Dune Awakening’s ornithopters are being used as griefing tools again, this time against PvE pl

Chris Neal 2025-06-30 00:00:00

Apparently there’s a stupid arms race beginning between Dune: Awakening’s developers and some of its worst players. Now that “goomba stomping” has been patched out of the survival MMO, a certain subset of players have found a new way to use ornithopters in unintentional ways: by pinning PvE players to the ground.

Reports are coming in from Reddit of players patrolling the Hagga Basin zone in their ornithopters searching for spice blows, flying towards them in order to land their vehicles on top of individual players to keep them away from the resource, then use a thumper to summon a sand worm. The same player edited their post to point out how hunting parties in thopters appear to be specifically chasing him and that he faced threats of doxxing when he called the behavior out in the game’s general chat.

“Griefers are in an all-out war against everyone else on their server, and yet there’s zero way for solos to band together to stop it,” the post argues. “I’ve been in WoW general and other horrible chats but Dune general is the most toxic chat that I’ve ever seen.”

While some players are calling the account anecdotal, a few others have chimed in with similar experiences, while others point out that the majority of those who are seeking to grief people are infesting the higher population servers while lower pop ones are reportedly pretty chill. There hasn’t been any official response from Funcom on the matter (yet?), and there are certainly no lack of suggestions (chief of which being to disable vehicle collision in PvE zones), but yet again some bad apples are spoiling the bunch.

source: Reddit via IGN
Comment: Reads: