Arc Raiders is not Pinball.

2026mar21. I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point pinball machines began "watching" your playing, in a crude manner. If you started on a ball, and then lost it really quickly, the machine would take pity on you and let you re-shoot the same ball. Because playing a round of pinball and finishing in three seconds is not fun for most people.

The developers at Embark have never played pinball.

It's hard to talk about Arc Raiders (released late 2025) in a general sense because there's a lot that needs to be explained to illustrate how strange the path is that Embark has decided to take. So let's pretend you know some things about the game/"extraction shooters." Okay.

1) You can spawn in, and then someone can spawn in almost immediately right behind you, and so forth and so on. It has happened many, many times to people. Since day one. They have not acknowledged this.
2) You can spawn in next to one of the largest/beefiest enemies in the game -- the queen -- and be downed in seconds. It happened to me. "Oh hello"
3) You can spawn in next to a group of 3-5 of the smaller enemies that have different attacks, different modes such that you are downed in seconds.
4) People have spawned in already downed.
5) My favorite: people have spawned in sitting on top of enemies. Good luck with that.

Where/when you spawn, that's on you, and if you are knocked out -- tough darts. You never get your ball back. In GTA5, if you lose a life immediately like that, no one cares, because you don't lose your gear. None of your weapons, ammo, etc. In Arc Raiders, you can gear up with a ton of weapons/ammo to kill one of the larger enemies in the game and be killed immediately because you're sitting on top of an enemy or there are five right next to you or etc. All your gear is gone.

Was it 8 Ball Deluxe that first started with the pity ball? It was decades ago. We had the technology.

You may wish to fight the queen, for example. An average kit -- a heavy gun, a grenade launcher, defibs, some homing grenades, etc -- that's about 100,000 of the in-game currency worth of weapons/health items. You join up with 3-10+ other randos and you're all fighting this thing for anywhere from 3-20 minutes, depending on the gear used, number of people etc. Once you've pretty much used up all of your ammo and are looting the queen for parts, another rando who's been tucked away all this time comes through with a player-killing gun he got with a free kit (you can sign up for a free kit and you get a random gun plus other random weapons/health things) and mops the place up ... because he's a PVPer w/many bullets, and you're PVEers who just dumped everything into a ro-bot.

There's no balance in the game. It's exactly like GTA5. One party risks everything to deliver their own goods to someone else for a million dollars+ ... and then one chucklefuck shows up with a $400 RPG, pushes one button and blows everything away. It reminds me a lot of street art, its fragile state of existence, how quickly it can be destroyed with a paint roller etc. "Right, forgot about the assholes."

Embark has stressed that the game isn't "about" PVP, but they do nothing about this sort of situation.

Honestly, they do nothing about nothing. Not surprised to see the tons of comments on the official server from PVE people who are leaving the game.

The queen still rakes her legs through buildings and/or pushes people out of the map, enemy ro-bots shoot thorugh walls, warning lights you use to assess your situation bleed through walls etc. From day one. No acknowledgement, no plan of action. Players fall through the map, suddenly teleport, etc. No acknowledgement, no plan of action. Microphones don't work, random game crashes, game can't load, etc. A large healthy set of comments about this on the main server. No word from the developer on any of it. Remember how Cyberpunk 2077 had so many problems there were gag reels of all the bugs and the developer went to town on the problems with a bug roadmap and now they've got an 85 on metacritic? Let's do the opposite of that. Make a really good game with a lot of bugs, don't fix 95% of them, don't talk about any problems, just fix like one middling problem every two weeks. Double down on that, "fix" some things three times in a month.

The anti-cheat used for the game is both (A) turning in D+ work: there are a ton of cheaters in the game (B) creating loads of false bans because it is seeing specific non-standard hardware/software configurations and calling that cheating. The official Arc Raiders forum is filled with people who are completely stymied by this. Originally Embark had a "three strikes" rule which was just like honey to cheaters. You can intuit the internal logic going on: we need a three-strike rule with all the false positives we're passing out.

It gets better. When people are banned, all they get are canned email responses. People are not told why they're banned ("We've got to keep the sAuCE seEKrIt"), then they get canned responses. This has been going on since launch. During a recent interview with the CEO, three paragraphs about the anti-cheat, one half-sentence about reviewing bans, no acknowledgement that there were false bans. "Again, we need to make sure that we get it right. That we are fair, and that, in the case where it's clear that we didn't get it right, that we can quickly remedy the situation so that player isn't affected in an unfair fashion or way." [1] For inert values of "quickly" and "remedy" ... wait, hold on ... just remembered a popular streamer got his ban reversed w/in a day. Also, I've seen two other people indicate their bans were reversed on the official forum. So that crack wasn't fair. Because at least three people have broken through the system.

There was recently a fourth. On February 23rd, Embark banned a quadraplegic person using a special mouth controller and then issued a permanent ban. Embark responded to this indicating they were looking into it ... a month after the original ban when it started blowing up. Here's another false ban which describes the situation and links to the third party AI company "dealing" with correspondence by essentially, telling everyone to pack sand except for the (as their website put it before it was taken down) "most valuable" "VIP & Whale" players. A summary. The person was eventually unbanned. See also The Truth About Arc Raiders False Bans & Embark Support... which details the entire system in addition to the video creator being banned and finding out that people with hand tremors, like him, are getting banned. That's how you deal with AI systems. They fall on their face hard then you pick up the pieces. It's the only game in town with a truly immersive environment: first you fight ro-bots, then you're banned by a ro-bot and you continue fighting ro-bots. AI: What can't it not do?

GTA5 dragged their feet for years on deploying a working anti-cheat, then turned it off completely. Every game, cheaters messing with you with invincible weapons, teleporting everyone to one place, blowing everything up, duplicating computation-heavy items in the game (like say, a jet plane) until the game bogged to a crawl or outright crashed. Every game. But then, they wanted to re-soak players for a premium monthly experience which wasn't possible with all the cheaters. So they signed up with a dependable anti-cheat company. It wasn't important until MORE money was on the line because almost ten billion in revenue wasn't enough. 99% of the people I had known playing that game had left by that time because of the cheating and aggressive cheaters that would become stalkers following you from game to game, try to DDOS you etc. Turns out I didn't sign up for the premium monthly soak.

Arc Raiders is in the first foot-drag phase. Perhaps they will come up with a soak and then switch out from garbo anti-cheat to something that works. Did they sign some sort of awful contract and are locked into it? People are leaving Arc Raiders but the only extra soak currently available after the initial buy-in is cosmetics.

This is a system of disengagement. There are at least two channels on the Discord in which people are encouraged to leave "feedback and suggestions" and it seems obvious that almost nothing is acted on ever, quite the opposite: people speaking out about the systematic false bans are seeing their posts deleted, over and over. So what's the point? The point is, make a little mudhole for people to complain in, so it's all in one nice location that no one else bothers to read. You could at the very least make one web page that indicates what problems are being worked on, what problems are acknowledged.

Briefly, perhaps one non-soak way of retaining the player base is creating a PVE mode. PVP players are very vocal about people even suggesting this, "IT'S PVPVE" "IT'S BORING" and "THE GAME WILL DIE IF PVE MODE AHH" and it's odd how many other games featuring a PVE mode and are doing well. There's an achievement on Steam: "Knock out 10 raiders." 51.8% of players have done that. This includes people I've seen expressing their reluctance to PVP, they'll engage just because they don't want to lose their loot even though they know that means ABMM is going to throw them into PVP lobbies afterward. Between those people and the people who don't know about ABMM, you're over 50%, easy. Right, ABMM. Agression-based matchmaking. At first Embark denied it existed, then clucked about it, then denied it. With ABMM, I've been able to get runs of many, many rounds where everyone I encounter is friendly, we're all there just for everything non-pvp. Sometimes the ABMM will throw a PVPer or two in a PVE lobby. We're all PVE, so guess what happens. If the PVPer has two working brain cells, they can just go person to person, follow them a little bit, maybe even say they're friendly (this is a big thing in the game, lying as a game strategy, what larks), then shoot them when no one else is around and they're looting, for example. They shoot you in the back, 90% of the time. Because it's easy. It's way easier than going up against an entire PVP lobby. If you're poor at PVP, where do you fit in an ecosystem with PVE/PVP lobbies? You go to the PVP lobby, and poor PVPers don't want to do that, so they complain. Or, If they only have one working brain cell, they start PVPing when there are a group of PVEers fighting the queen, let's say, and then all the PVEers who are not 100% PVEers turn with their various weapons and liquify the lone PVPer.

The game originally was just PVE. But the developers are a bunch of PVPers, so they found it "boring" ("IT'S BORING") and spent two or three years re-tooling it so PVP was a component of the game. The CEO has also said that PVP wasn't the focus of the game, it's just there to bring "tension." Which of course is horse puckey. There's no tension when I'm looting a crate in the corner of a closet and someone is standing at the door blasting me. "Oh hello do you need -- I'm dead." It's quick, and so far I've had the extreme fortune that of the ~15 times I've been knocked out, the PVPer hasn't said a thing to me. This is for a number of reasons, but again, grateful I don't have to listen to some racist squeaker as is happening on the regular. Lately I've been hitting the mute button when I get downed by a player, I don't need to be reminded of how much people suck ... plenty of that going around.

The developers were so not ready for cooperative PVE even though that was what the game was originally. When randos started teaming up to fight the ro-bot enemies instead of each other during one of their pre-release public server tests, they were shocked, that sort of emergent behavior had never reared its head during their internal playtests ("BORING"). Yeah that's right, some people don't want to shoot other people. Some people aren't wired like PVPers that need that dopamine hit or else it's BORING. Odd innit. It's a common problem in this world ("Earth"): people think everyone is wired like them. Have we not taken the lessons of the hit TV show Diff'rent Strokes to heart? "It takes diff'rent strokes to move the world."

There are items in the game that you need. There are some items that are like bottlenecks: you want to do X, but you can't until you get a specific item, or multiples of the item, or a group of items. Okay. There are certain containers/places/times/conditions when you have more of a chance of finding specific items. Here's the problem. It's exceedingly clear that the developers came up with a loot pool, then assigned the likliehood of getting that item when you open a container, then modified that according to place/time/condition. And that's it! Good luck! Two things wrong with that. (A) You can run an "empty" loadout. This means you are going into a round empty-handed. No gun, no nothing. You are given one "safe pocket." You put anything in it (only enough room for one thing) and if you're then knocked out, you will still have it in your inventory. So people do "naked runs" for items. They run to the specific containers, open them all; if they find the item, whoosh, into the safe pocket, then they knock themselves out. Now let's say it's a rare item. For Reasons, recently, mushrooms became a hot commodity. On one map, there's one tree that spawns mushrooms. You would go there, and right by the tree, five-six bodies of people who got to the tree, grabbed mushrooms, and knocked themselves out. Or, they got to the tree, saw that the mushrooms were all gone, and knocked themselves out so they could start another exciting round of running to a tree.

"Fun."

Just to clarify, some people aren't doing this because it's the minimal amount of effort required to get mushrooms. They're doing it because they've done it every other possible way, over and over, and they're not getting mushrooms. It's when you're completely over being screwed by bad RNG.

Right, RNG. I need a rare/valuable "Wolfpack" "blueprint." It can be found in a few places, but only during night (it's a harder mode with more ro-bots roaming around), and mostly on one specific map. So I did this a lot. Sometimes, I spawned in late (another huge ignored problem I'm leaving on the table; are you getting how this all of these problems feed off each other?) and allllll the containers were looted, only cheap scrap was left. Sometimes, I had an unpleasant encounter with an arc and never got to loot. Sometimes I looted but (obviously) never got the blueprint -- some blueprints have a ~1% chance of showing up. This is just like mushrooms, people run in naked, look around for the Wolfpack blueprint, find/don't find, immediately bail from the round.

Here is a surprise for you: doing the same thing, over and over and over again, and never succeeding: that is also not fun. This is a game that does not respect your time. I honestly just quit looking because it was starting to feel like a dead-end job. I don't know why the developers are leaning on straight RNG for this other than laziness. There are always outliers. That's why pinball machines give you your ball back.

"But oh no! You will never get a 'Wolfpack' ... what was it ... 'blueprints'!" Do not worry about me, little one. Do not worry. For you see, PVE lobbies have a superpower that I haven't mentioned because this is an article about grousing: the power of LOVE no, sorry, GIFTING. Yes. Instead of shooting someone in the face, giving them a desired object. Just a tad different. Every time I get a duplicate of a blueprint I have already "learned and consumed" as the game inelegantly puts it, I bring the blueprint with me and then I try to find someone who needs that particular blueprint. I have given away blueprints ... 50+ times. It is a thing. I have gotten 10+ blueprints I didn't have from randos. Eventually, my Wolfpack blueprint will find me.

Extra Section: Gettin' to Carebearland.

There are many, many comments in the completely ignored "game feedback" channel of the official Arc Raiders chit-a-chat that complain that they have not been shooting at people for several rounds yet they are still ending up in PVP rounds and quickly rinsed out. Like I have said, my rounds are exceedingly carebeary. Perhaps if you are having this problem, maybe try doing what I do. When the developers first acknowledged the existence of ABMM they insisted that it was very multi-layered wrt to how your PVP/PVE ratio was determined. So: perhaps all of this will work. Perhaps none of it will and it's something else that I'm doing, like swearing a lot when I down a rocketeer, two hornets and two wasps, go to pick up some hornet drivers and three fireflies swoop in from nowhere like it's camp fire time and I'm a big fluffy marshmallow with two minutes left on the timer. Try that as well.

1) Don't shoot at anyone, ever. Not even in self-defense. Run, or surrender. No, you can't play PVE in solo but PVP with duos/trios. You have one ABMM status value and it carries over from round to round regardless of solo/team designation. Learn the sound difference between someone shooting at a little rolling ro-bot ball and someone shooting someone else in the face. If the latter: run the other way. It helps to know where the underground transit lines are, rats like to hang out there and wait for loot-heavy randos ... so you're more likely to hear semi-near PVP in those areas. Hatch keys are your friend: an above-ground hatch is safer than an underground transit line.
2) Take the "ROUND FEEDBACK" poll, click the frowny face, then click "PVP." The developers have specifically indicated that this does nothing, but (A) there's you getting rinsed and there's me in carebear lobbies and (B) as mentioned, the developers have flipped back and forth ("it didn't exist" "now it does" "it never existed oooh tension oooh") wrt to the existence of ABMM so I don't take much stock in what they say about anything any more. [FX: frolics in carebearland "La la lalala la LA"]
3) Bring at least three defibs; defib/bandage strangers. Bring six+ to queen/matriarch events, drop a few on the ground. Those are for someone else to use on you. Usually everyone else has defibs, but it's a good backup measure (amusingly, people seem to have settled on asking new randos: "do you have a defib?" which sounds more like "oh I am downed can you revive me" not "just making sure you're equipped in case any of us are downed"). There are people that play as medics, looking to help as many people as possible ... I'm slowly moving toward doing that as well.
4) Give away loot. If I end up with more than one queen/matriarch core, I usually throw the excess at someone else. A lot of the times after dumping shots into the big ladies you get to the loot five seconds after everyone else has stripped it bare and people go without getting any cores. I give away duplicate blueprints, I gather "rare" items I just happen to stumble across and try to give them to people that need them. Sometimes you get stuff you're looking for in return, most of the times you get a very thankful rando. I also give away healing items after defibbing someone, if they need it.

If you've been paying attention, you have gathered that Embark really enjoys RNG. It may be that all of the people that are complaining about being friendly yet are getting immediately rinsed are victims of simple RNG, and I am not. In that case, it's not clear how my luck has held out for 90+ rounds, etc. I hope this isn't a thing, that would be awful from a PVE standpoint.

There are ... several other odd major decisions involving this game that I'm going to leave on the table for now. They feel like fixable issues, even though most of them have been baked into the pie since day one because they are conscious decisions, like pretending the game is a Las Vegas casino without clocks and never shows the player the number of times they've been downed/knocked out, and only clocking the time spent in rounds, not total game time. I've also left a lot of different aspects of PVPVE on the table, like players "lying" in-game to turn innocent players on each after they've downed someone, players gaming ABMM to get in PVE-heavy lobbies as a PVPer for obvious reasons etc.

This honeymoon phase for Embark is odd. Apparently their previous game, The Finals, had/has the same problem with anti-cheat etc, since the same anti-cheat service is contracted out for it. Yet ... no journalists are touching it. What I LOVE about this situation is that if they provided a PVE-only experience, they'd have a huge uptick in people not getting rinsed by cheaters so it would solve one problem and half-solve a second.

Or instead ... they could just introduce a new weapon.