While Arc Raiders might not be dominating the extraction shooter genre quite as heavily as it did late last year, the game continues to pull in a respectable 40,000 to 50,000 concurrent daily players on Steam alone. Now, Embark Studios is rolling out a major quality-of-life improvement that could easily entice lapsed players back to Speranza: a highly requested overhaul to its matchmaking system.
Since its launch, Arc Raiders has utilized a unique, aggression-based matchmaking algorithm. The system assigns players a hidden rating based on their combat behavior; if you frequently engage in player-vs-player (PvP) firefights, the game places you in lobbies with like-minded combatants. Conversely, players who focus strictly on AI enemies and scavenging are sorted into friendlier, lower-threat servers.
However, this unified rating system created a frustrating bottleneck. Many players prefer a relaxed, quest-focused approach when playing solo, but shift gears to aggressive PvP tactics when squading up with friends. Under the old system, engaging in sweaty trio matches would heavily skew a player's hidden rating, inadvertently forcing them into high-aggression lobbies the next time they queued up alone to pick plants or scavenge.
Update 1.36.0 finally addresses this headache by tracking play styles separately across solo, duo, and trio queues.
"Say you are a friendly solo player, but your two squadmates always want to dominate in trios PvP. Before, being friendly solo could push you into more cooperative trio rounds, and playing PvP-focused in a trio could push you into more PvP-focused solo rounds - so changing squad size meant matchmaking took a bit to adjust.
"Now, there's no overlap. You'll be able to go from friendly questing and plant-picking in Solo rounds to adrenaline-fueled PvP Trio games (if that's how you usually play in those respective cases), by simply changing your squad size. The same holds for Duo - all three are tracked on their own."
While it might take the upcoming "Frozen Trail" update in October to push the game back to its record-breaking peak, this patch represents a massive win for the community's day-to-day experience.
Update 1.36.0 also brings a few other notable changes, including an unlockable crossover outfit for fans who play Embark's other hit, The Finals. The development team also announced the completion of its Denuvo anti-cheat rollout, additional patches for item duplication glitches, and the expansion of "forbidden free loadouts" across more map conditions.