ARC Raiders is a unique game among extraction shooters in that there is a very strong social aspect to it. Whenever you play solo (and I consider that to be the quintessential ARC experience), folks will always gauge whether or not to fight you, seeing as you both stand to lose with no one there to back you up.
But if you do love hunting people down for sport, you’re in for a world of reckoning when it comes to matchmaking now. Though we’ve known that aggression plays a major part in the game’s queue system, ARC Raiders devs are now looking to honor the right to self-defense by treating unprovoked attacks separately from just minding your own business and fighting to save your hide.
In a new post titled “Notes on the matchmaking system,” Embark Studios stated that “your playstyle didn’t capture whether you started a PvP encounter or merely defended yourself” in previous iterations, leading to situations where “cautious Raiders could be treated as more PvP-focused than they actually are.” Going forward, the two are going to be treated “differently,” the devs explained.
This means that you now have the God-given right to self-defense, and if any Raider out there opens fire on you unprovoked—and that will inevitably happen—you can fire back without having to worry that you’ll agitate the matchmaking and make it put you alongside the worst, most aggressive offenders.
Additionally, if you play matches where nothing ever happens, those will be afforded less weight for the sake of matchmaking calculations. Your actual choices and what you do will be reflected more in the queue rather than uneventful games, leading to more “peaceful” lobbies overall.
Embark Studios also explained how the overall matchmaking system in the game works, painting it as a “continuous scale” stretching from minus one to plus one, i.e., from extremely cooperative to extremely PvP-focused. The system tries to match you with people that are closest to you on that scale, meaning there are now black-and-white “good” and “bad” lobbies for each player type.
What I found most interesting is that, as per Embark’s own visual, most players in the game fall between zero and plus .75, indicating that the majority of the player base is more keen on PvP than cooperation or peaceful negotiations. A good chunk of the community skews extremely towards cooperative, however, so if you fall into that range, odds are that you’ll spend more time being on good terms with other players than actively fighting them.
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