New World character transfers paused due to gold duping glitch
Amazon will ban players found exploiting it
New World's long-awaited character transfers have been taken away almost as soon as they arrived, because they've caused a glitch that allows players to duplicate gold. The bug came about after the MMORPG's 1.0.3 update this week. It makes it so characters don't save properly after transferring, letting them trade gold and items to others while magically keeping it in their own pockets. Amazon have paused server transfers for the time being to work on a fix, and have warned players that those caught exploiting the glitch will be banned.
Amazon explain that after transfers went live, they identified a number of characters who were in "an invalid data state" preventing the character from properly saving. Players reported receiving the "Character_Persist_Failure" error code, claiming their progress reset after transferring, and some were even disconnected from the game. Others figured out that if they sent a load of gold to another player, logged off, then logged back in, both players would keep the same pile of cash.
However, abusing a glitch like this is a bannable offense, say Amazon: "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."
The developers briefly thought they'd fixed the issue and dealt with the characters stuck in this state. But as players continued to transfer over the last couple of days, it seems it's become a larger ongoing problem. So, they've paused character transfers for now, and will turn them back on when they've fixed the exploit.
Character transfers were added to New World to help with long queue times in the popular MMO. The idea is that players could start a character on a less populated server so it didn't take them ages to get in, then move into their preferred server later down the line once queues started to ease up.
Hopefully players will be able to jump servers again soon and, you know, not get rich quick off of it. Amazon don't provide any detail on how long their fix might take, though they say that they'll announce it ahead of time when they plan on bringing transfers back.