Players are accidentally triggering New World's latest gold duplication exploit

A gold duplication exploit forced Amazon to halt all wealth transfers in New World yesterday, making it effectively impossible for players to move money around while it works to find and fix the problem. But it seems that by doing so, it opened the door to another exploit that enables players to dupe their gold without even trying.

This New World forum thread details how it's done. First, start an upgrade—the original post specifies a town upgrade, but a later followup says fort and lifestyle upgrades will do as well. Then attempt to pay for it using your company treasury. And that's pretty much it: Instead of deducting the gold to cover the cost of the upgrade, it's added to the company treasury, and because the upgrade itself doesn't happen you can keep banging that button all day long, watching the gold pile grow.

Amazon hasn't commented on this new issue yet, but given the number of reports in the thread complaining about virtually identical issues, it seems clear that something has gone very wrong. And it's doubly frustrating for players because it's basically unavoidable: It happens through regular gameplay, and if you're like me and tend to get angry and mash buttons when things don't work like they're supposed to, it's easy to trigger the dupe multiple times without realizing it's happening.

That could be a problem down the road, when Amazon corrects the issue and then decides what to do with people who took advantage of it. Amazon warned yesterday that New World players caught using the gold dupe exploit "will be actioned against," which a community manager later specified in this thread means a ban. I can't imagine that Amazon will take that sort of heavy-handed approach with this new exploit because it's so easy to unintentionally trigger, but there is some worry that players could end up facing sanctions regardless.

"At this point I am now nervous to take 2 steps in the game without looking at the forums to see if I am accidentally going to do an 'exploit'," a player named Strober wrote. "This is not an exploit, this is literally doing the steps you are required to do as a governor to not neglect over your settlement!"

"Wtf i just did this like 10 times thinking it wasn't working and i had run out of personal money to keep doing upgrades from my wallet but now i have a lot of fuckin fake gold in my comp will this hurt us?" another, named haihefaroan, asked.

A few players have recommended opening a support ticket immediately if you encounter this bug in order to help ensure that Amazon doesn't think you're trying to sneak one past it, but otherwise the only option for now appears to be avoiding upgrades completely. For now, wealth transfers in New World are still disabled, so there's no indication as to when this new bug might be fixed—I've reached out to Amazon for more information and will update if I receive a reply.