New World Character Transfers Paused as Amazon Promises Bans to Players Using an Exploit

As reported earlier this week, Amazon Games had enabled the character transfer feature in New World so that players may reach their friends on a server of their choosing. However, a percentage of players who’ve immediately transferred their character had to deal with a ‘character persistence issue’ that didn’t save any of their further progress on the new server. As a side effect of this bug, some players found out that they could trade their gold with another player, log out, log back in and find that their gold was still there, leading to gold duplication.

Amazon has since confirmed that anyone who intentionally used this bug as an exploit would be banned from New World.

New World Patch 1.0.3 Introduces Server Transfers; Rollout to Begin with Asian Pacific Servers

Since transfers began we have identified a small number of characters who after moving servers are in an invalid data state that prevents their character from properly saving. We’ve corrected the characters in this condition as of this morning.

Some players among this small set transferred gold or items while their character was affected. All of these transactions are logged in our database. We are reviewing them now and any players found deliberately using this condition to gain advantage will be banned for exploiting. We will also remove items or gold received where appropriate.

Going forward, as a precautionary measure, we may prevent login temporarily on characters in this state. If you are one of the rare people who transfers and afterwards cannot log in, the condition should automatically resolve within two hours. If it persists beyond that time please contact customer service.

Later, the New World developers revealed that around 150K players already transferred their characters, most of them without issues. However, character transfers have been paused while the aforementioned character progression bug (and its exploit) are completely fixed.

We’ve transferred approximately 150K players since character transfers went live. A small number of those have resulted in characters with an invalid data state that needs to be corrected. We’ve done that for those affected last night, but there are still some new transfers affected that we see happening. We have paused character transfers and evaluate how we can prevent future occurrences of this problem. When that is resolved we’ll resume the service, with an announcement ahead of time.

In related New World news, the game can now be played via cloud through NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW service.