The Deep Desert continues to vex Funcom.
The fun thing about videogame patches—and I’m using “fun” in the definitely-ironic sense here—is that sometimes they’ll cause new, interesting, and entirely unanticipated problems: Fix this, break that, it’s the circle of life. Such is the case with a recent update to Funcom’s survival MMO Dune: Awakening, which saw several PvE areas of the Deep Desert to become PvP enabled, resulting in “people suffering an unfortunate amount of lost bases and equipment.”
Funcom has been making some serious changes to Dune: Awakening’s Deep Desert, the endgame zone that put a heavy focus on PvP play at launch, which, turns out, a significant number of players are not into.
This latest change was planned as a part of those efforts, Funcom said in today’s announcement, but “was intended to only occur with the next Coriolis cycle”—essentially a wipe of the Deep Desert—”and not impact the ongoing cycle.”
“We’re incredibly sorry that this happened and we want to acknowledge that this should have been handled better,” Funcom wrote. “We’ve changed our internal processes as a result of this and will be better in the future.
“We are working to reimburse vehicles and items (to the best of our ability) to players who were impacted by this. You can expect the reimbursed materials, items, and vehicle components to show up in the in-game ‘Claim Rewards’ tab by the end of this week.”
On one hand, hey, these things happen. Whomst among us has not had our videogame stuff unexpectedly erased from existence by the fickle finger of fate, right? But on the other, as someone with a tendency to rage over the most minor inconveniences, I can sympathize with complaints. You were doing a thing, and now the thing is gone, and it sucks! Funcom has been reasonably quick in acknowledging the problem and has publicly committed to making it right, though, which is about the best we can ask for at this point.
Looking beyond this latest misstep, Funcom said its “primary focus” is eliminating exploits, identified as “third party cheat engines, client hacks, or in-game exploitation of game mechanics.” It promised “zero tolerance for the type of player behaviour that has an impact on the experience of other players,” and said hundreds of players have already been banned for various sorts of cheats, and that more ban waves are coming.
Funcom concluded by also apologizing to players who have lost vehicles or resources because of bugs, and said it’s working on improvements to how it reimburses players for vehicle losses caused by them (and, of course, on preventing them from happening in the first place).
Those losses can be “thorny to untangle,” the studio said, because there is “legitimate item loss” in the game, not due to bugs but just because you were dicking around a little too much and got caught out. That’s apparently resulted in a backlog of support requests developers are powering through, and so for now, Funcom says, your patience is appreciated.
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