Arc Raiders And Its Surprisingly Chill Community
Arc Raiders has built an unexpected reputation for being one of the most relaxed extraction shooters around. While games in this genre often lean toward ruthless player killing, many solo players in Arc Raiders are having a completely different experience.
Instead of constant ambushes and sweaty firefights, some lobbies feel almost cooperative. Players shout "dont shoot" over proximity chat, help each other with enemies, and mostly focus on looting and surviving rather than hunting each other down. When a particularly aggressive player does start terrorizing others, the rest of the lobby often bands together to deal with them like white blood cells fighting an infection.
That kind of behavior sounds almost impossible in a competitive shooter, which naturally begs the question: why is this happening, and how is it lasting more than just a honeymoon launch period?
As it turns out, this peaceful vibe is not just a community quirk. It is heavily influenced by a system quietly running behind the scenes.
Aggression Based Matchmaking Explained
Embark Studios, the developer of Arc Raiders, has confirmed that it uses what it calls aggression based matchmaking. Patrick Söderlund from Embark explained that the game now looks at how likely you are to engage in player versus player combat and tries to match you with similar players.
If you tend to avoid fights, stick to PvE objectives, and rarely shoot first, you are more likely to end up in lobbies with players who behave the same way. On the other hand, if you regularly hunt down other players and focus on PvP, you will increasingly find yourself matched with people who play aggressively.
The system is not perfect or purely scientific, but it is enough to noticeably change the vibe of different lobbies. One player with over 50 hours and fewer than 15 player kills reported that almost all of their matches are still calm and cooperative months after launch. Meanwhile, other players insist that Arc Raiders is just as brutal and cutthroat as any other extraction shooter. Now we know both sides can be right, because they are effectively playing in different behavioral pools.
Some players worry that this means they are being judged or penalized just for playing the game as a shooter. From that perspective, it can feel strange that choosing to shoot in a PvP enabled game might land you in a so called killer pool. But that framing misses what Arc Raiders is trying to be.
Designing A Shooter That Is Not All About Kills
Unlike many competitive shooters, Arc Raiders does not treat kill count as the main measure of success. The game’s progression and rewards lean heavily toward survival and PvE achievements rather than pure player killing.
You can earn more experience for surviving a full match and looting a dangerous area than for killing a couple of enemy players and extracting early. The most visible leaderboard, called Trials, is not about K/D ratio or headshots. Instead, it tracks things like who loots the most boxes or destroys the most wasp enemies over a week.
There are no profile badges showing off lifetime kills, no trophies for how many players you have eliminated, and no dog tags listing your victims. Compared to games like Escape From Tarkov or Hunt Showdown, where kills and combat prowess are a core bragging point, Arc Raiders quietly pushes you to think about a raid as more than just a deathmatch.
In older online games, players who wanted a low conflict experience often had to manually find special servers with rules about limited PvP or roleplaying. Arc Raiders is essentially automating that process. Instead of hunting through server lists marked as "no KOS" or "PvE preferred," your own playstyle gradually tells the matchmaking where you should be placed.
Is this better than human moderated servers with clear rules and admins ready to step in? Not necessarily. If someone is griefing in your lobby, there is no admin to appeal to. Embark still believes that some level of PvP danger is essential to what makes Arc Raiders fun. That tension is always present in extraction shooters: how much control should players have over the level of risk they face?
Many fans argue that a pure PvE mode would be wildly popular and that giving players more tools and options usually leads to better long term engagement. For now though, aggression based matchmaking is the studio’s way of nudging the experience in different directions without splitting the game into hard PvE and PvP queues.
What This Means For Multiplayer Shooters
Arc Raiders highlights a bigger shift happening in online shooters. Skill based matchmaking used to be the main focus, pairing players by mechanical ability so matches felt fair. But in a game where backstabbing a distracted looter can inflate your stats, raw skill is not always the most important factor.
In extraction style games, what you want out of a match can matter as much as how good you are at aiming. Some players want thrilling PvP hunts. Others want tense but mostly PvE focused runs where the danger of players is a possibility, not a guarantee.
By tracking aggression and using it to build lobbies, Arc Raiders acknowledges that playstyle is just as important as skill rating. It is not about moral judgement. The system is really a form of automated moderation for a game that aims to be more than just a team deathmatch with extra steps.
For players who prefer to be the "nice guy" and avoid unnecessary fights, this can feel like the first time a multiplayer shooter truly rewards that approach. You can still get the tension and risk that define extraction games, but surrounded mostly by people who want the same balance of cooperation and conflict that you do.
Whether other extraction shooters follow this path remains to be seen. But Arc Raiders shows that matchmaking can do more than keep your win rate stable. It can quietly shape the personality of your lobbies and let very different types of players enjoy the same game in their own way.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third-person-shooter/arc-raiders-contentious-aggression-based-matchmaking-isnt-just-smart-but-absolutely-necessary/
