A newly announced revision to Arc Raiders' season-wiping Expedition system has sparked blowback from players, particularly those who worry they won't be available to play during the five-day challenge teed up by developer Embark Studios, or those frustrated that the resources they've saved all season no longer matter.
For the Expedition sign-up opening April 28, with the Riven Tides update, and closing May 4, Arc Raiders players will not need to purchase bonus skill points with money or stash value, but can instead earn them by completing a "deal damage" challenge in a five-day window. The shift from saving money to dealing damage seems to have been more positively received, but the way it's been announced and implemented has proven unpopular among many.
It's currently unclear just how much damage players will need to deal to get all five potential skill points. If the challenge ends up being easy to complete, this could all blow over quickly. But based on the grinds that Arc Raiders uses elsewhere, many players aren't optimistic. And frankly, it doesn't help that players still don't know the specifics of the challenge, even after Embark's reveal. Communication around Expeditions has been spotty since launch, and players have only grown more frustrated with each successive wipe.
The complaints are two-fold. Firstly, because this Expedition change was once again announced right at the end of the season with no heads-up from Embark, players are scrambling to react. This time, assuming players had understandably been saving up money for the value-based skill point system used for the past several months, they can also throw those efforts and resources away. Apart from the Expedition caravan supplies, all that gathering doesn't matter.
"I saved up 3 million credits throughout this entire season to 'chill' on the last phase of the expedition," one player laments on the Arc Raiders subreddit. "It’s practically worthless now because of the lack of communication."
Then there's the issue of FOMO, with many players very much fearing they'll miss out on this five-day challenge due to other obligations – work, vacation, family stuff, health, who knows. Life happens, or maybe you just won't want to play those days, so tying an essential endgame activity to a small five-day window risks excluding players who were perfectly capable of completing the Expedition caravan throughout the wipe.
"I’m okay with a time limit but 5 days is just too tight," one player replies on Reddit, "it should be 10 or even 15 days 5 is ridiculous".
"Your player base dwindles and you use FOMO to get it back LMAO," writes another player. "That's certainly the strategy of all time. And you won't even give me a precise amount of damage to aim for, so I have to stay online as long as possible during those 5 days?"
"F you if you can't play on these days I guess lol," reads a top reply to the main Arc Raiders subreddit post about the Expedition change.
"Yeah, let's make the skill points purely based on the last 5 days instead of what you did the 2 months before that," says another.
One prophet writes: "Sure hope the damage dealt required isn't too high, or there are gonna be a lot of upset people."
Embark has made a point about changing the Expedition system further based on player feedback, and yeah, I'd say it's got some feedback to sift through. It seems to me that announcing this change much sooner, or using the same system for this Expedition and implementing the damage challenge in the next, could've saved devs and players some headache.
