Yes, you read that title correctly: cheaters in ARC Raiders are randomly catching on fire and dropping mountains of rubber duckies in their wake. This is the type of story I got into video game journalism for.
Earlier this week, Embark Studios dropped the brand new Headwinds update for ARC Raiders. Most players seem to be enjoying the new content, but the update has had an unintended side effect on the meta.
Rubber ducks were introduced in the Headwinds update, and they’re worth a lot of money. Fortunately, the ducks themselves aren’t the issue, but the new duplication glitch introduced in the latest update is being used in tandem with the expensive rubber ducks, so that raiders can generate a lot of disposable income.
As spotted by PC Gamer, threads have been popping up all over r/ArcRaiders subreddit… displaying downed raiders amongst hundreds of rubber ducks.
“A raider caught on fire in Buried City Metro, went down without saying a word, and left behind a mountain of Familiar Ducks. I extracted with $2.8M. Still confused,” reads the title of endgame2937’s post.
“Was doing the pharmacist quest for Lance, heard the tell tale duck noise…came upon this silent raider,” states the title of Onidge’s post.
There are, by my count, half a dozen of these posts currently on the subreddit, and almost all of them state the same thing: whatever killed the raider in question, it definitely wasn’t another raider.
This has led the community to the obvious conclusion: Embark Studios is aware of the exploit, and they’re hunting down those who abuse it… and using invisible fire to kill them, apparently?
The funniest part of this is that players are only just finding out that Raider Den screen in the menu actually changes based on what is in your inventory. This has led to several posts popping up on the subreddit of raiders surrounded by hundreds of rubber ducks in their dens.
Personally, while the duplication glitch is obviously not good for ARC Raider’s meta, I do kind of hope that Embark Studios will see everyone’s obsession with rubber duckies and opt to let us farm hundreds of them through different means.
Just don’t actually try to replicate the dupe glitch for yourself, because other players are reporting that doing so will earn you a 30 day suspension. Almost seems worth it just to set up a rubber ducky kingdom of your own… almost.
