It seemseverybody is headed to Arrakisfor the summer, asDune: Awakening’s player count is higher than anyone expected. The MMO is set in an alternate timeline where the Fremen are missing and Lisan al Gaib never showed up. The planet is engaged in a constant war between various factions.
While the bulk of the game revolves around survival and base building, Dune: Awakening has some PvP elements too. If you’re not busyrunning from sandworms, another player might come along to steal your moisture. However, it seems the community is fed up with a particular tactic that seems like it’s straight out of the Harkonnen playbook. Thankfully, Funcom has announced that it will soon be addressed.
The Ol' Ornithopter Smash
It seems the ornithopters in the game are much sturdier than the ones in the movies as players have been using them to literally crush their enemies. The tactic involves simply smashing your vessel onto an enemy player over and over again till the enemy is dead. The fact that the ornithopter takes little to no damage when it smacks the ground only makes this sort of griefing more viable.
“I’m really disappointed to see that you cannot win versus an orni crushing you every time,” said one of the many complaints on Reddit. Thankfully, a developer from Funcom replied saying they’re already looking into it. “Yeah sorry about this,” said Joel from Funcom. “We have people working on fixing the goomba stomping ASAP.”
The community has been complaining about this sort of ‘orni-stomping’ since launch. This sort of griefing isn’t in the spirit of the game, especially because the vehicles don’t take any damage. It’s another thing if someone managed to crash an ornithopter onto an opponent and survive, but currently the odds are in favour of whoever has an ornithopter.
“I mean it should still kill people, however, air vehicles should definitely take damage from hitting the ground this hard,” suggested one of the comments. While others said that it should only take damage in PvP scenarios. Funcom hasn’t said how it will be dealing with this issue, but we can assume that ornithopters will start blowing up pretty soon.
