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There's been a slight shift in the world of Arc Raiders, as the overall sentiment of Steam reviews has gone down. Previously, the extraction shooter was riding high on "Very Positive," but now it's moved to "Mostly Positive," and within the statistical change, you can find some recurring bugbears.
Consulting SteamDB, the overall number of daily negative reviews for Embark's sci-fi multiplayer game hasn't changed much, generally sitting between 120 and 250 over the last few weeks. The positive reviews have dwindled, however, down to between 300 and 900 daily, well below the 1,000-plus that was a regular occurrence some weeks ago.
The feedback contains a few recurring complaints, with a lack of worthwhile new updates being a solid theme. "Arc Raiders is a live-service game. It shouldn’t just get new enemies and reskins of existing maps; it needs new maps, new mechanics, new weapons, for crying out loud," says one Steam review left on March 20, with 30.9 hours of playtime. "The game has become pretty stale."
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Another review from the same day, with 75.9 hours on record, is similar. "[It's] a very frustrating game and the devs seem to not listen to its players and are not adding anything new. The very small additions were tiny and did nothing but make the experience worse," the person states.
The amount of cheating comes up, as you'd expect, since it's been a thorn in the community's side for months. "I am all for PvP but not cheating. I been killed many times by rats and I don't mind when I lose. It just hits different when it's a lose all if you die looting game, but lost all to cheaters," a Steam user with 32.3 hours of play says.
Some aren't happy about how rounds are divvied up either, as one player who's invested 21.1 hours into Arc Raiders called the aggression-based matchmaking "unreliable, completely non-transparent," and states "players can game the system to get into more PvE-friendly lobbies." There's an ebb and flow to all of these elements, in that Embark will always be fighting the tide in one respect or another.
The more resources are given to making new features, the less goes to balancing and anti-cheat measures. That all said, the studio may need to rethink its priorities to begin climbing back up Steam's review scale.
