There is always that point in a video game where you just had enough. I’d say going into the Deep Desert accelerated that a lot for me. My plan of taking every other week off from it was not working.

Granted, this was still at a time before a few changes ended up coming into the game. At the time of writing this, I don’t feel those changes would have prevented this. After all, I did cross over 500 hours played in Dune. Sadly, close to 300 hours of that must have been spent in the Deep Desert, feeling like I was barely making any forward momentum.

During my weekly break from the Deep Desert, I ended up doing something rather interesting. I switch factions. While you can only do this once. I got tired of my faction never winning.

This involved running a couple of not-so-long missions. With getting some house, Atreides standing for doing so. Once you switch, you end up keeping your same rank. You can also go and buy that faction’s blueprints that you switched to at the discounted rate they offer their members.

While the Atreides saw me as a traitor. They were more than willing to take me in. They also did it in a way in the storyline that makes sense, so that I can’t go back to the Harkonnen faction. While I won’t spoil anything beyond that.

Beyond that, it was quite a light week. Other than enjoying being on the winning side of the Landsraad. It was a rather lazy week. I mostly just logged in to see what rewards from the latest Landsraad missions, and that was it.

The Deep Desert week started like most. Everything got hauled out from Hagga Baison to a dump base I had set up in the first row of the Deep Desert. From there, our crawler would get assembled, and once a base was up, I'd fly over in the Carrier our high-value items. From there, it was time to get the crafting machines up and operational.

Two weeks prior ended up being one of the better Deep Desert weeks I would have had. This left me in a situation where I just needed to get resources for future updates. We had gear and a lot of other stuff already crafted. Any spice or ores I'd get from the Deep Desert this week would be extra. I also wanted a nice stockpile for repairs.

For the time being. It was decided that any extra spice or ores I'd get this week would go into filling our main base with higher-end crafting machines. That way, we could get some higher yields for our efforts on the lower-tier crafting and materials. There would also not be any need to set up in the Deep Desert just to afford to craft something that required a higher-tier crafting machine.

Every week, I do end up spending time in the Deep Desert. A guild member would set up a new base. He has lots of fun making something new every week. Since we were now Atreides and could get their tile sets cheaply. The base reflected being in that new faction.

This is also where things start to fall off quite quickly. Week after week, the server population, not just for our server but for every server, got smaller. You would think that would allow you to have more time without running into gankers to go gathering, right? Wrong.

The PvE players were quitting in mass. The developers who handshape the Deep Desert map every week thought it would be a great idea to ensure important resources were next to important points of interest. As to why a group of gankers fly around the map for 15 minutes looking for the couple of remaining players, when the right map layout is used, it could be done in under 10 minutes.

I had also been in the Deep Desert long enough to be quite tired of wanting to spend any time farming in the PvE section. This was before they changed ore spawns back in Hagga basin, back when you still had to go and farm it in the Deep Desert.

So, it was to go into the PvP section or go AFK at the base in the PvE side of things. At least in the new base, I had some amazing spots to AFK while I would manage the base's water supply.

While there used to be certain hours of the day that you could go out on the server I was on and farm without anyone causing trouble. That was gone. The couple of groups of gankers left on the server were now playing 18 hours a day. Why? I have no idea. There was less and less for them to do the longer they were online. As more and more people have just stopped logging in.

On one late-night session, I ended up just giving up on farming any of the large spice fields. With where they were on the map, it did not take long for gankers to check them all and anything else.

I now had to just stick to medium fields. While I did manage to get a few spices out of a couple of them. Even that was starting to push my luck. As with any sound of another player incoming at this point, I'd just expect trouble.

It used to be that if the Deep Desert chat was silent. It was a rather relaxing time out in PvP. We were now into the phase of a game where people stop cussing each other out in global chat in a fit of rage. The gankers also learned to stop taunting people in chat as well as which caused the couple remaining PvE farmers to flee, knowing if they were online and active or not. Everyone was just silent for the most part.

During one night, when I thought I had a chance with only 15 players online. I was wrong again. A group of 7 in the same guild of gankers was out hunting. Who did they find? Just me. You see, the remaining players on that server could all have been AFK or not even in the Deep Desert. For all I know, there were just the eight of us.

They nearly got me a couple of times. So, I went and AFK at my base. I then went to sneak off into the PvP section again when I realized they had a player camping outside my base to keep tabs on me.

Within a couple of moments. The gankers showed up. So I went AFK once again. Then I did what I did not want to do. I went around the PvE section of the Deep Desert farming. With a shadow of a ganker's life following in its tail.

I then went and ran my weekly testing stations for points. With some of the gankers waiting outside each one. I found it rather funny. For hours, these people have not farmed in the Deep Desert outside of blueprints for over a month. Wasted hours following around the only player they could find to harass.

You might wonder why certain people never need to farm in Dune. Replaces losing is like they never lost anything at all. Well, that week's patch yet again was supposed to fix duping. Not even a couple of hours into that patch, this is what Arrakeen city looked like. People spam ending themselves in the fashion that dupers use to exploit the game for resources.

That would explain a lot. In a not-so-funny fashion, the developers would announce or put out yet another quick patch to fix duping yet again. With the same thing going down hours later, like every single time.

Final Thoughts

I still ended up collecting enough in the Deep Desert that week to make it worth my time in setting up a base and hauling everything to and back again. We ended up packing up early and getting out of the Deep Desert.

I then went around turning off everything I could at most of our bases besides our main base. I farmed a bunch of fuel cells and filled our bases up with them. I then started to just log in every two weeks or so. I’d pay the taxes, fly around to the bases, and refuel the generators.

Sadly, the game's banking system is a joke. You can barely store anything in it at all. There really is no better solution to taking a long-term break from the game other than logging in every two weeks to stay on top of taxes and fuel, or just letting everything rot.

The once-thriving server I was on, where most people got along. Where you could farm in peace or face the wrath of others on the server that just wanted to hunt the gankers down. Slowly turned into a ghost server with so many buildings on the Hagga Basin I'm on disappearing.

Funny enough, weeks afterward, I noticed the number of sietches (Hagga Basins) on a single server going up. Making me wonder if that is their way of dealing with such a declining game, as content updates don’t really seem to be enough to bring back the player base.

Now, I did have an insane amount of fun in the first 200-300 hours of playing Dune. Beyond that, it stopped being fun. For a modern-day game that is quite amazing. It’s just a shame there were not more PvE content options. I can also only hope the 7 gankers would have no one else to play with but themselves in the ghost town of a game it became.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Dune: Awakening.