You must have heard about it.
You may have seen some stuff.

Well, I bought it when it came out, I enjoyed the first 60 nolife hours over a week (Hey I was stuck in the house) and it was fantastic time.

Now? Aaaaaaaaaabsolutely not.

What changed?
Dipshit players flooded the game and developed new asshole tactics that take 3 seconds to waste 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 minutes of your effort and it comes at zero risk.

Week 1, people were new, feeling the game out. Doing quests. Go here, do that, etc. you'd meet a guy, in-game said hi through an emote wheel, you maybe bust some of the PVE enemies up and got lots of loot and left. Nice.

*NOW* ?

Well, ths PVE-concepted, PVE-designed game has decided late in development to shoehorn in PVP. Allegedly this was 2-3 years ago, but the state of the "PVP" in the game is laughable for that amount of development time. 2-3 years development time on PVP means "We changed some sightlines, removed cool PVE features because it would get abused in PVP, made the TTK incredibly short, there is no weapon balance and shields barely matter".

Oh cool. So that was a bad decision.
It was especially a bad decision because Arc Raiders' camera system is third person, which is great...for PVE.
For PVP, you can be a little shit hiding down a long corridor around a corner (or just around a corner) and see approaching players several seconds before they can possibly see you. You camp, quietly, you wait. You step out, alpha strike, all shields gone, down to 20-50% Hp. Second shot will end them, which is about when they'll *get* to react.

"PVP" behaviour is rat bastard behaviour. Shooting people in the back when they are engaging with the PVE (Punishing PVE players for doing so as there are no protections or warnings). Shooting people when they are in a 2-3 second animation lock of looting. If you are shot and you immediately quit the loot menu, your character has to get his hands away from the loot, stand up, get his weapon around, you have to turn around, aim and shoot. It takes a very bad player to fail to backshot someone, meaning you died for looting. The counterplay to that is...never loot ever, apparently? Because, yes, some people call this a "skill issue" . That is why the "PVP" is called "PVP" is because *that* part of the PVP (No quote marks) are the scumbags who are the problem.

Let's backpedal.

Arc has 3 modes.
Solos - you go alone, can form uneasy temporary alliances with people through verbal agreement.
Duos : Friend or fill with a random and go together.
Trios : same but 3.

Now, solos were 95-98% friendly players cooperating to get shit done when I started. It's still oddly high for a toxic game like Arc, but much MUCH lower now.
Duos were roughly 60-85% KOS (Kill on sight). Meet other players? No diplomacy, shoot them.
Trios are 99.5% KOS.

So both duos and trios are functionally PVP only.
So what if you want to play with a friend and party up? Well you're forced to likely be shot even if you just want to engage with 95% of the PVE-developed game.
Because the time to kill is comically low and rat bastard behaviour is rampant, solo people have it the worst. In Duos\Trios you largely know what you get.

Solos are full of scumbags who use the "Don't shoot!" emote to pretend to be friendly, then as soon as your back is turned, shoot you dead.
Hide in a bush, camp extract with stunning or massive damage mines you often can't see until you're stunned or blown up.
There are "spite kills" of people killing people as the final extraction timer is active - this does NOT give them enough time to loot, but YOU lose your loot. Nobody gains anything, except the sicko who made someone mad and wasted their time.
That is the "PVP" in Arc.
Actual PVP is fine. Duos, trios, whatever. Still shit behaviour but *actual* PVP people are there. They largely have their corner, PVE people have their corner, fine.

But then the developers keep fucking up the most basic things since release.

We have a large, boss-tier enemy called the Queen, who guards rare loot and might drop blueprints to craft ...mostly PVE guns (logical?). The best way to fight these used to be to bring a "Hullcracker" with special ammo like little grenades to fight it. The hullcracker has been "fixed" (Hard nerfed) to do much less damage, make its ammo harder to make, stack less, cost more, and it was the SINGLE "Definitely only for PVE" weapon that had a purple rarity (Ultimate is gold, one tier higher).

Except.
You know, the other 20 players on the map. Are they going to help you fight this highly dangerous enemy? They don't have to. They may wanna just loot and not be geared up to help, which is the next best thing to them helping because a lot of fuckers come in with a Free Loadout (Basic gear, basic guns, some ammo, a few basic tools), wait till you are busy with a LOT of resources to fight the PVE boss to engage with the PVE content and spend 3 seconds shooting you in the back, wasting your time and resources and risking literally nothing. Farming back up to attempt a Queen takes 1-2 hours.

No protections, no fixes, no point. Except they added and even bigger, even more dangerous enemy to the Matriarch - same exact thing, but you know you have to spam more resources into killing it to get blueprints for guns you will rarely be able to make that are far too valuable to actually *use* because a grey tier machine gun spawning little shithead will just shoot you in the back while you are busy playing the ACTUAL GAME.

It is an absolute, miserable, total fucking slog.
The developers recently fucked up again by ...talking.
Which you'd think is better to what they did - not talking - for a MONTH.
You see, for the entire time the game was out, people knew there was a Prestige (Reset to LV 1 with some bonuses) system and have been asking for specifics, for details.
All you could find out on your own was get to LV 20 to unlock a resource pit that says find this or that, then find X of Y value and put it in the pit to get to a new tier which asks more and more shit of you.

You did it, and then it says ah cool now wait for the Expedition to depart, if you want to.
That's somewhere in the next 1,5 -2 weeks.
2 days ago, they finally told you what you needed to get the bonus skill points (Side - note : 80% of skills are misnamed, mislabelled, don't work how they say, or have comedy level improvements, like 10% at 5 full skill points, so they're worthless).

It's 1 million in-game loot value or in-game wallet value, per skill point, up to 5 million.
Now, I put approx 80 total hours into the game. I have 2,5. So who is this game for? It wants to be accessible and casual-friendly, but allows cancerous ratbag "PVP" behaviours and demands *incredible* dedication and farming with no real endgame content and literally un-engageable PVE. I should note that it will cost several hundred thousand to up your storage capacity to max so you can STORE SHIT in the first place, and at least a million in item value was sunk into the "Pre-expedition" bit, where you construct the vehicle by putting certain items and certain value items inside of it.
The developers saw fit to *finally* tell everyone this....with less than 2 weeks to go. Before Christmas. When everyone is even more busy than normal. When they have been asked since day one and they could have said.

It was found out that if you set your PC clock to the expedition departure date ("When you COULD actually reset") , a button shows up to let you - it won't work, but it'll think it can. Strike one.
Strike two, the meter counts up to 3 million, suggesting that you could get all 5 skill points for 3 mil combined item and money value, which is a *lot* more reasonable, but they never changed the UI after arbitrarily making the game grindier.

Finally, the game is $40 to start and has (had? They lowered the prices *a bit* on backlash earlier) $20 usd microtransactions. Un. Fucking. Excusable.


So the game has barely any content, that it wants you to endlessly snort, with a playerbase infested by horrific asshats who break paradigms, abuse mechanics to grief and basically cheat but "legally". They will ask you to spend time engaging with the not content, the unplayable endgame Boss Raids, nerf PVE weapons, strategies, but allow "PVP" rat behaviour to waste your time, ruin your fun and offer you nothing in exchange. They have utterly failed to communicate anything, or on time (The skill trees have no values. No this makes you 2.5% faster per skill point. One outright lies about what it does, etc).
Absolute and total amateur hour.

And it makes me *SO ANGRY*.
Because Arc felt like something special. When the playerbase CHOSE to cooperate and it lead to some wonderful emergent moments of people who are individually afraid of the big mean rocket shooting row-boat gangbang it from all angles and crush it.
You see, Arc Raiders lore is, oh shit, robots fucked us. There is one location that is barely hanging on.
So you go upstairs to loot, find scraps to keep shit going. Everyone is kinda poor, kinda miserable, but surviving and it's humanity's last stand, yadda yadda.

But you have PVP people coming out from the same location.
Getting drowned in blood and going back to the same location.
So, lore-wise, how do you justify this?
If you were in a post-apocalyptic setting and saw someone come back with shit another dude had earlier that morning, would you not immediately, violently and publicly execute them to dissuate that kind of behaviour? "Fuck you got mine" doesn't belong in modern society, nvm when you are barely barely alive.

So despite allegedly developing the PVP side for 2-3 years, they have nothing to show for it.
I'm serious. You could erase PVP by just turning friendly fire off.
I used to want PVP gone because it was infested with asshats. It still is! But while the PVP is *straight bad* (camera abuse, first shot bonus, very small TTK so nothing matters), now I just want a PVE only mode.

No sickos, no cod kids, just people wanting to co-op to engage with the story, the lore, the world. To get loot, to work towards something other than HAHA I SHOOT PVP LAUL.
If I want PVP - and PVP that isn't dog shit - I'll buy Battlefield fucking 6.

This is a key point.
Because the "PVP" (ratbags) say things like you suck, skill issue, and most importantly, "go away". "Play helldivers 2" "This is an extraction shooter".
Which is important because when I brought up that a PVE mode is required or the game will rapidly (More below), they gave a lot of harassment, insults and regurgitated the non-argument of "Well it would split the playerbase!"
So a PVE mode to *retain* PVE people sick of your shit is bad, but telling them to literally stop playing the game and hurt the playerbase is fine?

As it stands, me and a lot of my friends are tired of the game because of the "PVP" abusers. I enjoy the core game, the cooperation, looting, etc. Still.
But I can't invest any time when I'll likely have some piece of shit risk nothing and gain everything. The only winning move truly is to not play the fucking game.
The logic is, me and a lot of the PVE people will quit.
So the "PVP" rats will get bored because they won't be able to cheap camp and get easy kills - which is all they are here for. That and to make people *mad* and waste their time. Literal actual sociopaths with no empathy or compassion, just "Well this is my fun and the game lets me, so I'll ruin someone's fun and waste their time lol".
So the "PVP" rats will leave.
And all that will remain is the real PVP in duos and trios - Arc Raiders will lose its identity and become just another boring, toxic, shitty extraction shooter that just happens to have PVE, lore, quests and stuff that NONE of the PVP players will give a shit about or engage with.

With a PVE only mode, PVE people get to keep playing with the game, engage with it and complete, you know. CONTENT. ACTUAL DEVELOPED CONTENT.
"PVP" people still won't get to shoot anyone and leave, and PVP people won't be affected because either people go to PVP or they don't in duos or trios.
Literally a universally good solution.

Developers have to stop being stupid with every single individual decision since launch. Do not buy Arc Raiders in its current atrocious state, it likely won't hit you what I'm talking about until the 2 hour refund window has passed, and at that point it's too late.
Until they stop being shit, don't waste your money.

Thanks.