In a post-apocalyptic landscape of cutthroat scavengers, surprisingly peaceful players are opting to team up and open up – a phenomenon that’s intriguing game developers and psychologists alike
It seems like the following is indeed interesting, yet I’ve never ever experienced Arc Raiders myself! Have you? ^^
But often, players are just talking. A YouTube video called The Humans of Arc Raiders, inspired by the photographer who interviews strangers in New York City, includes conversations with randomly encountered players. They talk about family struggles, work lives, depression, autism and, in one case, a lung collapse. In one conversation, a heavily armed player in green armour named Poopy candidly asks another raider: "What’s it like having kids, dude?”
When I first jumped into Arc Raiders, I found a dichotomy on the topside, where birds sing and plants thrive among the carcasses of downed machines. The more I wandered around this 1970s-style retro-future setting, the more I bumped into other humans, many of whom offered help, such as medical supplies. Mostly we snuck around and battled robots together. It was tense at times, sometimes scary, but often relaxing.
In one session, I encountered another player with a British accent who was also new to the game. "Have you been killed by another person yet?” he asked me, as we explored a burst concrete dam complex. "Because every person I’ve met has been friendly,” he added. “No one kills each other.”
Yep, just got the game last week, heard all of the “care bear” talk and thought that maybe there was some humanity left…I got ratted within 120 seconds on my very first raid…
Noticed people talking about this for a while regarding Arc. For myself it seems as gaming became more accessible and streaming took off (especially on PC) the toxicity and trolling in games with social features increased exponentially. As a result I now deliberately avoid games with any kind of PVP if it’s not separate or solo-able, and I disable chats and voice out of habit unless i’m with clanmates. I don’t even give it a chance. I ignore people in open world or “live” games in pve areas for the most part as well.
During the ps3/360 era i could join random games and meet interesting people and most were just normal. Not sure what console atmosphere is like now since i stopped buying them.
These are the players that get angry when people say they don’t want to play the game. And then act clueless when the game is dead due to low player counts. The people that also don’t want to play in lobbies with other high level players and only want to Noob Stomp.
Its why I call this genre of game “Scum Sponge.” Because it attracts all of the worst people on the planet due to the game design rewarding that kind of player behavior. I am thankful for it, because it means other games have less of them.
That’s your choice, and I’ve met a couple people like that, but you could have just blocked them and moved on. I’ve also had a rando save my stupid ass twice in one raid because I kind of suck at extraction shooters.
In the end, I’ve had about as many meetings where I was ganked as where people just randomly helped me, and a whole lot more where we both said hi and went on our way.
I certainly hope blocking people in the game does not stop you from matching into each other’s lobbies and only prevents voice/chat with each other.
Xbox tried the “blocking people prevents matchmaking into their games” way in the early days of the Xbox 360 when accounts had a reputation system and all that. Know what the end result was? All the best players and pro players at games were waiting in 10+ hour queues to find a match. Because people were blocking everyone that beat them. So Xbox ditched that, and that was absolutely the correct call.
Blocking should absolutely never prevent matchmaking from doing its job and getting everyone into games. And listen, I hate Extraction Shooters. I played the Arc Raiders closed and open betas, and the server slam, so its not like I have no experience with the game. I lament that another fun PvE Coop Shooter was stolen from everyone to be added to the Scum Sponge genre. But I still think the game’s matchmaking should function correctly.
Looks like Arc has learned something since then, and it reduces your odds of matching with them but doesn’t completely remove the possibility. I think I’ll keep blocking people I don’t want to play with. Frankly, it’s not surprising that game developers have learned from the mistakes made before, and there are certainly more nuanced options than forcing people to play with people they don’t want to or having to wait hours to match.
To me it seems like any kind of communication in multiplayer games has gotten less and less over the years. Used to be pretty common to just talk about random stuff with random people in games like CS, DayZ and even Overwatch years ago, but in recent years, I hardly remember any instances of people using voice chat at all, let alone using it to say anything positive. So if this is true and common for Arc Raiders, which I haven’t played, it seems to be a positive outlier. Also curious about other people’s experience.
I used to Play a lot of Team Fortress 2. Like thousands of hours over 8ish years. It was the only multiplayer game i played. I would just hop on and talk to people and it was great. Aroumd christmas, people would send around gifts. At the time, i wasn’t a big fan of christmas, because i didn’t have nephews or kids yet and it seemed kinda poimtless, so i would usually just play the game, thinking maybe there would be people online who are lonely around the holidays. I used to work in a bar around holidays, it’s brutal.
So i lived in a bubble of positivity for quite some time. Going back to games like Overwatch and CoD in the pandemic was pretty brutal.
My experience has been the adoption of Discord for communication in game has been a negative factor in the social aspects of gaming. Before, games needed to implement their own comms, which would encourage players to communicate as part of the game experience. But now it’s expected that you’d talk on discord instead, so there’s less need for games to be a social experience.
I think its a combination of that and games moving from community run servers (named things like “Gregz Hangout | Gungame 24/7 | No isms” ) to just clicking a matchmaking button and being dropped into a match with a bunch of people you’ve never seen before and will never see again after that game is over.
With the server model occasionally people join or leave, but you’ll likely see most of the same people over several matches and maps. And if you rejoin that server another day because you liked it you might see that some of those people came back for the same reasons that you did.
Speaking as someone who’s only been playing ARC Raiders for about a week, this does happen pretty often. The game uses Aggression Based Matchmaking, so there is still PVP if you want it. But if you want to be friendly, team up and chat with randoms you meet, and generally coexist with fellow players, it’s totally doable and actually happens fairly often.
Bumped into a guy on the map Blue Gate in a residential area. He was in a rush to get somewhere, but when I told him I was new to the game he stopped and gave me a couple blueprints for guns and a few tips for the map we were on.
Likewise. I’ve been ganked a number of times, I just block them and move on. Probably 10 player kills in the last 4 months or less? The aggression ranking in matchmaking really seems to help. I’ve yet to get the achievement for player kills, and I’ve seen an uptick when player kills are linked to feats, but overall most of the people I see are helpful and not trying to loot steal or kill you. I hope the PVP players keep being put in matches with each other and are enjoying themselves somewhere I’m not present.
One thing I appreciate about the game is the natural enforcement of rules. Usually, in a game we see strict, coded enforcement: You’re not punished for attacking a teammate, you either physically can’t, or you’re removed from the game when it’s demonstrated to be intentional.
In Arc Raiders, if there’s no witnesses, you CAN get away with murdering another player. It comes with risks, for instance people could hear and deduce the situation. I think having that as a possibility actually makes the friendly interactions feel more positive. It’s more of an intentional choice.
There’s perhaps something interesting to say about game design mechanics there - where something exists in the game but is not actively rewarded or encouraged nor punished.
Well you physically can’t attack teammates in arc raiders either. And since we all know aggression based match making exists, there is a punishment (albeit ephemeral) for killing other players.
Having played the game I disagree entirely. People were blood thirsty and pretended to be helpful only to kill before extraction. The DON’T SHOOT emote was used 100% of the time before they shot me in the face.
The game puts you in different lobbies depending on your play style. Care bears get matched with other care bears. Murder bears get matched with other murder bears. If you are finding yourself only getting matched with murder bears, examine your play style.
Most of my experience has been good and friendly but there are certain maps that murderers tend to frequent. Stella mons has been where I’ve found most player killers. Overall though, people chat and team up successfully all the time
In Jedi Outcast and Academy having your saber off meant that you were currently chatting or AFK. In good servers you’d get banned for killing someone who had their saber off.
I love that game exactly because of this, the random encounters, the crazy people, the funny ones, the awkward ones, when in the right lobby it’s such an interesting social experience
Honestly Arc Raiders is (or can be) more about collecting stuff while staying alive than about killing stuff. Evading 100% of the fights is a totally valid play style. So your vision problems might not be as big a deal in this game as you would expect.
I know next to nothing about Arc Raiders, so I may be assuming wrong. It’s not just about PvP, it’s about how fast-paced the game play is. I can bumble through a game of Deep Rock Galactic with friends because it’s (I imagine) slower paced and everyone is working on the same goal. My friends are also patient enough to deal with my issues.
If you buy ARC Raiders, you’ll have your money’s worth by the time you decide whether you’re enjoying it.
You can easily avoid PVP most of the time by not engaging in combat with other players - the game will put you into like-minded lobbies in a few raids.
ARC is often fairly big and has multiple ways to destroy, as well as multiple points to damage them, with some weapons definitely being easier to use, let alone the grenades. On top of non-combat ways of dealing with them.
And most importantly, the people. You can just join raids solo and run up to people and team up to go do whatever together. You can get helped on most, if not all, things that you might wanna do, but struggle with due to your vision.
And even if you don’t, you’ll love the game for what your vision won’t affect: the chatting and the community and the cool shit you all do.
I’d say go watch some specifically friendly videos, but they just do such lobbies justice.
Deep Rock with friends is indeed a very awesome game!
I have no idea how bad your vision is, you do need decent situational awareness in Arc Raiders to stay alive. And you need to get to an exit point before the mission is over (15 minutes I think? Been a while since I last played it). But other than that you can solo in your own tempo, tagging along with others is completely optional.
Hell, I wish more games just had humanity. It might be due to me being antiwar, but when playing MMOs (whose MO is pretty much always ‘kill each other’ PVP) I wish folk were not so quick to kill, especially not when the kill isn’t imperative. Face it, some of the best ever moments in gaming are when folk have the option to kill each other and dont. A shred of humanism.
Universal signs in COD existed to plead for mercy, such as switching to a knife and looking away. In Black Ops II there’s a rave room in a map and several players spent a minute bobbing their characters around until someone else came and mowed the other team down. One time in Battlefield I spent the majority of a game (no mic mind you) chilling on a roof with half a dozen players from two teams. I came to multiplayer FPS games for the combat, stayed for the randoms I met.
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Yep, just got the game last week, heard all of the “care bear” talk and thought that maybe there was some humanity left…I got ratted within 120 seconds on my very first raid…
Was fun in the beginning, but now there are just lots of experienced pk players camping the exits -uninstalled the game.
All those games evolve to that point and become a pile of dung.
It’s unavoidable.
Noticed people talking about this for a while regarding Arc. For myself it seems as gaming became more accessible and streaming took off (especially on PC) the toxicity and trolling in games with social features increased exponentially. As a result I now deliberately avoid games with any kind of PVP if it’s not separate or solo-able, and I disable chats and voice out of habit unless i’m with clanmates. I don’t even give it a chance. I ignore people in open world or “live” games in pve areas for the most part as well.
During the ps3/360 era i could join random games and meet interesting people and most were just normal. Not sure what console atmosphere is like now since i stopped buying them.
Hopefully this becomes more of the norm.
So I bought arc raiders. Even though I don’t like extraction shooters.
Hopped on solo, came up on a pair of raiders getting fucked up by the arc. Saved their lives.
Crouched in a corner to look at my inventory since this was THE VERY FIRST TIME I PLAYED.
One of the two people I saved, naded me. Just chuked a sticky grenade right at me as I browse my menus.
Then said I was camping in a corner and was going to kill them. After I JUST FUCKING SAVED THEM!
the guy tried to argue with me. I deleted and refunded the game.
Fuck you too guy.
These are the players that get angry when people say they don’t want to play the game. And then act clueless when the game is dead due to low player counts. The people that also don’t want to play in lobbies with other high level players and only want to Noob Stomp.
Its why I call this genre of game “Scum Sponge.” Because it attracts all of the worst people on the planet due to the game design rewarding that kind of player behavior. I am thankful for it, because it means other games have less of them.
A shame. You could’ve seen the people who yell I’M FRIENDLY I’M FRIENDLY before shooting you in the head.
Why though? It’s just pixels, laugh and go again, you have unlimited free kits, and every raid is different.
That’s your choice, and I’ve met a couple people like that, but you could have just blocked them and moved on. I’ve also had a rando save my stupid ass twice in one raid because I kind of suck at extraction shooters.
In the end, I’ve had about as many meetings where I was ganked as where people just randomly helped me, and a whole lot more where we both said hi and went on our way.
I certainly hope blocking people in the game does not stop you from matching into each other’s lobbies and only prevents voice/chat with each other.
Xbox tried the “blocking people prevents matchmaking into their games” way in the early days of the Xbox 360 when accounts had a reputation system and all that. Know what the end result was? All the best players and pro players at games were waiting in 10+ hour queues to find a match. Because people were blocking everyone that beat them. So Xbox ditched that, and that was absolutely the correct call.
Blocking should absolutely never prevent matchmaking from doing its job and getting everyone into games. And listen, I hate Extraction Shooters. I played the Arc Raiders closed and open betas, and the server slam, so its not like I have no experience with the game. I lament that another fun PvE Coop Shooter was stolen from everyone to be added to the Scum Sponge genre. But I still think the game’s matchmaking should function correctly.
Looks like Arc has learned something since then, and it reduces your odds of matching with them but doesn’t completely remove the possibility. I think I’ll keep blocking people I don’t want to play with. Frankly, it’s not surprising that game developers have learned from the mistakes made before, and there are certainly more nuanced options than forcing people to play with people they don’t want to or having to wait hours to match.
Arc is not the game for you. That is insanely bubble wrapped behavior.
To me it seems like any kind of communication in multiplayer games has gotten less and less over the years. Used to be pretty common to just talk about random stuff with random people in games like CS, DayZ and even Overwatch years ago, but in recent years, I hardly remember any instances of people using voice chat at all, let alone using it to say anything positive. So if this is true and common for Arc Raiders, which I haven’t played, it seems to be a positive outlier. Also curious about other people’s experience.
I used to Play a lot of Team Fortress 2. Like thousands of hours over 8ish years. It was the only multiplayer game i played. I would just hop on and talk to people and it was great. Aroumd christmas, people would send around gifts. At the time, i wasn’t a big fan of christmas, because i didn’t have nephews or kids yet and it seemed kinda poimtless, so i would usually just play the game, thinking maybe there would be people online who are lonely around the holidays. I used to work in a bar around holidays, it’s brutal.
So i lived in a bubble of positivity for quite some time. Going back to games like Overwatch and CoD in the pandemic was pretty brutal.
Like og wow
My experience has been the adoption of Discord for communication in game has been a negative factor in the social aspects of gaming. Before, games needed to implement their own comms, which would encourage players to communicate as part of the game experience. But now it’s expected that you’d talk on discord instead, so there’s less need for games to be a social experience.
I think its a combination of that and games moving from community run servers (named things like “Gregz Hangout | Gungame 24/7 | No isms” ) to just clicking a matchmaking button and being dropped into a match with a bunch of people you’ve never seen before and will never see again after that game is over.
With the server model occasionally people join or leave, but you’ll likely see most of the same people over several matches and maps. And if you rejoin that server another day because you liked it you might see that some of those people came back for the same reasons that you did.
Speaking as someone who’s only been playing ARC Raiders for about a week, this does happen pretty often. The game uses Aggression Based Matchmaking, so there is still PVP if you want it. But if you want to be friendly, team up and chat with randoms you meet, and generally coexist with fellow players, it’s totally doable and actually happens fairly often.
Bumped into a guy on the map Blue Gate in a residential area. He was in a rush to get somewhere, but when I told him I was new to the game he stopped and gave me a couple blueprints for guns and a few tips for the map we were on.
Likewise. I’ve been ganked a number of times, I just block them and move on. Probably 10 player kills in the last 4 months or less? The aggression ranking in matchmaking really seems to help. I’ve yet to get the achievement for player kills, and I’ve seen an uptick when player kills are linked to feats, but overall most of the people I see are helpful and not trying to loot steal or kill you. I hope the PVP players keep being put in matches with each other and are enjoying themselves somewhere I’m not present.
I wish Escape from Tarkov had something like this.
Lol, good luck. EFT is about making everyone else more miserable than you. That’s how you win. 😂
deleted by creator
One thing I appreciate about the game is the natural enforcement of rules. Usually, in a game we see strict, coded enforcement: You’re not punished for attacking a teammate, you either physically can’t, or you’re removed from the game when it’s demonstrated to be intentional.
In Arc Raiders, if there’s no witnesses, you CAN get away with murdering another player. It comes with risks, for instance people could hear and deduce the situation. I think having that as a possibility actually makes the friendly interactions feel more positive. It’s more of an intentional choice.
There’s perhaps something interesting to say about game design mechanics there - where something exists in the game but is not actively rewarded or encouraged nor punished.
Well you physically can’t attack teammates in arc raiders either. And since we all know aggression based match making exists, there is a punishment (albeit ephemeral) for killing other players.
But beyond that I agree, it is fun anarchy
Fire will still damage them, so Fireball Burners and Blaze Grenades are still there as an option. I think you can also stun your teammates.
There’s been reports of griefing randoms doing this for profit.
Having played the game I disagree entirely. People were blood thirsty and pretended to be helpful only to kill before extraction. The DON’T SHOOT emote was used 100% of the time before they shot me in the face.
0/10 don’t recommend.
The game puts you in different lobbies depending on your play style. Care bears get matched with other care bears. Murder bears get matched with other murder bears. If you are finding yourself only getting matched with murder bears, examine your play style.
murder bearsintensive Care Bears
Don’t Care Bears
Most of my experience has been good and friendly but there are certain maps that murderers tend to frequent. Stella mons has been where I’ve found most player killers. Overall though, people chat and team up successfully all the time
Sure, but it has never been as kumbaya cooperative as described in this article. People can and do meet up cooperatively but it is not the norm.
It is if you play with me! My favorite thing is finding a player with low health and healing them or recharging their shield before they see me.
I’ll note you as the exception 🫶
I bet the big difference is time. When do you play vs the journalist?
8pm central time vs 8am central time, vs 3am central time probably bring in very different people.
Kinda like how a bar or pub shifts during a day.
That’s the fun thing, I don’t, because my game experience was horrible and I’d rather play games that I can enjoy in the time that I have to do that.
I wasn’t saying you should. It’s just a thing I’ve noticed and that reviewers never mention.
In Jedi Outcast and Academy having your saber off meant that you were currently chatting or AFK. In good servers you’d get banned for killing someone who had their saber off.
I think the connections are more exciting when in the back of your mind is always the thought “I could kill them”.
I love that game exactly because of this, the random encounters, the crazy people, the funny ones, the awkward ones, when in the right lobby it’s such an interesting social experience
I wish I could experience multiplayer games like this. Bad performance due to my vision would likely frustrate others playing with me.
Honestly Arc Raiders is (or can be) more about collecting stuff while staying alive than about killing stuff. Evading 100% of the fights is a totally valid play style. So your vision problems might not be as big a deal in this game as you would expect.
Other guy: “Grab the supplies”
Me: “Where are they?”
Other guy: “Over there”
Me: “Where is ‘there’?”
I know next to nothing about Arc Raiders, so I may be assuming wrong. It’s not just about PvP, it’s about how fast-paced the game play is. I can bumble through a game of Deep Rock Galactic with friends because it’s (I imagine) slower paced and everyone is working on the same goal. My friends are also patient enough to deal with my issues.
If you buy ARC Raiders, you’ll have your money’s worth by the time you decide whether you’re enjoying it.
You can easily avoid PVP most of the time by not engaging in combat with other players - the game will put you into like-minded lobbies in a few raids.
ARC is often fairly big and has multiple ways to destroy, as well as multiple points to damage them, with some weapons definitely being easier to use, let alone the grenades. On top of non-combat ways of dealing with them.
And most importantly, the people. You can just join raids solo and run up to people and team up to go do whatever together. You can get helped on most, if not all, things that you might wanna do, but struggle with due to your vision.
And even if you don’t, you’ll love the game for what your vision won’t affect: the chatting and the community and the cool shit you all do.
I’d say go watch some specifically friendly videos, but they just do such lobbies justice.
Deep Rock with friends is indeed a very awesome game!
I have no idea how bad your vision is, you do need decent situational awareness in Arc Raiders to stay alive. And you need to get to an exit point before the mission is over (15 minutes I think? Been a while since I last played it). But other than that you can solo in your own tempo, tagging along with others is completely optional.
Hell, I wish more games just had humanity. It might be due to me being antiwar, but when playing MMOs (whose MO is pretty much always ‘kill each other’ PVP) I wish folk were not so quick to kill, especially not when the kill isn’t imperative. Face it, some of the best ever moments in gaming are when folk have the option to kill each other and dont. A shred of humanism.
Universal signs in COD existed to plead for mercy, such as switching to a knife and looking away. In Black Ops II there’s a rave room in a map and several players spent a minute bobbing their characters around until someone else came and mowed the other team down. One time in Battlefield I spent the majority of a game (no mic mind you) chilling on a roof with half a dozen players from two teams. I came to multiplayer FPS games for the combat, stayed for the randoms I met.