Arc Raiders

Lenas said:

You always could. None of this is new outside of whatever matchmaking narrative you had in your head.

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Wait I’m a bit confused. You are implying it never mattered if you shot back, but Embark said,

“1. Defending yourself is no longer treated the same as starting a fight. Previously, your playstyle didn't capture whether you started a PvP encounter or merely defended yourself. This meant cautious Raiders could be treated as more PvP-focused than they actually are. Now, the two are treated differently.”

so to some degree, shooting back DID have an impact on your matchmaking….right?

thats fair i dunno maybe i was drinking

The Rascal is a fine addition and makes a great secondary weapon when ya might come across big ARC. Its less burdensome than the Hullcracker yet serves the same overall mission.

*tumbleweeds*

I'm always hoping to see a post somewhere that's like "Arc Raiders is Back, Baby!"

Tarrant said:

If they did a non PvP mode I’d still be playing this.

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Does the 'aggression' system not already effectively accomplish this?

anyone having the issue where you close out and the game is still running? Ive tried to re ver on the anti cheat but still happening.

I don't know what they are going to do to bring people back to this game. For me when they nerfed the loot drop rates on the fringes of the maps is when I stopped caring for the game.

Araxen said:

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I don't know what they are going to do to bring people back to this game. For me when they nerfed the loot drop rates on the fringes of the maps is when I stopped caring for the game.

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For me it was what felt like constantly adjusting the game to be harder. Just when I was starting to get in a groove with AR and felt capable of tackling some of the bigger things head on, they added shedders to all maps, introduced vaporizers, added turbines in a short span and then nerfed weapon durability and other things. I haven’t gone back in a while, but back when the game was “easier” I was so hooked.

The problem with Arc Raiders, and I said it at the beginning, was they couldn't figure out how to make PvE interesting, so they decided to add in PvP. This made for a big splash of initial popularity, but it hinted at an underlying and still existing problem. They didn't know how to make engaging content outside of 'Just go shoot each other.'

Its why I didn't buy all the GotY hype and thought this would be a passing fad that faded once the streamers left. It was fun, it was good. The interactions between players were fun, but as people ran out of things to do, griefing others was all that was left and the company had already tipped their hand they had no plan, let alone process for making continuing content.

I will say the new map and some of the new quests have gotten me to pop back in on occasion and have fun in the carebear lobbies, but the game doesn't really feel like it has any staying power and it seems like their plan for Expeditions to be the content treadmill rapidly fell apart as well.

Not hating on the game. It was good for what it was, but it wasn't deep nor did it have much promise of longevity.

My complaint was always the economy kinda, unless you burn a bunch pvp'ing and dying. Money quickly is irrelevant. farming specific mats was pretty easy to make stacks of whatever grenade and gun for the most part. Very simplistic weapon attachments and relatively few guns, with later ones rarely making any kind of big splash. That just got bland fast vs you look at something like Tarkov that was maybe too far the other way, but there was much more oh hey what might be on this npc enemy I killed, or in this crate to a much larger degree due to the amount of items that either got directly used, or hard to come by but needed for something giving it more value than just being mostly all vendor fodder like arc is. Esp in carebear lobby it quickly got to be not worth looting unless you had something specific to gun for, and then that loop was too simple because you knew it only dropped off X arc, or had a specific map/kind of area to go get it.

The economy was a double edged sword. On one hand the ease at getting most items made losses less painful and people more willing to engage in risky gameplay and pvp. A lot of the 'normies' who would never touch a full loot pvp game were willing to stick it out longer because it wasn't as painful to die. However it made the gear grind content treadmill extremely short. Unless you were dying extremely often, it wasn't long before your inventory was full and you could easily get whatever you wanted. The only real gate was blueprints.

Free kits similarly were two edged. It was really good for letting the vast majority of people get into the game and play at minimal risk, but also it encouraged the pvp player who would just roll free kits until they got a successful betrayal of someone with good gear they could loot, and they could do this over and over with literally no risk to themselves.

For me, the longevity I found with the game was by making my own objectives. I enjoyed a lot of zero to hero runs, either with free kit or even going 100% naked and just using in match crafting. The musical instruments were a fun add that kept me a little bit longer, just running around solo and bumping into groups of people and forming impromptu bands as we farmed arcs. Also, just sitting on a rooftop and sniping arcs cause the shooting was oddly more satisfying than I expected.

Still, eventually a guy would walk into our band or whatever acting friendly and then try and shoot us. He most inevitably died and got no loot, but there appears to be a quirk of the game's behavior score that would come into play. If you all were chilling playing music and a guy shot your guitarist, if you all turned and gunned him down your behavior score appeared to suffer, cause you counted as initiating the attack, cause while he did shoot your guitarist he never shot you so you 'shot first'. You'd then have to play a couple rounds of the more violent before being sent back to the chill server. And for me, pvp was kinda pointless. Most of the time I didn't want the guys loot as I already had everything I wanted and shooting people just to kick over their sandcastle didn't do it for me.