New World Is Being Overrun By Fishing Bots

Bots are becoming an increasingly large problem in Amazon's New World MMO, and this time they're coming for your fish, PC Gamer reports.

Bots are a problem when any MMO launches, to be sure, but players on the New World subreddit are reporting what appears to be an increase in bots reaching higher levels, suggesting issues with bot reporting and the issuing of bans.

"Over the last week I have seen a huge influx of bots on my server again," writes Reddit user JustDaveInTheLBC. "But they're all higher level now, 20's & 30's. They're out harvesting and mining in full effect. Are other servers seeing this again? I've reported the same bot three times in three days. It's starting to get really annoying competing for materials with bots."

YouTuber Gladd has even made a game out of spotting bots in the wild, analyzing their behavior and movement in-game. Gladd points out characters casting fishing poles into currently empty lakes and beelining between empty ore deposits. At one point, he runs into what appears to be a bot doing the same beelining motion, and then seconds later runs into another character exhibiting the same bot-like behavior. Literally seconds after that, he encounters a third identical character.

Other players are expressing anger with Amazon for seemingly allowing bots to do as they please despite players submitting multiple reports.

One Reddit user described a bot that has remained in the same spot fishing for 18 hours a day, and continues to impact item prices in-game despite "hundreds" of reports.

"On Mag Mell, it is impossible for ocean fish in Restless because literally every hotspot has a bot that has been camping it for weeks, and I have reported them daily," user Ralisti wrote on the New World forums.

Without more input from Amazon, it's difficult to tell how deep the bot problem truly runs. IGN has reached out to Amazon's PR for comment.

New World has suffered from a number of exploits that are impacting the in-game economy, including repeated issues with gold duplication, and an ongoing currency crisis. The latest update's changes have also sparked off plenty of player backlash, spurring Amazon to apologize. Despite the struggles of launching a new MMO, New World has climbed to the top of Steam's most-played games of 2021.

Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/bot for IGN.