Arc Raiders Rats Are Jumping In Front Of Bullets To Game The New Self-Defence Matchmaking Patch

Embark's matchmaking crew over at Arc Raiders thought they had finally killed the griefer problem this week. The studio pushed Live Update 1.39.0 on July 28, the headline change being that defending yourself in a PvP scrap no longer drags your playstyle estimate toward the aggressive end of the matchmaking pool. In theory it was a clean fix: stop punishing pacifists who shoot back when some opportunistic raider tries to loot them on the way to a Queen event. In practice, less than 48 hours later, the rats had already cracked it. They are now jumping in front of gunfire so that the defender looks like the aggressor, the kill counts as self-defence, and the matchmaking brain pats them on the head and queues them right back into another friendly lobby.

What Embark Actually Changed

Update 1.36 was the first shot across the bow, a stricter behaviour-based matchmaker that weighs every kill, down, and squad wipe across solo, duo, and trio lobbies. Embark wanted to stop people from coasting through PvE-only matches while they were secretly little Tarkov sweatlords. The problem was obvious the moment the patch went live: if you downed one aggressive raider across an entire weekend you could get promoted from a calm farming run straight into a PvP bloodbath. Embark's own players screamed. So 1.39.0 walked it back and rewrote the self-defence clause to read, and we are quoting the dev blog here, only the fights you choose to start will influence your playstyle estimate, and defending yourself won't affect it at all. It also added a new rule that third-partying, meaning entering a fight that two other squads were already having, counts as starting a fight. On paper, beautiful.

The New Trick Is Embarrassingly Simple

PC Gamer's Elie Gould posted a clip on July 30 of a player named craybe catching the exploit in real time. The lobby was running a Queen event with two free kits of hairpins. Everyone was minding their own business, healing, picking up loot. A random raider kept trying to step in front of craybe's Equalizer. When the Equalizer went off and the rat went down, the system registered craybe as the aggressor, and the rat, naturally, was the defender. From there the playbook is grim. The attacker opens the quick wheel to swap to a long-range weapon, hits the swap-bug, and uses the moment of confusion to ping the lobby chat claiming they were shot first. Naive players who were not paying attention rush in to avenge them, and the real rat walks out of the firefight with all the loot. Multiply that across enough Queen and Matriarch events, and you have a matchmaking system that is functionally a rat farm.

Community Reaction Is Loud, But Mostly One-Sided

Right now the loudest voice is PC Gamer's writeup itself, and the Reddit thread it links to on r/ArcRaiders titled ABMM workaround already in use for the Queen. Embark has not yet posted an official response. The on-X chatter is mostly people tagging the studio and asking for a hotfix, but the volume is still low compared to bigger Embark controversies, and there is no coordinated player uprising yet. The bigger signal is on the Steam review side: ARC Raiders is sitting at Mixed recent reviews with about 3,961 logged, and the negative burst since the 1.39.0 patch has been noticeable in the discussions tab. Several long-time raiders in the community Discord are openly asking for a dedicated PvE mode, the same request they were begging for back in February, and Embark has refused to add one every single time. The more the ABMM claps back, the louder that chorus gets.

The Critical Pixel Take

This is what happens when you build a mood-matching algorithm on top of a 60-dollar extraction shooter and ship the dial as a live experiment. Behaviour-based matchmaking in a PvPvE game is already a nightmare to balance because every fix is just a new puzzle for the worst players in the lobby, and Embark is learning that lesson in slow motion. They tried three patches in a month to walk the line between aggressive and defensive players, and the latest one is already being routed by people who have nothing better to do on a Tuesday than grief a Queen event. Embark can either tighten the self-defence heuristic to require an actual aggressor badge on the victim's profile, or finally give the community the opt-in PvE mode they have been asking for since launch. Both options are cheaper than letting the Reddit clip stay the top result for Arc Raiders matchmaking for the rest of the week. The studio is also juggling a major Frozen Trail expansion for October, the first big content drop after the new six-month content cadence they announced in May, and going into that window with the matchmaking on fire is the worst possible optics. Whoever is leading the ABMM team at Embark has a short window to push a hotfix, restore some trust with the solo and duo crowd that built the game's launch momentum, and avoid turning the Frozen Trail reveal trailer into a comments section full of rat jokes. Right now the fix is in their court, and the community is watching the patch notes like a hawk.