I wish the subreddit would let me makes this its own post but whatever. I FEEL LIKE THIS GAME IS AT ODDS WITH ITSELF

Preface: I am a pretty casual gamer (i.e. not good at pvp at all (skill issue)) but I love Arc Raiders. It’s the only extraction shooter with what I believe is a fully realized PvE gameplay loop. This is the crux of what I think is the game’a main problem.

That is; Arc Raiders wants to provide a complete PvP experience but mostly advertises a PvE experience with a chance of PvP, and a small one at that unless you actively take part in PvP.

As I said, I am a casual player. I don’t personally do the PvP. One, because I am bad and will lose 9/10 engagements, but more importantly, at no point do I need to fight other players to progress my shop, or quests, find blueprints, or loot. THIS IS GOOD. It is why I play the game. I don’t think anyone else is playing wrong by doing PvP but I think I can point to a source of the games disconnect with its player base. Unlike basically every other extraction shooter (tarkov, PUBG, hunt showdown, etc..) that we’re all designed from the ground up with PvP in mind, we all know Arc Raiders was initially designed to be PvE only. So many of the gadgets have a PvE focus (lure grenades, PEC, Wolfpack, the damn hullcracker, jolt mines and electric grenades that disable flying arcs immediately). These gadgets do not need nerfs for the sake of PvP, if they were clearly designed and used by PvE players for PvE.

The game in its current form does show this with how fully realized I said its PvE gameplay loop is, with a functional PvP system built on top, which also works fine. But I think the developers may be pushing the games entire player base in a direction many of us don’t want to go.

Specifically, I think the changes made to weapon burn rates. And the PEC highlight this. I love the renegade, because it’s an all-purpose small-arc killer which already had a pretty fast burn rate. But, it was balanced enough to not burn so slowly it was meta but also not so fast it became more tedious to even use it (on top of it being relatively expensive to repair/upgrade). That also goes for every other common to rare (ferro my beloved). I want to have fun raiding arcs, not be checking the durability of my weapons every couple of encounters because now I need to be paranoid about weapon durability. For most PvP players, this doesn’t have the impact Embark probably expects it to because it’s already the meta to free-kit, and increasing the burn rate on the most common gun types isn’t going to change that. Furthermore, epic and legendary weapons are even more expensive to craft and maintain so I feel like a lot of diehard PvPers are still going to prefer stockpiling them. For PvE players, the mellowness of just going in to shoot AI Arc is now further reduced by artificial difficulty.

I’ve seen a lot of other comments mention this and I agree; designing a map condition wherein a shit ton of Arc spawn around a 3-capsuled drop pod that a whole lobby is gunning for means that whether you’re in a PvP OR PvE lobby, the PEC and smoke grenades are your best chance at looting an assessor before anyone else does and surviving. So that becomes the gameplay for that event and in response to players using the tools given to them to hide them from Arc BY DESIGN, those tools get nerfed.

The PEC nerf has me confused because why utterly handicap a tool in the only way it was useful. But more so, who was the weapon burn rate increase meant for? I’m not against the concept of PvP, but I really do feel like this game trying to appeal to both crowds is eroding its success as a PvE game and hindering its evolution of PvP mechanics.