Whereas I would argue that Dune’s failure stems from multiple different issues. Until very recently they did not offer any option for either singleplayer or private server use - those factors alone cut out a massive portion of the potential playebase compared to CE. Another factor that prevented me from being interested was the fact that it is a hybrid game - PVE for the early game, but (at least initially presented as) forced PVP in the endgame. This would be the worst of both worlds - those that want PVP would be forced to wait and not able to PVP except under specific circumstances, while those who don’t want PVP are forced to deal with it at some point despite not wanting to.
While I would argue that is only true for those that want PVP. A massive proportion of the CE playerbase does not PVP and does not ever want to. And yet those branches of the game are still played long-term by a greater proportion of the playerbase than those that do PVP. There are many many players like me who find plenty of replayability in the game without PVP.
I agree with you that better use of server settings might help keep the balance between PVP and PVE (maybe), but as you say, they did not go down that route so we are where we are. I am aware that PVPers also spend a lot of time engaging with the PVE aspects of the game, but there are significant differences - you engage with it as a means to an end, doing what is necessary to set up for better PVP and, by your own admission, you have less interest in it, find it less replayable and would only engage with it because it allows you to get what you need for PVP. We engage with it as the purpose of our game - we enjoy the PVE elements. That creates a different focus and makes the game experience quite different.
As for the failed balance between PVP and PVE, that is most easily demonstrated by the many many elements of the PVE game that have been nerfed, removed or simplified in order to fix problems in PVP. (Those may not always have been the best solutions for PVP either - the devs have historically often had the wrong response to the small, loud group of complainers from PVP.) We all know how every time there is any slight settling in the PVP meta,there is immediately some loud group demanding ‘nerf this’ ‘remove that’. The smart ones ask for other elements to be brought up to a suitable level to counter the meta, but they are always drowned out by the loud complainers. And over and over again, PVE has lost elements as a result - many of those elements may not seem important to PVPers, but often to PVEers they are a significant part of the game being removed or nerfed to the point of unenjoyability.
To use a non-controversial example - when horses where introduced, they fought back when attacked (like warhorses do). This created an imbalance in PVP - a player with horse and follower had an advantage over a player with only one of them - and I think most PVEers understood and accepted that this was a problem. Initially the devs tried the solution of ‘you can have a horse or a follower’, but that didn’t work because it just meant no one would use a horse. So then they moved to this situation where horses ‘run away’ if attacked - except that has never really worked properly; either they don’t run away, or they run into combat and just stand there, or they run away in circles with enemies chasing them and it becomes comically irritating to finish the fight. So to fix a genuine problem for PVP, a mechanism had to be created that generates perpetual irritation in PVE.
And there are many other similar examples; things that PVE has lost to fix real (or perceived) problems in PVP. That is what I mean by the problem of balancing the needs of the two game modes. PVPers may feel some of these losses as well, but not as intensely as PVEers, because for PVEers that is the game, while for PVPers that is only setting up for the part of the game you want to engage with.
As for the cheaters and hacking - yes, that is absolutely a problem, and it is something that needs more work put into it. But it is also a much more complex issue. As others have pointed out - global banking cannot entirely solve securing its systems from hackers, and it has much more budget available to fix its problems than a (relatively small) games company (Tencent is huge, of course, but is just a financial link, it is not going to make major investment into one small game - Funcom and Inflexion are far smaller and CE’s playerbase (indeed sandbox survival genre playerbase as a whole) is really very small in terms of the overall industry or Tencent’s part of it.) If there are 100 devs working on the game and 1000 (or 10000) hackers working on breaking the game, it is obvious which side is always going to win. The amount of time and money that would need to be spent combating this level of hacking would mean that legitimate players would need to be paying as much to play as the cheats are paying to buy their cheats from the actual hackers - and that can range into the hundreds or thousands each month, per player. To raise the prices that high would certainly kill the game (and any game) immeditately.
Certainly Funcom could, and should, apply harder sanctions to these people - but even there, that would solve little - the cheats that spend money on cheat programs are going to think nothing of spending a small amount of money making a new account and starting again.
All of these issues are why I would never again buy a survival sandbox game that tries to also do PVP - fixing the problems creates problems for the game I do want to play. And fighting back against the cheats and hackers costs money and dev-hours that could be spent on fixing bugs or adding more content. As I have said (and Oduda also) - CE was sold with all of these modes and pplatforms, and therefore it must support all of these modes and platforms. I have said before that I would be as angry if CE abandoned PVP as I would be if they abandoned singleplayer. But if I was looking for a new game, I would be looking for one that focused on the areas that interest me and did not try to work for such a broad selection of different needs and interests. (Dune did not do that - as I said earlier, it tried to force a hybrid where all PVPers had to wait before they could get a bit of PVP and all PVEers eventually had to engage with PVP. That is the ultimate result of your belief that PVP is the only way to get replayability - that was explicitly the Dune devs trying (and failing) to fulfill that concept.)
