New World Valentine's Day Cosmetics Removed Following Server-Crashing Bug

Amazon Games' MMORPG New World is no stranger to game-breaking issues, but few could have expected seemingly innocuous Valentine's Day cosmetics to be the cause of a serious server-crashing bug.

It was just a few hours after various Valentine's Day-themed cosmetics went on sale yesterday in New World that Amazon removed the cosmetics from the store, much to the confusion of players. As it turns out, the skins had a potential bug that could cause server crashes, though Amazon states that players who did manage to purchase the skins should still be able to use them. The cosmetics will return to the store once a fix has been found.

This isn't the first serious bug to hit New World and likely won't be the last. In the few months since the game's September 2021 launch, Amazon has disabled the game's entire player-driven economy multiple times to investigate and fix various item and coin duplication bugs, had to address a bug that made players straight-up invincible, find a fix for time-traveling servers that were wreaking havoc on server economies and settlements, and more. While most of these major issues were fixed quickly, it's unfortunately been a common theme anytime New World releases a new update.

Amazon announced New World would not receive any new content in February, with the team instead focused on delivering quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes for the game's next update. In a recent developer update, the New World team stated it had learned that it needed to give updates on the game's public test realm more time so that potentially game-breaking issues could be found and player feedback could be taken into account.

New World recently received new endgame content in the form of Mutated Expeditions, which allow players to tackle harder versions of the game's higher-level dungeons in exchange for better rewards. But New World isn't Amazon's only MMO these days. Amazon helped localize and publish the Korean action-MMORPG Lost Ark, which launched on February 8 in an early access period for buyer's of the game's Founder's Pack. Lost Ark's launch saw more than 500,000 players concurrently on Steam and more than 1.2 million viewers on Twitch. Lost Ark will be free for all players starting on February 11.