All week, we’ve been covering the fallout from Dune Awakening’s latest update, which had a not insignificant portion of the playerbase up in arms owing to the fact that it accidentally flagged newly PvE areas in the Deep Desert back to PvP again. This unfortunately caused many players to lose their bases as PvP players swarmed back into those areas and kicked over all the sandcastles as they do. Affected players were quitting in droves and even calling for a rollback, though nobody familiar with Funcom’s live development history really expected anything to happen.

Well, turns out yes and no. There’s no rollback, but Funcom is doing something about it, including compensation for players affected.

“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.” [Emphasis ours.]

Funcom – actually, it’s signed Joel, Vlad, Scott, Ole and the Funcom team, which is a nice touch – also apologizes to players who’ve lost other items through different bugs; the team says the devs and CS are working on a backlog of players affected as well as addressing prevention.

Finally, the studio reiterates its plan to “remove all identified exploits (third party cheat engines, client hacks, or in-game exploitation of game mechanics” in accordance with the team’s zero-tolerance policy, which has already led to “action on several hundred players who have abused exploits.”

“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,” Funcom says.