Amazon’s New World faces down a world of wild glitches

A video explaining just some of the glitches New World has faced of late.

Anyone who follows online gaming knows that new titles often have a few issues at launch and that those issues can need a few post-launch updates to iron them out. Still, Amazon’s long-delayed New World has played host to some surprising bugs, security issues, and exploits in recent weeks.

This weekend, reports started filtering in from players who had discovered how to insert and process their own HTML code inside New World‘s chat box (thanks, apparently, to some improper input scrubbing). This resulted in some amusing visual trolling, as players could use specific HTML to spam giant pictures of in-game sausages or even display large yellow boxes above their characters to block the other players’ in-game view. Other trolling was more severe, like gold duplication exploits and HTML code that could crash the game if a player hovers over a certain bit of text.

On Friday, New World Community Manager Luxendra posted that the team had just that day “discovered an issue where players were able to post images and other links in the chat that resulted in unsavory behaviour.” Luxendra added that the developers “have enabled a fix that should resolve this issue and prevent players from abusing and exploiting this feature.”

Other problems deal more directly with in-game economic systems not functioning as designed. Since the rollout of New World Patch 1.0.4 last week, players are reportedly failing to receive gold from trading-post sales that take place when they’re offline. “We are currently testing a fix for this and will be deploying it as soon as we are confident,” Amazon writes in the game’s forums. “Players who encounter this issue WILL receive their missing gold/items when the fix goes live.”

I’m invincible!

Previous New World glitches were even simpler than that. Earlier in October, YouTuber Kona demonstrated that New World players could become effectively invulnerable if they clicked and dragged the location of the game window on their local machine. Though the damage would register as soon as the game window stopped moving, players could still use the exploit to camp indefinitely on PvP capture points, gaining a massive advantage.

A YouTuber shows off the (since-patched) simple method for temporary invulnerability in New World.

That particular oversight was fixed a few weeks later with patch 1.0.4, which the patch notes said “fixed several known causes of players being invulnerable [emphasis added].” But those notes also suggest that they are only “beginning work on addressing issues causing invulnerability” and “are continuing to track down fixes for additional causes of this issue.”

Some have pointed to this invulnerability bug as evidence that Amazon was giving the game client authority over the server, a big security no-no in online game design. But Luxendra shot that down in an extended post that goes into some technical detail on what was happening here:

We did have a bug, in which given certain circumstances we were waiting server-side on input from a client before processing through to outcomes. Combined with an intentional weapon effect that allows for brief invulnerability, this created a situation where players could reach an invulnerable state and prolong it by making the client unresponsive, even though the client has no say in damage (both damage the player creates and damage taken by the player are computed server-side based on the results of physics simulation plus game rules). This was a particularly bad bug given our server-based simulation, and we apologize for that. We corrected the bug in code the same day we learned about it, then tested to make sure nothing unintended came out of those changes, and published the fix immediately after that.

Despite the fixes, there are still plenty of known issues in New World, including a few that have only popped up since the last patch. Hopefully some of those issues can get fixed before the game loses even more of its quickly dwindling player base.