ARC Raiders' Latest Exploit Is Giving Players Instant Kills - Sunburst Viral- Latest News on Celebrities, gossip, TV, music and movies

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Every live-service game is in a constant struggle with not only cheaters, but those who bend the rules to exploit unintended game mechanics, and ARC Raiders is currently suffering from an egregious loophole. Embark Studios’ extraction shooter has been prone to glitches, like players phasing into locked rooms, and more innocuous crafting exploits to reap incredible profits, but a proliferating issue is now tarnishing any semblance of balance the PvP side of ARC Raiders possesses, granting near-instant kills to macro users.

The Kettle, a common weapon and one you can get from a free loadout, is at the center of ARC Raiders‘ biggest controversy because it has a very generous frame rate cap. It’s possible to fire the Kettle more than 12 times per second, according to testing done by Reddit user InformalSolutionM8, which gives it various times-to-kill ranging from less than a third of a second to barely over a second, depending on the target’s shield and the shooter’s accuracy.

This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if human ability was always a factor, but macros—software commands that allow players to execute a string of inputs with a single button press—have turned the Kettle into an insta-kill machine. A very good clip of the issue was posted by Reddit user ContextEFT, showing that even with a medium shield, there’s no possible way to fight back against a Kettle macro user instigating.

ARC Raiders Players Are Up In Arms

ARC Raiders character standing by a probe on Blue Gate.

There have been consistent issues upsetting the metagame, which have surprisingly had seemingly no impact on the immense popularity of ARC Raiders. Players initially being able to glitch through locked doors, which guard loot hot spots, threatened both loot balance and the conventionally understood design of where PvP was most likely to occur. It was given a band-aid fix in which perpetrators are simply incinerated, but now the use of Kettle macros is on the upswing and players are growing frustrated.

The Kettle exploit utterly undermining PvP balance is now a regular topic in the ARC Raiders subreddit and across social media. Consensus believes that using a Kettle macro is cheating, and it is in fact in violation of the game’s terms of service agreement, as pointed out by Reddit user IronLotus29. Arguments for the use of macros, which often hinge on the idea that they’re not explicitly blocked by the game client itself, are rarely taken seriously by the player base at large.

Instant Kills In PvP Aren’t Fun

Macro usage to make the semi-automatic Kettle an effectively automatic weapon has cast a pall over ARC Raiders. It’s seemingly a more common issue on PC, where cheats are generally easier to utilize, but macros are possible on consoles as well. Even aside from litigation involving ARC Raiders‘ TOS and the game’s anti-cheat measures, Kettle macros are a bane of fairness and sportsmanship—two facets of competition that are often sadly abandoned in the anonymity of online gaming.

Getting killed in a game because your opponent is using an exploit simply isn’t fun. Doubly so when your demise is near instantaneous. ARC Raiders has an immense amount of momentum behind it, but Kettle macros becoming more popular will drive players away if the issue is not rectified. Fixes are understandably slow during the holiday season—Embark deserves a break—but an influx of players also makes it a bad time for ARC Raiders‘ most frustrating exploit to fester.