A major new bug has been uncovered in Amazon’s MMO New World. Not only has the in-game economy been threatened by gold exploits and deflationary trends, but now, gold is being deleted. Yes, really, A New World auction house bug has been discovered that has rendered player listings for selling items pointless.
The bug works like this: You list an item for a certain amount of gold, then log off for the night. If your item sells while you’re offline, the player who bought it gets their item. For some reason, the server-side handshake doesn’t give you the gold. So in short, all items being sold on the Trading Post are being given away.
The New World auction house bug only seems to affect single items, or full stacks. Players have tested it, and found that partial stacks do sell properly. And it seems like some kind of issue where the game isn’t properly storing offline transactions for the auction house. It sounds like some coder deleted a function to fix the other game-breaking glitch, and caused a new one.
Amazon has already responded, saying that “We are aware of issues regarding the trading post where players are not receiving the gold from their sales and being blocked by active contracts. We have identified a few root causes. One that was introduced with our patch was players not receiving gold/items from completed sell/buy orders on the trading post while offline. We are currently testing a fix for this,” said the Reddit thread.
We can see why this is a huge problem. There’s already a problem with in-game gold losing value, and this just further destroys player confidence. The economy is brand new, and it’s pure chaos right now. New players aren’t getting the proper value for their items thanks to inconsistent pricing. Now, they’re just being scammed by the game itself.
Credit where credit’s due, Amazon has fixed the Invulernability bug that relied on broken server communication. But it seems that the dreaded “spaghetti code” has struck this game studio. Somewhere, some server handshake was broken by the newest fix, and the auction house bug struck.
