Have you recently lost a vehicle or item in Dune: Awakening in a fashion that wasn’t your fault? If so, you may be entitled to in-game compensation from developers Funcom, who’ve said sorry for a Deep Desert patch “oversight” that wiped out “an unfortunate amount” of bases and gear.
You won’t even have to enlist the services of a friendly neighbourhood Lionel Hutz or Saul Goodman either, DA’s devs are already working to send out replacement stuff to affected folks. They’ve also pledged to tackle the cheating and item loss due to bugs that’ve been plaguing the game since launch.
All of this is outlined in a developer update post Funcom have put live this fine morning, providing some nice June 9th breakfast reading. It kicks off with the Funcom team, including Dune: Awakening’s Joel Bylos, saying sorry for technical missteps while working to rejig the Deep Desert from PvP-only to a thing that also has a bunch of PvE zones.
“On Monday the 7th of July, we patched out a layout change to the Deep Desert which caused several areas of the PvE Deep Desert to become PvP enabled,” they wrote, “This was an oversight in our development process and internal communications, which led to people suffering an unfortunate amount of lost bases and equipment. This change was intended to only occur with the next Coriolis cycle and not impact the ongoing cycle.”
As well as making changes to their processes in the hopes of preventing this sort of thing from happening again, Funcom are working to “reimburse” affected players with vehicles and gear. The devs say “reimbursed materials, items, and vehicle components” should rock up in these players’ claim rewards tab by the end of this week.
Alongside that, the studio say they’re stepping up wider efforts to make sure folks get back any vehicles that end up being banished to the great worm void by bugs, something they say they “lacked the tooling and logging” to start doing right from launch. If your Ornithopter’s gone walkies to the bug dimension, you can submit a ticket in-game that’ll be added to the big pile that’s now being worked through.
Finally, Funcom say their anti-exploit team are taking aim at eliminating all of the cheating and hacking that’s frustrated folks playing properly so far. “Over the next few patches, they will be introducing additional efforts to prevent exploits by increasing security on several client/server communication layer, performing additional penetration testing against common attack vectors, and auditing our item and inventory systems to make sure they are resistant to item duplication,” the devs wrote.
So, there you go. Funcom are on the case. Tell the suited sandworm you put through Harkonnen law school to stop shuffling papers in its teeth.
