Players slam New World's recent changes via Steam reviews

Amazon's MMO, New World, has seen its aggregate user reviews on Steam fall from "mostly positive" to "mixed" in the last 30 days.

As spotted by TheGamer, feedback seems mostly to criticise the game's "grind" and its litany of bugs and issues.

"It saddens me to have to write a negative review," wrote one player. "The game has a great foundation but is pretty much completely screwed over by bad decisions from higher-ups."

"Incompetent and ignorant dev teams that resulted in a game so spaghetti-coded dupes and exploits became a feature as well as various bugs and gameplay issues so broke it makes my bank account look like a tea party," added another, while one simply said: "Trash, can't believe I wasted so much time on this". The unhappy player have over 200 hours recorded in-game.

Played it and enjoyed it from launch until the first update in late November," explained one player who'd played from launch. "Then they pumped up the grind while also nerfing everyone not running a STR build. Now it's near impossible to solo with bullet sponge enemies like I've never seen before. Hopefully they revert this disaster of an update but I won't hold my breath."

The drop in ratings is further compounded by recent news that despite hitting an impressive all-time concurrent peak of just shy of a million players on 3rd October, New World seemingly lost more than half its player base just a month after its launch on PC.

ICYMI, a couple of weeks back, Amazon said it would take "remediation steps" against New World players who "egregiously exploited" the recent coin duplication bug.

Players of the MMO found a coin/item dupe bug when player trading and, as you'd expect, exploited it. Amazon was then forced to disable trades in the short-term as it worked on a fix. "It was not a decision that was made lightly, but we feel the ability to trade and improve settlements is an important, and fun aspect of our game we aim to preserve," community manager Luxendra wrote in a forum post at the time. "We have permanently banned players who exploited the coin/item dupe issue."

Server merges are "on the horizon", though.