Hello sleepers!
It has been a long time since my last review. Life has been too much the past few months, and Dune: Awakening has taken a hefty chunk of hours from my life as well. It is one of the few games where I have managed 100% completion on the achievements! As of now, I have over 1500 hours on my main account, and with my two alt accounts, I am easily sitting at around 2000+ hours.
A lot has changed in the sands of Arrakis since I first set foot in Sietch Jacurutu. The game’s mechanics have evolved, the much-anticipated self-hosted private servers have finally been live for a few months, and the Deep Desert has been split to give PvE players a fighting chance against the griefers.
But this article isn’t just a standard game review. This is a chronicle of my interactions with a specific player and a public service announcement for my server and my friends. The Eastern Shield Wall is currently undergoing a massive architectural purge. My Guild leader and I are rebuilding all my bases, one by one. In a few weeks, nothing will remind anyone of a player named MKos. We are calling it Project de-MKos-cification.
The Setup and the Griefer Problem
I love survival crafting games with lore and good visuals, and Dune has it all. I bought it on a gray market for 17€, endured the full servers of the early days, and slowly progressed from a sandbike to my first ornithopter. The moment you start flying in Dune: Awakening is the moment the world gets bigger.
But the endgame was plagued by griefers. The Deep Desert used to be entirely PvP, meaning if you wanted endgame materials like Titanium, Stravidium, or Large Spice Fields, you had to risk hours of grinding only to have some coward in a scout ‘thopter rocket your carrier to death for absolutely zero loot. They didn’t gain anything; they just wanted to ruin your day. Funcom eventually split the Deep Desert and introduced the self-hosted servers we are enjoying now, but before those fixes landed, the public servers were the Wild West of toxicity.
It was in this chaotic era that I crossed paths with MKos.
Meeting MKos: The Honeymoon Phase
I was camping a small spice field one day, recording for a YouTube video, when another player landed right on top of it. Not wanting a confrontation, I backed off. That player was MKos. He looked me up, invited me to his massive base near the second trader, and actually gifted me 200 spice melange, which was huge for me at the time. I was eternally grateful.
We started playing together. He helped me move, and he even built my bases for me. Today, I basically own a full neighborhood in the Eastern Shield Wall because of the work he put in.
Communication, however, was tricky. He is Russian and spoke broken English. He dictated his thoughts via voice-to-text on Telegram, and I had to run them through multiple translation tools to make sense of them. At first, whenever he sounded abrasive or rude, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I chalked it up to “lost in translation.”
But let me tell you a universal truth: a persistent pattern of negative words, insults, and belittling behavior bypasses any translation excuse. It is not an error; it is a behavioral baseline.
The God Complex and Hypocrisy
MKos operated with a super megalomania that I haven’t seen in my 22 years of playing MMOs. He thought he was a god, and the rest of us were his little insects. If he invited people to a group, they were elite. If I invited my real-life friends (like Nikos) or new players we met, he threw a tantrum.
He claimed to be a champion of the new player experience. Do you want to know how he helped new players? By depriving them of resources! I had friends who were just starting out, trying to farm small spice fields in the Hagga Basin. They would land, compact the spice, and suddenly the almighty MKos -a guy sitting on 70,000 spice melange in his bank- would swoop in and steal their compactions.
Do you know what I did to help new players? I built a tall base near Imperial Testing Station 10 that provided shade, free water, and protection from sandstorms and sandworms for anyone to use while they farmed Floor Sand. He went around stealing scraps from noobs.
Our dungeon runs were a nightmare. Despite the game’s mechanics heavily favoring melee and tactical cover, MKos insisted on playing like John Rambo. He would stand out in the open, blasting with a disruptor, pull aggro from all the melee enemies, die because he shield was down while shooting the gun, and then flame me in the chat. I even sent him a video showing how to use the environment for cover. He took it as an insult.
The Landsraad Obsession and the Breaking Point
The final straw revolved around the game’s garbage Landsraad system and a fabricated drama over a base.
MKos was obsessed with his Cyrillic-named guild’s ranking in the Landsraad. He constantly busted my balls to do these daily missions, ignoring the fact that the houses opened at 9 AM when I was at work and are done/completed way before 5 PM, the time I stop working and can play. I refused to waste my time on a system that gave zero tangible rewards just to stroke his ego.
Because I wouldn’t blindly obey him, he started lying. We had some new friends transfer to our server. They saw an abandoned base belonging to a former player. a streamer named Zhoxie that I have mentioned a few times in this blog. I asked Zhoxie on her stream if she cared about it; she said no, she was never coming back. I asked MKos seven times if he wanted to keep the base since he built it. He gave zero straight answers. So, I let my new friends claim the spot.
MKos lost his mind. He accused me of “selling land to Harkonnens” (which is impossible since I didn’t own the land and no money was exchanged) and went on a massive insult spree in Telegram.
The PDF, The Fallout, and The PSA
I am a debater, and I do not tolerate lies. I wrote a comprehensive, 16-page PDF document (which I am attaching to this post for everyone to read and laugh at) breaking down every single logical fallacy in his Telegram meltdown. Final tally? 9 outright lies, 6 contradictions, and 5 attempts at gaslighting.
The funniest part? Nikos and the new players we spend time with already couldn’t stand MKos before they read the PDF. After they read it? It just cemented what we all already knew.
He kicked me from his group and revoked my access to his bases. I removed him from mine.
I am writing this article and using his real in-game nickname as a Public Service Announcement. New friends of mine have started playing on this server. I suspect (though it is speculation) that he might be lurking in my OGComfuzio Twitch chat to gather intel and target my social circle, trying to pull the same manipulative crap on them. I’ve warned them, and they know they don’t have to pick sides just because they know me, but I have a duty to call out this behavior.
People ask me why I haven’t blocked him in-game. It’s simple: Threat Intelligence. Blocking him only hides his chat from me. I leave that channel open so I can monitor the global chat like a system log. If he starts spewing bullshit and lies about me or my friends on the server, I want to see the incoming traffic so I can shut it down immediately.
Dune: Awakening is in a much better state now. The private servers are exactly what this game needed, and my time is spent enjoying the sands with actual friends. As for the Eastern Shield Wall, the de-MKos-cification is running full speed. Once the projects are completed, I will upload a new image from my new hood.
Good riddance, and let the spice flow.
