New World Disables Character Transfers Due To ‘Invalid State’ Bug And Exploit

Amazon Game Studios has temporarily disabled character transfers as they work to fix an issue that caused some characters to be transferred in an invalid state and prevented them properly saving. Character transfers for all regions went live Wednesday night after a few hours of testing in the Asia Pacific region, which apparently failed to reveal the bug.

“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 a 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.”

Some of these players also found that moving items around while in an invalid state resulted in duplicate items, a fact which a few resourceful players proceeded to exploit. Amazon says they’re aware of the exploit and will be banning anyone found to be deliberately exploiting the bug.

“Some players among this small set transferred gold or items while their character was affected. All of these transactions are logged in our database,” warned Amazon. “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.”

Details can be found on the New World official forums.