In an anti-cheat update posted yesterday, ARC Raiders executive producer Aleksander Grøndal admitted that Embark Studios was too cautious about permanently banning first-time cheaters early on. Permanent bans are now standard for all known cheat programs, and any account caught using cheats is banned for good with no warnings or second chances. Grøndal’s post comes ahead of Frozen Trail on October 8, the first of the game’s new twice-yearly major updates.
Embark has also broadened its use of license restrictions, which stop a sanctioned copy of the game from being used with another account. Any account that has ever been tied to a banned copy now gets a permanent ban as well. Hardware bans, which stop the game from running on a machine that’s been used for cheating, now kick in at a lower threshold than before. Embark is also working on a way to target more systems with hardware bans, which it hopes to implement later this year, though Grøndal acknowledges they aren’t foolproof since cheat makers keep finding ways around them.
On the detection side, Embark uses kernel-level protection from Denuvo and detections from Anybrain, along with a growing set of in-house models built around machine learning and other data. These systems analyze behavior across multiple instances before acting so legitimate players don’t get banned by mistake, which Embark says is why cheaters who stream or post clips aren’t always banned right away. Grøndal says there’s always a human in the loop through the appeals process, and the team also reviews footage on YouTube and other platforms to act on clear evidence of cheating. Embark is testing another anti-cheat system called Elytra on a small scale in The Finals, and it’s working toward testing it in ARC Raiders as well.
Queue teaming, where players coordinate to end up in the same solo lobby and go after Raiders who queued alone, is the other big focus of the update. Embark recently started keeping known teaming groups apart in matchmaking, and within five days, 85 percent fewer players were engaging in the behavior. Spoiled raids dropped from around one in 50 to one in 300, with no meaningful impact on queue times. Teaming up with someone you meet in a raid through proximity chat is still allowed, since Embark is only targeting players who coordinate before a raid begins.
