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"Wanted to feel like a raider? Sorry, bro — that moment is gone. Now you are just meat for f***ing content."


For the first two–three weeks, ARC Raiders was that rare case: a game about raids, atmosphere and survival.
Now most matches feel like an arena for aggressive streamer content (and other content creators), where a normal player is just expendable.

· WHY I LIKED THIS GAME SO MUCH

Visually and atmospherically, ARC Raiders is honestly a piece of art.
Concrete brutalism that feels like a Soviet–era architecture fever dream, mixed with industrial aesthetics in the form of rusted structures; post–apoc–punk clothing with retro–futuristic elements that could be ripped straight out of old sci–fi – it all works together as one coherent style.

The sky and distant vistas are the kind that make you want to just stand there and stare.

Sound and audio design set the overall feeling of a raid and give that rare sense of: “I am actually in another world.” The developers themselves called audio one of their “strategic pillars”, and you can feel it: this is a game you first play with your ears, and only then with your eyes.

The raid atmosphere and the map as a sandbox: tension and unpredictability, a world you genuinely want to explore, where every run can feel unique. All of that existed in the first phase of the game’s life (those early weeks) – the game really did deliver that experience, until it became flooded by mass PvP purely for content.

· WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

I want to freeze in time the moment when it was still possible to play ARC Raiders “normally”. For me, this was that rare case when a game actually gave me a feeling of happiness and deep engagement. ARC Raiders could easily have become one of those games I come back to for years.

But right now it is being buried by one specific thing – an aggressive meta pushed by streamers.

· HOW IT LOOKED BEFORE THE “EVENTS”

Not that long ago, matches looked roughly like this:

– you drop into a raid;
– sometimes you run into other squads;
– some players choose to interact, some choose to avoid you;
– there were tense moments (“is this guy a d***bag or actually a decent dude?”), but you did not have the feeling that every single person you met was a f***ing psycho sprinting at you and screaming for “content” on TTV or TikTok.

You could:

– team up and destroy ARC machines together;
– loot buildings (there really is enough loot for everyone);
– help each other with quests;
– sometimes extract side by side with total strangers – and that felt great.

Now it is a completely different story.

· WHAT CHANGED

After one particular streamer (TheBurntPeanut) decided to start his “war” and hyped his audience into playing as aggressively as possible, this started:

Every encounter = automatic KoS gameplay.
(For clarity: KoS = Kill On Sight.)
No attempt to communicate (I literally carry defibs just to pick random people up), no reading the situation – just instant deletion of anything that moves.
Or they hard–ignore you until you get knocked, then suddenly turn on their mic to brag about being from some “faction”. Bro, we are in solo. What f***ing faction are you talking about?

Camping exits and key locations.
People sit on extracts and quest spots not for loot, but for “clean frags” for recordings or streams. And it is not even impressive – the shooting in this game is extremely simple; this is not CS or PUBG, where gun skill actually matters a lot more.

Matches feel less like raids and more like BF/CoD with extraction sprinkled on top.
Instead of tense PvEvP, you get a pure PvP arena with some running to the exit. On top of that, depending on luck, the surrounding PvE can either screw you over or bail you out: bots aggro whoever they see first and often end up helping your enemy.

Naturally, part of the community picked all this up: people watch how their favorite streamers or YouTubers play and simply copy the style. As a result, a normal player (or a newbie) who came for an extraction adventure, not for a never–ending circus of clips, just stops having fun.

Friendly or neutral players slowly turn toxic too. As we all know, evil breeds evil: if you get ratted out ten times in a row, your hands start itching to play the same way. If it keeps going like that, we might as well rename the game to RAT Raiders.

· WHY THIS IS NOT JUST A PROBLEM FOR “SNOWFLAKES”

I am not against PvP and I am not asking for some “hippie chill–only mode” (I can play aggressively – I just keep hoping the person in front of me will turn out to be reasonable, not an a***le).

But right now:

The game is losing its identity.
Instead of a unique mix of co–op raids and risky PvEvP, we are getting yet another simulator of “shoot everything you see” (well, except ARC, apparently).

The experience is dictated not by design, but by streamers and their fanbases.
Today they feel like “playing like psychos” – and the whole server turns into a toxic festival of aggression, and everyone else is basically forced to live in that format.

New players are thrown straight into the most toxic version of the game and make the only logical conclusion: this is just another toxic KoS trash pit – so they uninstall it, or in the worst case, go straight for a refund.

· WHERE THE DEVS COME INTO THIS

The problem is not just one freak who started a “war for content”. The problem is that:

The game has no tools to balance player behavior or dilute the total KoS clown meta:
no karma, no reputation, no rewards for helping others or for non–aggressive behavior, no real tools for peaceful interaction, no convenient signaling or identification systems, and so on.

There is no clear stance.
Is this a game about raids, survival, adventure and destroying ARC –
or about “shoot everything that moves”?

Right now it feels like the developers themselves have not fully decided what they want from their own creation, and that empty space has been filled by streamers. They are effectively the ones setting the tone.

If you let streamers and content creators define the behavioral meta, be ready for your game to become a hostage to their moods. That is exactly what is happening right now.

· WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE

If the developers really want to keep ARC Raiders as an interesting extraction experience, and not just another PvP arena, we need at least some of this:

– Systems that reward a variety of playstyles, not just brain–dead total KoS shooting.
Yes, technically something already exists (killing raiders gives less XP than killing ARC), but that is nowhere near enough.

– Counter–measures against constant extract camping and stream–sniping for highlights.
Shoutout to that “Partisan” from EFT – at least there, there is a dedicated NPC whose whole job is to hunt down ratting campers. In ARC Raiders, there is not even a hint of that kind of counterweight to this playstyle.

– A clear communication stance: what kind of game this actually is and what behavior is considered “normal”.

– Basic boundaries for friendly play.
For example: if you signal “I am friendly”, get a clear “yes, me too” back, and then the guy just shoots you in the back – that should be reflected somehow: karma hits, reputation loss, something. And honest play, on the contrary, should be rewarded.

You could even go for a more radical approach: put the “bad boys” in lobbies with other bad boys, and sane players with sane players, with some kind of redemption system if someone decides to start playing normally. The online population allows this – there are enough people to separate rats and normal players into different lobbies.

[ My final verdict is in my last comment at the bottom of this thread. Also look for my “Update after ~200 hours played” comment — it has important extra observations. ]