Decided to share my story and why I even wanted to play the game under a virtual machine.
So due to having to work from home I decided to convert my desktop to a server running esxi. As well as invest in hardware such as a dock for my laptop, cables, stand, etc.
Now, before this I tried looking up whether new world doesn’t mind being in a VM. And all I could find was, that people have no issues whatsoever playing in one nor getting into any trouble. However, once I tried actually playing the game I was greeted by a strange message (character select) that when put into google, I found a thread saying there is an issue with the servers (albeit an old thread). So I just gave it a day. Still the same message, tried contacting the customer support, explained the situation and was told to verify the game files (oh no, the copy pasta procedure). But it actually helped? (sort of). Now I get a message saying I can’t play under a VM instead. I then found a thread announcing a policy change from a week ago or so that new world is going to block virtual machines. I know that some games, that don’t allow virtual machines, do allow hyperv virtual machines. I asked this the customer support rep and was told that they will check that for me. After five minutes or so they left the chat.
So I am left with options: not play new world, hide the fact that the game is in a vm (don’t have the time currently + don’t know how sophisticated amazons detection is - how much would I have to hide and potentially risk amazon getting angry at me for it), play new world on my laptop (doesn’t run well because of how cpu heavy the game is), convert my desktop back to a regular pc and lose all the esxi functionality I use for personal projects/work, try hyperv but potentially lose a couple of hours until I figure out hyperv gpu passthrough etc, play on geforce now (runs horribly even though I am on a fiber +600mbps connection), scrap my whole setup I spent probably over 300€ on and several hours (days).
All this for a policy change that won’t be a solution but a deterrent at best. Sophisticated bots/gold sellers will either find a way to fool the vm detection or find different ways to do what they do. Heck if amazon allows geforce now, that is potentially a huge hole in the plan to battle bots/gold sellers already (which is a vm session anyway).
If anyone would wonder about my setup, I use esxi with gpu passthrough to a vm running standard windows with geforce experience installed (might be a bit tricky to do, depending on your hardware and bios settings) and on my laptop I use moonlight - opensource nvidia gamestream client. Runs great with a bit of a input lag but after a minute you adapt to it, in certain games you don’t notice it at all. Also the way nvidia gamestream works as well as parsec, is that they use whatever display you have. If there is no display output, they just don’t work (team viewer creates it’s own virtual display if there is none, rdp also works in that case). Esxi creates a virtual display but to prevent whatever issues I disabled it (you can search for it on how to do that). Plugged in a dummy hdmi plug, used the custom resolution utility and overidden the resolution to 1080p@144hz (moonlight offers a 144hz option for streaming).