Hello Sleepers,
This letter begins with an apology.
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. 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.
We’re incredibly sorry that this happened and we want to acknowledge that this should have been handled better. 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.
Moving Forward
As we approach the end of the launch phase, we wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the other issues that are happening in the game.
Our primary focus, which continues over the next weeks and months, will be to remove all identified exploits (third party cheat engines, client hacks, or in-game exploitation of game mechanics). In addition, we will be hard at work improving the game, adding quality of life features, and addressing critical gameplay issues.
We have zero tolerance for the type of player behaviour that has an impact on the experience of other players, and we will continue to focus on ensuring that players can enjoy the game as it is intended. If you see someone cheating or exploiting, please report them to us using the available reporting channels.
We’ve taken action on several hundred players who have abused exploits, cheats and hacks, and there will be more waves of bans coming as we identify further culprits.
In addition, we have fixed the following exploits thus far:
- Account/Permission spoofing
- Building Dismantle Item Duplication
- Increased Damage/Insta Kill attacks
- Vehicle Inventory/VBT Item Duplication
- Vehicle Ownership takeover
- Projectile weapon rapid fire (rockets from ornithopters)
- Durability Repair
We have a team dedicated exclusively to fighting hackers and fixing exploits. 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.
Item & Vehicle Loss
We apologize to people who have lost vehicles or other resources due to various bugs in the game. These events can be rather thorny to untangle because there is legitimate item loss due to game mechanics, which makes it difficult to identify item loss due to bugs.
At launch we lacked the tooling and logging to identify and reimburse all circumstances of item loss. But we have been working on improving our tools so that we can better reimburse players for vehicle losses due to bugs. There is a backlog of customer support requests, so we beg your patience when waiting for tickets to be resolved. Our aim is to resolve support tickets as quickly as we can, including tickets that were closed near launch when we weren’t able to properly reimburse players. If you have lost a vehicle to a bug and require assistance, please submit a ticket in game and include vehicle type, tier, and when/how you lost the vehicle.
The development team has been also working to address the root causes of the item loss in game. We have a dedicated team focused on mitigating vehicle/item loss on server crashes, disconnects, server mesh transfers, and travelling between maps.
To our players, we appreciate you and your continued support. We have a lot of exciting things planned for Dune: Awakening and, despite a few bumps in the road, we’re really excited for what the future holds. We hope you are as well!
Sincerely Joel, Vlad, Scott, Ole and the Funcom team
