I love when things start going off the rails in an MMO, and while Dune: Awakening’s ongoing Deep Desert troubles are frustrating for fans, they’re also a fascinating experiment in balancing competing player incentives. Developer Funcom recently nerfed the endgame area’s PVP potential, turning almost half of it into PVE-only territory. That has unintentionally now resulted in the land covered in a bunch of giant boxes. Here’s why.
Dune: Awakening, which has continued attracting lots of players on PC despite a minor fall-off from its peak at launch, is a survival crafting game. The natural progression system is harvesting stuff to build stuff to harvest more stuff to build bigger stuff. Eventually, that requires players to venture out into the largely PVP-centric Deep Desert in order to access the rarest Tier 6 materials. Early on, that meant getting preyed upon by roving bands of veterans who could easily outgun their weaker opponents (or drop entire ships on them).
So Funcom did the sensible thing and made the PVP section of the map smaller with further plans to iterate on PVP mechanics and make it feel more engaging and fair. The studio also greatly increased the number of T6 resource nodes available in PVE areas. That patch went live earlier this week. The Deep Desert also wipes every week, deleting all players structures to keep things fresh and interesting. So some players were a bit surprised to find that shortly after the wipe this week, there were already resource nodes boarded up by other players, preventing them from being accessed.
“DD PVE T6 mats experience, a base on each nodes,” wrote one player on the Dune: Awakening subreddit today, alongside a picture what looks like a bunch of giant raised flower beds. “Well, looks similar to my Server,” wrote another in response. “There goes another week without T6 mats or progression unless I want to get slaughtered by the Russian zerg that basically owns my server’s DD...” Another angry player in a separate thread shared a similar image and story. “First day of the wipe, found around 15 bases built over titanium nodes in PvE area,” the wrote. “Third week of people being rats.”
Dune: Awakening fans speculate that this latest form of griefing is aimed at getting desperate players to venture out into the PVP zones and force them to engage with hostile gangs who are otherwise bored of the underlying progression and base-building mechanics. “It’s not even productive for the person doing it,” one player lamented. “You are not going to get regular enough use out of that ore for it to be worth farming, and no one gets the ores at all if a significant number of people do that.”
What are the solutions? Some fans have suggested making resource nodes no-build zones, while others wonder if there is a way to simply have the resources spawn outside of the structure. Others have called for the spawn points to be randomized each wipe, giving non-griefers a fighting chance to get some resources before the dust settles. Then there are those who think resources like Titanium and Stravidium should just spawn back in Hagga Basin, Dune: Awakening’s newb-friendly starting area.
In the meantime, PVE and PVP players are facing another stalemate in the Deep Desert and even some griefers are getting bored. “We found and downed another guy, landed by him and he tells us that it was his 4th lost Thopter today, he didn’t know how to pocket or something,” wrote a PVP raider on the subreddit. “We gave him a ride back, gave him more melange than his small refinery could dream of making in a day’s worth of grinding and our old mk5 assault. After that, we realised that we aren’t built for Funcom’s creative vision of the endgame.”
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