While ARC Raiders has been doing quite well for itself, every so often, a new exploit or hack is discovered that sends its player base into an uproar. The newest exploit is one that allows players to escape from any consequences from being taken out in a fight, since it essentially allows players to open up an escape hatch to quickly extract back to Speranza. The exploit, as caught by Reddit user SteezeManStan and being demonstrated by TikTok user syntax.media0, ensures that the player doesn’t lose any of their loot on death, mitigating any consequence for failure.
In a Reddit thread discussing this exploit, several players have called for ARC Raiders developer Embark Studios to take harsh actions against any player that uses it. While the exact nature of this exploit is currently unknown, some players have theorized that, rather than creating a brand new escape hatch, the player is simply interacting with one that is already present in the game’s world.
“Every game object has coordinates, even if it’s not meant to move like a hatch. If you move your game’s hatch around in memory, you could put it right on top of you,” explained one commenter.
“Technically, the hatch is still wherever it normally is on the server side. But, for your game’s sake, it’s right next to you. The game isn’t checking your position when you trigger the switch, it assumes that you MUST be right next to it.”
Of course, without any actual comment from Embark Studios, this is all still speculation. If this is indeed how this exploit works, however, among the fixes that the commenter has suggested for the developers is to cross check a player’s location data on the client and in the server to ensure that the extraction is legitimate.
Embark Studios has taken steps to address egregious use of cheats and exploits through a three-strike ban system as part of the January update for ARC Raiders. “A three strikes progressive ban system is in the process of being implemented. Bans will progress from 30 days, to 60 and finally a permaban for repeat offenders,” explained the developer in its patch notes.
Studio CEO (and now Nexon’s executive chairman) Patrick Söderlund spoke about the ban system earlier this month. He went into quite a bit of detail about the need to be proactive with the system while still ensuring that players that weren’t actually cheating don’t get caught as part of false-positives.
“It’s not always easy because the minute you do something, the minute you come up with something, they’ve come up with something else to do,” he explained. “The banning process is obviously delicate because we need to make sure that we ban people who deserve to be banned, if that makes any sense. If you take general figures, anywhere between 0.1% to 1% of any multiplayer crowd in a large-scale multiplayer game is cheating, and therefore, to some extent, should get a temporary or a longer, or permanent ban.”
As for how many players have been banned since the new system was introduced, Söderlund said that there had been “an influx” of players trying to get in touch with the studio in order to appeal their bans. “I know that we have banned probably tens of thousands of players so far,” he said, before noting once again that the studio has to ensure that innocent players aren’t affected.
ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The extraction shooter is slated to get a brand new map condition this week. For more details, check out our coverage.
