Arc Raiders' contentious 'aggression-based matchmaking' isn't just smart, but absolutely necessary

I got back into Arc Raiders this week expecting disappointment. After a nice long break from PvP games in December, it felt inevitable that the unlikely chill that defined Arc Raiders' community at launch would have eroded to more cynical, typical skirmishes over two months later. Surely as a larger pile of peaceful players checked off their final quests, cultivated stockpiles of valuables, or reset their progress altogether, they would turn to ruthless PvP as a means for variety. Nope.

My Arc Raiders solo lobbies are as chill and blood-quenched as ever. "Don't shoot" remains the preferred weapon of my fellow scrappers, and when the odd murderer does make themselves known, the rest of the server tends to go full white blood cell on their ass.

It seemed almost absurd that a competitive shooter could keep it up, until Embark confirmed in a recent interview with Games Beat that aggression-based matchmaking is very much real. That's according to Embark head honcho Patrick Söderlund, who described the system (which was apparently implemented in a recent backend update) in no uncertain terms.

"We introduced a system where we also matchmake based on how prone you are to PvP or PvE. So if your preference is to do PvE and you have less conflict with players … you'll get more matched up [with that sort of play]. Obviously, it's not a full science."

That explains so much. It explains why my lobbies are so nice—I have fewer than 15 player kills over 50+ hours, and they were all self-defense—and why half of the people I've talked to about Arc Raiders say it's just as bloody and cold as the next shooter. Is it regional? Is it platform-specific? Maybe a bit, but there's no doubt now that it's our own behavior steering the experience.

Judgy

I get why, faced with this unfamiliar rubric, some players are feeling unfairly judged for engaging in PvP (especially in trios, where group strength mentality naturally leads to more conflict). It's an odd thing to be "penalized" for making the valid choice to shoot in a multiplayer shooter, but those people are looking at it the wrong way. The incentives of even the least prescriptive competitive shooters out there—Hunt: Showdown and Escape From Tarkov—don't care if or how you kill, only how skilled the opponents were. On that familiar scale, the K/D ratio is a purely positive status symbol.

Arc Raiders does not share that opinion. XP is doled out based on what kind of raid you had—you can earn more XP for simply surviving a full match and looting a dangerous room than killing two players and running away. Kill skill isn't particularly glorified. The only leaderboard surfaced to players (Trials) is a localized 100-player contest of who can loot the most boxes or destroy the most wasps in a week. There is no profile badge chronicling your total kill count, no collection of dog tags with the usernames of your victims.

If you think for even a minute about it, it'd be weird if Arc Raiders had any of that. In the same way that skill-based matchmaking supplanted the manual process of finding servers with your preferred level of sweat, Arc Raiders is an example of automating the manual process of joining an MMO server with strict PvP limitations or roleplaying requirements.

Is that better than human-curated servers? Not really. My low aggression means my matches are likely to be pleasant, but it's hardly a promise. There's no server admin I can turn to when someone's spoiling the fun, and that's because Embark still sees PvP danger as intrinsic to enjoying Arc Raiders. I think the loads of players, myself included, who remain interested in a purely PvE mode would argue that's a narrow perspective on a widely popular game, and that handing players the tools to decide what fun is usually has great results, but hey, it's the early days.

It speaks to the unique MMO-like qualities of Arc Raiders, and extraction shooters more broadly, that there exists a reason for matchmaking beyond pure skill. What does skill even mean in a game where the "best" killer probably juiced their K/D ratio by shooting players in the back? If you're going to make matchmaking a requirement in this sort of shooter, aggression-based matchmaking isn't just needed, but should be treated as the tip of the iceberg.

Embark isn't passing a moral judgement by punting some players into a "killer pool," it's just trying to properly moderate a game designed to be more than a deathmatch. I'm just one data point, but it's really working so far. For the first time in a multiplayer shooter, I'm being rewarded for being the nice guy.