If you're getting tired of Arc Raiders players hitting you with eight consecutive headshots through smoke from 200 meters, or outright spawning escape hatches, developer Embark Studios has good news for you. It's preparing another level of anti-cheat protection that should catch more cheaters early and quickly.
In an anti-cheat blog post, Embark says it's testing "a new kernel-level solution that we expect will sharpen both detection and precision throughout Speranza and the Rust Belt." This will seemingly sit alongside or on top of the existing kernel-level Easy Anti-Cheat, as well as the game's broader machine learning-informed detection and "several additional layers" Embark won't explain for "operational security" reasons.
"Kernel-level detection is a necessity because most commercial cheats operate within that space," the studio adds. "Without it, we'd have little to no visibility into the tools doing the most damage."
Cheating in Arc Raiders has been a sticking point in the community almost since launch. The game was perfectly set up for cheating hurdles. A hugely popular multiplayer game is exactly what cheaters and cheat sellers look for, so Arc Raiders' enormous launch attracted a lot of them. Now that the game's out of the honeymoon phase and leveled out in daily active users, the player pool has gotten smaller, potentially putting you in proximity to more cheaters – though some cheaters have obviously left, too, and often via ban.
In over 300 hours, I could count the blatant cheaters I've encountered in Arc Raiders on one hand, and that's probably true for most people. But the problem undeniably persists in some capacity, and cheating is one of those issues that, even when encountered rarely, can really sour your experience with a game. And if you're a heavy PvP player, you're far more likely to encounter cheaters.
But as it escalates its assault on cheaters, Embark also has to be careful to avoid false bans. Multiple Arc Raiders players who have physical disabilities and rely on accessibility devices like mouth-operated controllers have reported being banned for no clear reason, suspecting their input device was flagged as suspicious. Embark says "managing accessibility devices is one of the harder problems in anti-cheat," as legitimate devices can also be used to mask or enable illegitimate play.
"The signal we care about is intent," the devs say. "Our systems analyze telemetry and communication patterns to distinguish legitimate accessibility use from abuse, so players who depend on these devices to play can keep playing. This is a process that continues to be refined, but we’re dedicated to the work and the results we’ve seen thus far."
Embark says it's "constantly expanding" its archive of recognized devices, so this issue should improve with time. Ban appeals, always "reviewed by a person on our team" and never "automated," remain the best solution to false bans, Embark stresses.
