Amazon patches now infamous New World chat exploit

In the month since its official release, Amazon’s MMO, New World, has been no stranger to technical issues. Ranging from lengthy queue times to problems with offline auction sales, it’s seen its share of controversy. With that said, Amazon has now addressed what was perhaps the game’s most dangerous oversight. According to a post from a community manager on the New World forums, the chat exploit has been patched, with the fix enabled in every region.

For those that don’t know, the New World chat exploit allowed all kinds of unintended behavior depending on what players decided to type. The New World server clients treated the in-game chat as a means of injecting and altering the game code. While this could be used fairly harmlessly to spam images covering players’ screens, a single line of code could also have more significant ramifications.

With the right line of code typed in, any player that happened to hover their cursor over the chat would suffer from a hard crash. According to an explanation by a professional coder, this oversight was a direct result of the way New World handled its chat boxes. Everything typed into the chat box was treated as direct HTML code rather than a container within the HTML code.