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Taking on the Matriarch or the Queen in Arc Raiders is no easy task. You generally need help, and quite a bit of it to take one down. But in saying that, they weren't designed for a whole map full of players to target them, neither in toughness nor loot, and the devs at Embark Studios are becoming increasingly aware of that fact.
"They're not intended for the full server to go up against and get equally rewarded," Virgil Watkins, design director on Arc Raiders, tells PC Gamer. "It is meant to be, you know, a couple of dedicated squads, maybe working together while also dealing with other players."
He concedes it's "definitely on us, to an extent," because Embark is who provided the weapons and balanced the extraction shooter. That people are finding increasingly efficient ways to harvest the largest prizes is, ultimately, a consequence of how the game's built.
"I think we gave players too effective abilities to take down these things too early. So they were tuned more for what I would call mid-game gear," Watkins adds. But even when you attune the weaponry, you've got to deal with how the treasure gleaned isn't rigged to have something worthwhile for everyone if an entire round jumps in on the fight.
"Do we reward the people who might pick their moment well, and go get some scraps from part of the fight and then sneak away?" he says. "Are you going to be the guy who capitalizes at the end of the fight because everyone's worn down and out of ammo, or are you the one who's trying to pull everyone together and have the fight on even terms?"
Embark is perhaps a victim of its success in a small way here, since it's attracted a massive audience that's consistently tested every avenue to its limits. If you've ever seen one of those fireworks displays, you've likely seen a sneaky raider or two swooping in for the nicest trinkets, before bungling away as quickly as possible. You might want to join them if you haven't already, as changes may be in the pipeline to make these encounters the kind of slobberknockers they're meant to be.
