New World Is Taking Action Against "Bad Faith" AFK Players

New World players have discovered ways to skirt around the game's automatic AFK detection system, enabling them to step away for long periods of time without being kicked back to the main menu. But that looks like it will soon be changing, with Amazon Games looking to take action to both implement better AFK detection as well as punish "bad faith AFK players."

Amazon Games' MMO has seen more than 900,000 concurrent players on Steam over the weekend, making it the most-played game on the platform. That has resulted in long queue times for some of New World's most populous servers. It's no surprise then that players are using every tool at their disposal to stay in-game and avoid waiting in line.

In a post on the game's official forums, community manager Henry Stelter writes that Amazon will be rolling out changes to New World's AFK detection system to better find instances of players artificially remaining active.

"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," Stelter writes. "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 [take] action against bad faith AFK players."

Stelter goes on to write that Amazon will not be disclosing how the new detection system works, but that players who are playing the game normally should not experience any issues. The AFK detection changes won't be immediate, but will be rolled out over a period of time, HardcoreHenry writes.

New World has proven to be Amazon Games' first big success, enough to elicit a response from Amazon creator Jeff Bezos himself. Due to the game's popularity, Amazon has added additional servers and increased server capacity to make room for new players. Free server transfers will be offered by Amazon in the weeks ahead for players who may have created characters on a smaller population server in order to avoid long queue times.