New World Starts Accidentally Giving Out Free Gold

Amazon’s New World is certainly used to players finding exploits to plunder extra gold, but yesterday the MMO took it to a whole new level: The game itself accidentally started giving out chestfuls of gold to certain players

New World has felt somewhat cursed since its release in September this year. It seems like every week there’s a new reason Amazon is having to undo some sort of disaster. Usually it’s to do with the game’s complex economy, and the wily players who find ways to exploit its multifarious teething issues. But this week’s calamity is entirely of the publisher’s own doing. As PC Gamer reports, players on on EU server found themselves on the receiving end of a rather generous 300,000 pieces of gold.

EU servers are back up! We know its been chaotic… we can explain…

Thank you for your patience and get back into Aeternum! https://t.co/N2iK957PAS

— New World: Aeternum (@playnewworld) November 25, 2021

In a statement posted to the New World site, a developer called Lane informed players what had gone wrong. The issue began when, rather kindly, the game had attempted to recoup lost taxes for players who’d faced previous outages. “This database change mistakenly granted very large sums not reflective of the intended amounts,” explained Lane. He continues, “Many players then spent that money, often buying large amounts of items off the trading post.” Which seems pretty reasonable.

However, with New World’s economy apparently so very vulnerable, they didn’t want this recent profligacy affecting their lands, and decided the only option was to hoik the servers offline, and then roll back time.

Upon examination, it was clear that there was no clean path to reversing only the players who were granted money, as the secondary effects were widespread and involved many more players and systems. We therefore made the decision to roll back characters, companies and the trading post to 12:45PM CET, which is just before the database modification was implemented.

Of course, this didn’t go smoothly, either. The note continues,

While testing, we discovered an issue where a small number of players who transferred between 12:45PM and 3:00PM CET are stuck in a “character_restore_failure” state. We are aware of the exact players affected and working to correct this state. We will have an update here once it has been resolved.

The last update made yesterday explained that while they had everything else back working in the game, albeit with all players waking up with a three-hour amnesia (and some far emptier bank accounts), the trading posts were still borked.

These issues seem to have only affected the “EU Central Region” servers, but boy-oh-boy, I bet New World’s developers aren’t having a great Thanksgiving break.