ARC Raiders Cheating Test Exposes Rampant Wall Hack Problem - How Bad Is It Really?

ARC Raiders is one of the few truly captivating games I've encountered in a long time. The tension of scavenging for supplies in ruins, the camaraderie of fighting alongside teammates, and the thrill of turning the tide in dire situations - these experiences are increasingly rare in other games.

This isn't the kind of game that becomes repetitive and tiring after dozens of hours of play. However, the rampant cheating problem can no longer be ignored.

Recently, a player-initiated test quantified, shockingly, a prevalent yet difficult-to-verify dilemma in our daily gaming experience: the extent of cheating far exceeds our imagination.

Test

One player conducted a special test to reveal the true density of cheating in ARC Raiders. He admitted to using a wall hack cheat, but not to gain an unfair advantage; rather, he used it as a means of observation. He designed a standard fishing process to verify the existence of other cheaters.

First, he spent hours gathering materials to craft a high-value Jupiter, equipped it with a Looting Mk. 3 and a medium shield. Upon entering a PVP match, he would choose a random location at the edge of each map, hide there, and wield the valuable Jupiter.

Second, he used wall hacks and radar to observe whether players were rushing towards his hiding place from hundreds of meters away, ignoring the terrain. These players' goal was clearly to seize his ARC Raiders Items. When other Raiders approached, he would put the pistol into his safe pocket and repeat the process.

The logic of this experiment is very clear: a normal ARC Raiders player could never spot a stationary target in a random hiding spot at the edge of the map. Any direct rush can be reasonably inferred as the use of wall hacks or similar abilities.

Results

The test was conducted on ARC Raiders PC client, with multiple raids performed in both modes with cross-platform play disabled and enabled. The results were worrying. In all test matches, the vast majority of games saw at least one cheater rushing directly to the tester's hiding place. Some matches even saw the absurd situation of multiple cheaters arriving simultaneously and confronting each other.

Overall, the proportion of matches encountering cheaters in ARC Raiders is alarmingly high. This means that a significant portion of matches in PVP lobbies, where players crave the core competitive experience, may be contaminated by cheating. The probability of an average player encountering a cheater far exceeds what is normally acceptable, jeopardizing the fairness of the gaming experience.

It's worth noting that these results were obtained even with console players included. Given the extreme difficulty of cheating at the core mechanics level, this suggests that the cheating problem in the pure PC environment of ARC Raiders may be even more severe. Cross-platform multiplayer functionality, in some cases, could even allow PC-based cheating to indirectly affect the gaming environment for console players.

Cheaters in the test might not have taken the bait for various reasons, such as being too far away or not considering the risk worthwhile, meaning the actual proportion of players detected by those using wall hacks could be even higher. This is a plague spreading to every corner of the server.

Root Cause

Testers also revealed an awkward reality facing anti-cheat systems: why are so many cheaters able to evade detection for so long? This is because the current ARC Raiders anti-cheat mechanism seems primarily to target cheaters whose actions, such as enabling aimbot, are too obvious and whose data is highly prone to anomalies.

However, to avoid being banned, current ARC Raiders cheaters only use wall hacks and completely disable aimbot. In this way, they gain god-like battlefield information, predicting the location and movement of all enemies, while effectively evading the system's automatic detection, allowing them to rampage through the highest ranks and dominate PVP leaderboards with impunity.

This explains why the frequency of successful player reports is decreasing. Initially, some cheaters using aimbot were banned, and their equipment was returned to its rightful owner. However, now, more covert cheaters dominate ARC Raiders.

They rely on X-ray vision to gain information and masquerade as expert players, making it extremely difficult for ARC Raiders system to detect them and for players to report them. The act of accurately killing you through bushes or directly attacking you without any prior information is likely backed by an all-seeing eye.

Another key factor contributing to this trend is the low cost of cheating. Once a cheater's account is banned, they can simply spend about 40 cents to get a new ARC Raiders game key from some third-party key websites, essentially getting back to the game at zero cost. This low cost of crime renders bans ineffective.

Solutions

Combating cheating is extremely difficult for any competitive game, especially for a popular player-versus-player game like ARC Raiders. The natural decline in player numbers after several months of ARC Raiders' release is normal, but it's undeniable that many players quit because they couldn't tolerate the rampant cheating. This is a direct drain on the game's vitality.

While we have sympathy and understanding for ARC Raiders development team, the current state of the game urgently needs change. This test, though controversial, revealed the true density of cheaters in ARC Raiders in a most direct and brutal way, showing us that the severity of the problem has exceeded our expectations.

ARC Raiders development team has stated they will increase their efforts to combat cheating, and we know they are working hard. I will continue to play this game because I genuinely love it. And many players who love this game are still waiting for ARC Raiders to come up with truly effective measures to purify this battlefield we love, allowing ARC Raiders to one day return to its original intention of fair competition.