Dune Awakening Has Me Thinking About Ashes of Creation

 

 I haven't posted about Ashes of Creation in a while as I made a decision to try and avoid getting myself to intertwined in it's affairs after the whole situation with Narc went down.  Yet the more I play Dune Awakening and follow the community reaction to it's mechanics the more I think back to what Steven Sharif has planned for Ashes of Creation.

Ashes of Creation, like Dune Awakening, envisions an end game centered on PvP and player conflict for limited resources.  In Dune that is the Deep Desert zone and in Ashes it will be more traditional fantasy RPG contention over dungeons and zones.  Throughout each game players have ways of interacting with each other; both positive and negative.

 It is the negative interactions that worry me the most as the general experience in Dune has shown the worse side of gamers.  If there is some way the game allows a player to do something to another player in Dune it is being done and often done in a way to avoid the consequence of the action.  

 Blocking a player ship so they can't take off?  Unfortunately happens too often in the safe zones.  Purposely causing the worm to appear faster near a player risking all of their gear getting destroyed?  Happens.  Training NPCs to destroy powered down bases?  It's a new national pastime in Dune Awakening and while a powered down base is likely from an inactive player there is no doubt a player that stepped away for a vacation that will come back to a very rude awakening.

 And it is those sorts of crappy player interactions that worry me when it comes to games like Ashes of Creation and Steven's intent for the game to be full PvP with only a reputation system as a guard rail.  Kill players too frequently and your player killer character will be banished from society and weakened.  Of course as we are hearing from the Ashes open alpha testing this just means players find ways to get around this by training NPCs over players or tricking players into attacking them first so they can retaliate.  The sort of crappy player behaviors that adapt to code changes designed to stop them faster than the developers like to admit.

 I want Ashes of Creation to bring back that big open world idea we all want out of an MMORPG.  I want there to be freedom and surprises to find in how players interact together.  I am just worried that Dune Awakening is proving to me that us as players can't be trusted in the virtual world.