Ding ding ding! Good news from funcom!
April 9th of 2026 Funcom gave us the best news ever! https://duneawakening.com/news/developer-update-april-2026/
It took them almost a year to understand that 80% of the players (of those which have remained that is, because the 95% of the player base have quit long time again) are PvE players. No shockers there. Dune: Awakening is a crafting game that players have to farm constantly materials and forcing players to go through forced PvP in order to get their endgame materials had the results we all expected, a player drop by 95%.
PvP in Dune: Awakening is completely pointless. Games that have PvP elements have some kind of counter and reward. Dune: Awakening has nothing of the sort. There is no K/D counter, there is absolutely no reward for killing another player. It would have if for example the attacking party was going after the defending party AFTER they have cleared a dungeon and have loot on them but the attacking parties in Dune: Awakening are made by retards who go in to kill the defending party while they are still in the first mob room…so yeah they kill the defending party, congrats on the kill, you can’t show it happen anyway and a middle finger for not taking any loot from the defeated enemies.
Kudos! You guys are giving retards a worse definition that it is already!
So 80% of the remaining players play the game as it supposed to be played and 20% of the players are there to annoy the remaining 80% with forced PvP.
But all those things are about to change. I will explain what will be the new problem though if Funcom doesn’t do this the correct way.
As the link above says:
Dune: Awakening offers a variety of playstyles. However, with over 80% of our lifetime players exclusively engaging with PvE content, the convergence of PvE and PvP, particularly in the Deep Desert, didn’t align with our objectives and remained a significant topic of discussion.
Combining our goals, the in-game data, and the results of player surveys, made it clear that we needed to rethink our approach and underline the PvE-first nature of the game. While PvP conflict is an important aspect of Dune: Awakening for some, it must be optional and incentivized rather than required for progression.
New repeatable gameplay loops in Chapter 3 have alleviated some of these concerns. These new features include Specializations, reworked Landsraad Missions and Faction Rank progression, and new scalable Testing Stations.
To further emphasize the PvE-first approach, we are making the following changes in Patch 1.3.20.0:
All PvP zones in Hagga Basin will be disabled across all official Worlds.
All official Worlds will have separate Deep Desert instances you can choose from:
A PvE instance for pure survival and exploration experience with no player combat. There is no PvP in this instance across any of the rows, including Shipwrecks.
A PvP instance with the classic high-stakes environment and open-world conflict across rows B through I. To make sure the rewards match the risk, the yield from mining and spice harvesting will be multiplied by 2.5 in PvP areas.
By separating these experiences, we allow players to hunt for spice or explore Imperial Testing Stations without the constant threat of a blade in the dark, while ensuring those who live for the thrill of the hunt have a dedicated arena to prove their mettle and the rewards to make it worthwhile.
They will be splitting the Deep Desert in 2 different instances, 1 that would be ALL PvE, as it should have been and 1 that would be PvP above the A row for the griefers to have fun.
Now where is the problem?
The Deep Desert is deeply (wink wink) problematic as it is with the compactors plague. I understand that new players do not have access to crawlers in order to gather the spice with correct way and they rely on the compactor, the DD as it is now, every spice field in the PvE zone gets hammered with 20+ players with compactos making it impossible to harvest. The sandworm constantly gets triggered and attacks and in general a Medium Spice field can take up to 5 minutes to clean it up, with the compactors hell it takes 30 minutes if not longer.
Now, if Funcom doesn’t limit the usage of the compactor to Small and/or Medium Spice Fields, the harvesting will be extreme difficult in every Spice Field!
Griefers: If you think that griefers will be infecting only the PvP Deep Desert instance you are either naive or stupid or a bit of both. The game as is has griefers harassing players in PvE zone with griefers landing on top of your ornithopter so you can’t take off, they are pushing your vehicles out of the spice fields, they are planting thumpers to attract the sandworm and in general use your imagination. There is absolutely no protection even in the PvE zone from the griefers.
Why do I call them griefers and not PvPers? Well, in order to PvP, you have to agree on a battle or if you initiate one, stand and fight. “PvPers” in Dune: Awakening are little kids who still piss their feet when they pee. They will attack you when you are farming and brag about it but the moment you stand your ground and you are ready to attack, they run away like terrified little girls whilst they still brag on the chat for their victory that never happen of course. So they are just that, griefers and not PvPers. To be a PvPer require balls, they do not have those.
So the game will be splitting the Deep Desert into 2 instances, why do you still cry about it?
1)I do not cry about it. Stating facts or presenting events that for sure will happen is not a cry about.
2)I also do not care about it much. This game is mostly solo/single player and I was asking for Self Hosted option from the beta days, so now that they will allow it, I do have the hardware and knowledge to self host my own World and Hagga Basin. I still have a few questions for the Devs about the self hosted worlds, I know it is one way trip from Official Servers to the self hosted and there will be no option to return. Their excuse is that private server players will corrupt the market of the official servers…only the official servers are way too corrupt because of the money duplication bug. Before that, we were happy to have 3 mil solari in our accounts, now we have 10 bil and still can’t buy anything from the market. The market provides abundant materials but the good gear coming from the Chapter 3 Dungeons is super limited and super expensive.
So for me, because I have done the new abilities to high level, I don’t want to lose that progression. I know if I move my character to my server, this progression will follow me but I want to know if I will have the ability to set rates for this progression. The ideal scenario for me would be to leave my character in the server I am at. Reduce power usage and generation and only keep on doing the daily missions. It is only 5 per day -unless they give us again a reset of 35+double xp- and start over a fresh character in my own private server. No need to admin myself to max everything, I would just like to have in my owner server what I already have in the public server, I will work for the rest as I have already done in this game all this time.
What do I suggest to funcom in order to improve the game?
Well, I do not care about the PvP instance, I am not a PvP player nor Dune: Awakening has the base or basics for it (no K/D Counter, no rewards for it).
-Make that instance super small so griefers can grief each other faster without spending hours and hours to locate each other on the map.
-Remove the x2.5 harvesting rewards, “PvPers” will go there for PvP and not to farm. The only reason you are putting the x2.5 modifier is to lure PvE players who can’t farm in the PvE DD instance because of what I will write in the PvE DD.
-Remove also the damage to the gear from deaths in PvP.
-Give some kind of reward for killing each other over there, some skin or something.
PvE DD
-Please funcom put a restriction on compactors! I know you will not, you will use greed of PvE players to annoy each others so some of them will go to the PvP DD to farm “in peace” and this will just give an excuse to the griefers, now under the mantle of PvPer to attack them!
-Add griefers protection, for example, if my ornithopter or crawler is on the ground and another ornithopter comes to land on it or block it in any way, make the attacking ornithopter explode and to take severe durability damage. Don’t worry, griefers will use glitches to repair it anyway. Or if you can’t destroy the attacking vehicle, make it to start taking severe damage to the point if the griefer DOES NOT lift up in the next 2 seconds, to be super damaged and crashland, let them dig their own grave.
-Griefer report button that will actually work. Add an option in the game for players in the PvE zone to report griefers, no need for account actions such as ban, clearly this griefer is the wrong instance, this button with 2-3 reports should be force teleport the griefer to the PvP DD instance and the only penalty should be: not to be able to go to A row to exit the PvP DD for the next 2 hours. Of course repeated offenders should be having block access to the PvE DD.
My 0.02$
