The extraction shooter genre feeds on unpredictability, but Arc Raiders brings in something far more sinister than that – a matchmaking system that tracks your behavior and penalizes the co-op. In December 2025, Embark Studios art director Robert Sammelin confirmed what many in the community had suspected for weeks – that the game tracks player behavior and matches based on that.
This system is known by gamers as “aggression-based matchmaking” and has but one simple tenet. Shoot anything that moves, and you will be put into games with fellow trigger-happy raiders. Drop your aggression, and you will have relaxed lobby partners with whom you can have proximity conversations, share items, and face Arc machines together.
This is now confirmed by the developers in a recent interview. Content creators playing two separate games, one for PvE and the other for the aggressive playstyle, have observed completely different environments in the parties after only a few games. The PvE party had players talking about the objective through proximity chat and reviving each other if a teammate had been knocked down, whereas the aggressive playstyle party received opening fire moments after a raid had initiated. A player had to play about 15 friendly games to overturn the negative match classification following a single kill.
The problem with all of this is the one-way trail. It only takes a casual player three to five highly competitive matches to end up in lobbies with a heavy focus on PvP, but to get out of the categorization of the gameplay system will take a whole lot more friendly matches.
From the point of view of game designing, it seems like Embark has made an engagement optimizer rather than an actual skill-based matchmaker. Now, the solo gamer without PvP skills to begin with has been sorted on the basis of playing style rather than actual ability. This transforms the formula for an extraction shooter, for which all playstyles coexist in theory.
