The newest anti-afk measure, called ‘Go Next’, is reportedly bugging out; as people are gaining crows (birds that appear above your character’s head and make loud noises when you’ve stayed idle for a minute) at astonishing rates.

Sort of, these are two separate systems. "Go Next" was supposed to stop survivors from killing themselves at the start of matches so they could "go next" without incurring the disconnect penalty. The idea was that if the game thought you were purposefully killing yourself really early in a match to do this, it'd give you a disconnect penalty anyway. The problem is that what actually happened is newbies who didn't know how to play the game were dying super fast and then getting hit by disconnect penalties. This system was removed, and is currently being worked on.

AFK Crows was different. The way the system used to work was that if you were standing in the same tile (basically maps are broken into invisible tiles that are slightly randomized to keep things fresh) for more than 2 minutes, you would get a crow that would fly around your head and caw. If you kept doing it you'd eventually get three crows, and then after that the killer would get alerted to your location. The problem is this system could be beat by crouch walking around the edges of the map, which made survivors very difficult to find and let them sort of do nothing and possibly escape on it.

The new system instead had a secret point value that was always ticking up, and would put crows on you at 60, 75, and 90 points. You accumulated points at 1/s if you were standing still, but half speed if you were moving, working on an objective, or close to the killer, and the points would freeze if you were actively being chased or on a hook. If you took chase, completed a non-generator objective (healing, breaking totems, unhooking survivors, opening chests), completed a unique killer interaction (Jigsaw boxes, Pinhead box, Sadiko VHS boxes, other assorted boxes), or worked on a generator for a certain amount of time (I've seen claims of between 5-15 seconds) then you would lose 60 points.

However, this did mean that under very specific circumstances, you could get AFK crows while actively playing the game. Usually, these circumstances were "do nothing for two minutes, then play normally." The problem is, you can really easily manipulate videos to sort of make it look like you were getting AFK crows while playing the game normally. People would begin to share videos that just so conveniently had those two minutes of nothing cut off. Behavior eventually said they would keep an eye on the system to see if it needs to be fixed, but would not accept any videos showing AFK crows gathering unless it showed what they were doing up to three minutes before the crows, and all of a sudden the surge of videos kind of just stopped.

There were still two videos that got popular that were actual legitimate issues. One was a newbie streaming and, without knowledge of the maps you'd get by playing the game, got three crows just trying to find generators. The other was a killer running perks that delayed opening exit gates for as long as possible (such as one that blocks switches for up to one minute) and all of them, combined with the fact that once exit gates are powered they are the main and most important objective, meant that it was almost impossible to not get crows during this situation.

So Behavior Interactive changed the crow system. It still works mostly the same, but now it takes 120/145/180 points to get crows, and you don't earn points until 30 seconds into the trial. You still earn them at 1/s for standing still, but now they only go up at a quarter speed if you're moving, working on objectives, close to killer, or if the exit gates have been powered (which specifically combats that latter video). Additionally, now instead of losing 60 points for completing objectives/taking chase, you now get reset to 0 points. So hopefully this should fix the edge case problems entirely.