It’s common in some multiplayer games: Get enough behavior reports in a short time, get automatically banned.
It’s a system ripe for abuse in competitive MMOs, and New World looks to have a particularly vicious outbreak where the combination of winner-take-all rewards and very narrow lists of participants make the best targets for your wave of aggressive false reports very obvious. Now, it looks like New World players have figured out they can target their enemies with reports to trigger that 24-hour ban… just before a time-limited war event.
New World players are widely saying they’ve been banned for nothing, or that large swathes of their company membership have gotten bans just before a war. Meanwhile, representatives from Amazon Games have muddied the water with conflicting statements.
Posts across the Steam forums, Reddit, and other social media give anecdotes of bans. “50 People in my 100 person company are now banned” reads one Reddit post. “We have to give up our hard fought territory because everyone can press report a couple times? This is crazy we need a fix ASAP” the post continues.
“So my company has a war today and the company we are going to war against reported our top players so they would get a temporary 24 hour ban and not be able to participate in the war,” says a post on the New World forums. Posts complaining about automated bans date back to late last weekâthough some on Reddit earlier this year complain about automatic bans in the New World beta.
Another, now removed, Reddit post gave details from a company member who discovered, then exploited, the process to ban the highest level members of another company before a war event. Perhaps most damningly, two clips of a streamer for wiki site Fextralife confirm that he was temporarily banned by what seems like mass abuse of the report system. Streamers are frequent targets in games with a mass reporting problem.
Moderators and customer service at Amazon are giving mixed messages. Posts by certain moderators seem to indicate that there is a threshold of reports to trigger an automatic 24-hour ban. Other moderators on the New World forums insist that each report is reviewed by a real human.
All our bans are reviewed by humans before any decisions are made. I have randomly researched specific reports of unfair moderation from Twitter, I have pulled chat logs and every instance there are violations of the Code of Conduct.July 24, 2021
It has caused more than a little confusion in the community, certainly due to mounting evidence that some 24-hour bans are decidedly automated. An enterprising user on the New World forums has compiled an extensive list of evidence around the issue compiling both forum threads and social media posts.
PC Gamer has reached out to Amazon for comment, and will update if we receive a response.
For my part, it’s not a particularly unbelievable scenario. I’m familiar with this problem, and I’ve seen it before in other games: I quite like Foxhole, but it suffers from precisely this issue. Do something a large clan doesn’t like, even if it’s not against the rules? Prepare for a mass report and auto-ban.