Dune Awakening: We finally got ganked

Years ago, back in the EverQuest days, I was a guide on the Tallon Zek server. All the “Zek” servers were PvP servers under different rule sets. Rallos Zek was full-on PvP, kill anyone. Tallon Zek grouped the player races into two teams, Team Good and Team Evil. You couldn’t attack anyone on your own team, but the other team was fair game. I don’t think your teams even shared a language.

Players could send petitions to guides just by typing ‘/petition <message>’, and they did. Guiding was a lot of fun. You could help out other players, you’d get invited to weddings and sometimes asked to officiate them. Back then, players had to petition to get a surname, and it was fun to do those, too. We’d get to do events. It was a lot of free customer service, but getting to interact with players in such a way was, for many guides, more fun than playing the game itself.

My favorite petitions, on TZ, were the ones we got from players who had just been killed by the other team. And not just once; they’d been killed repeatedly. And their stuff had been looted.

Now, there were rules around ganking. You couldn’t just stand by a zone boundary and burn down anyone who came through. Zoning was a process, and just because you could see a player zoning in, it didn’t mean the player had control yet. So the rule was: the player had to move their character. Once that happened: fair game.

My role, as a guide, was to watch invisibly to ensure the campers were following the rules. If they were, there was nothing I could do. Guilds would absolutely prevent the other team from using particular zones at all.

When there wasn’t anything happening not allowed by the rules, I had to tell the complaining player that there was nothing I could do. What I wanted to say was, “don’t you know what kind of server you’re playing on?”

Calrain and I have been working in the Deep Desert for a few weeks now. The Deep Desert, in Dune: Awakening, is split between PvE content in the southern half and PvP content in the northern half. All the good spice blows happen in the PvP half, and it makes a certain kind of sense to place your base in that northern half each week to have quick access to all the good spice. It’s easiest to find the high level ores and other materials there, too.

We’ve typically been in the PvP half because, as far as we knew, almost nobody was even playing in the Deep Desert and we hadn’t had any sign PvP was happening. We built our Carry-All, the largest ornithopter in the game, in the PvP zone… but I was so paranoid that I flew it back to our home bases on the Eastern Shield Wall days before the weekly Coriolis storm reshaped the Deep Desert, erasing anything left there.

Last week, we placed the base in the PvE section, as close to the PvP section as we could without going over. But with the priority this week being spice harvesting, we placed it on the other side of that invisible line.

We spent hours yesterday harvesting spice and doing high level PvE content for the very rarest and most prized mats. We intended to do more of that today, and then start carting the stuff back to our bases in the Hagga Basin to turn into vehicles and gear.

I was just wasting time on the internet after my morning chores, talking with the Malifaux folks about a tournament they were organizing, when I saw Calrain report that he’d logged in in the middle of the Deep Desert, surrounded by the ruins of our base. His vehicles were scorched skeletal twisted bits of metal; he couldn’t leave. (Well, he could, by deliberately killing himself and respawning at his Hagga base, but that isn’t the best option). He asked me to bring my assault thopter out to grab him and the bits of the base they didn’t find worth looting. I put my spare scout thopter in my pocket for him and headed out.

What could we do? We were in a PvP zone. Just because we hadn’t encountered any PvP before didn’t mean it wasn’t happening, and it was our own damn fault. We loaded up the two thopters with the remains of the base and headed back; we spent the next couple of hours farming PvE content back in Hagga Basin to get the bits and bobs necessary to get Calrain’s replacement assault thopter and buggy built.

So: next week, our big base is firmly in the southern half of the desert. But we might have a smaller forward base for water and dust storm protection. But anytime we’re logging off — we’re carting the good stuff back to safety first.

A word to the wise from the Deep Desert: It’s a PvP zone. Think before you go. It can happen to you.