly to the game that players are using to get all manner of unscrupulous advantages. While New World has lots of in-game PvP opportunities for players to contest regions or duke it out with each other, it’s also proving to have lots of in-game opportunities to blindside opponents or gain advantages by exploiting the game’s many, many bugs. And some of developer Amazon’s fixes and patches have also resulted in additional player issues.

New World had bugs from the beginning; all MMOs do. At first, the game’s biggest problem was queues of players trying to get into the game. Then, people noticed that they could make their character invulnerable by minimizing the game’s screen and dragging it around. Amazon stepped in to fix that for Patch 1.0.4, but new problems had already emerged. These issues varied wildly between servers. Some communities had to resort to the barter economy to hoard as much wealth as possible during a deflation process, while other groups found the key to infinite wealth via duping.

Even mundane features like the chat box became untrustworthy. Fans on the New World subreddit reported that other players could post HTML code in the chat to blind them, or even disconnect other people from the game. “You can insert HTML code in the chat to display images or even kick people of they hover over a word,” wrote user janikFIGHT. It’s certainly an unscrupulous advantage to use the chat box to send a giant yellow square that covers most of your screen. And even less rude uses of the exploit — like sending a giant stock image of sausages — are still immersion breaking.

Image: Amazon Game Studios

This has put Amazon into a position where it needs to fix these bugs, but new patches have the potential to just add new problems. On Oct. 29, Amazon fixed the image posting bug, which aimed to make chat more secure and avoid this kind of disruption. On Monday, the developer posted this message on the MMO’s official forums, which reads:

We are aware of a possible gold duplication exploit that has been circling and we are temporarily disabling all forms of wealth transfer between players (ie. sending currency, guild treasury, trading post, player to player trading).

Any player that has engaged in the use of this exploit will be actioned against.

Once the gold duplication exploit has been investigated and we are ready to turn on wealth transfer again, we will update this post.

Thank you for your understanding.

But now, it appears as though this fix opened the way for another gold duplication bug, with players flocking to the official forums to report the issue. A major part of New World is upgrading your settlement and acting as governor; however, players are reporting that they can start upgrades, see the gold accumulate in their company bank, and then … the upgrade simply doesn’t start, which allows them to collect free gold.

This is in addition to a myriad of other, less game-breaking bugs like a hatchet exploit that allows players to solo end-game areas with ease. While some players are having a blast killing boars and fishing, others are playing a wholly different game, where they try and see what elements of New World they can bend or break to their advantage. From there, all the developer can do is scramble to try to catch up.

In a forum thread, a developer under the handle Kay wrote: “I’m being sincere when I say [the glitch is] not funny. We worked really hard to get those changes that addressed the exploits from Closed Beta, and for another issue to show up that looks exactly the same, negates our work completely. We created this game for you all, and issues like this one, where it looks like we are ignoring something that we all consider a huge problem, make it seem like we don’t care. We care a lot. And I’m sorry that this is happening.”