Arc Raiders promises severe repercussions for cheating after Marathon twisted the knife on its recent woes: 'Serious infractions now carry stricter consequences'

If you've been out there utilising cheats to gather up unfair numbers of, you know, toasters and lemons and whatever else it is Arc Raiders tasks you all with collecting, I've got bad news. Embark is coming for you like the goddamn Black Death.

In an update published yesterday, the studio threw down the gauntlet to Arc cheaters, pledging that it is "further tightening our rules and stepping up enforcement. Serious infractions now carry stricter consequences."

On top of its challenge to cheaters, Embark sounds a little defensive in these patch notes, perhaps owing to the struggles it's had with cheating in the past and Marathon's recently announced hardline anti-cheat stance.

"When we shared our last update about tackling unfair play, we didn’t fully convey the complexity and scale of what goes into cheat detection," writes Embark. "Our defenses operate on multiple levels: some checks are simple and definitive, while others are behavioral and data-driven and evolve over time.

"These methods take longer to develop, must adapt as game systems change, and don’t always offer instant certainty the way blunt software detections can."

It sure reads like a studio trying to reassure players and make up for some lost prestige after a competitor scored a clean hit, but it's not just an explanation. As I mentioned earlier, Arc Raiders is tightening its punishments against cheaters going forward, too: "Strong detections will receive permanent bans right off the bat, while others will receive a temporary suspension and a single chance to correct the behavior."

Embark also says that "Recent updates to Family Sharing have strengthened our ability to curb misconduct and streamlined the removal of bad actors," and it's prepping to launch "a systematic manual review of ban appeals.

"The game is young and the volume of telemetry is enormous, but this process ensures every case is handled with care as we continue to learn quickly and invest heavily in the precision of our enforcement tools." In other words: 'our anti-cheat tech is really good, guv, honest, it just needs time to mature, and in the meantime we're tightening the screws on cheaters currently in the game'.

Sounds reasonable, but if Arc can't get a handle on its cheaters, we know there are competitors out there just waiting to prove they can—and the jury's still out on whether Bungie will live up to its hefty promises against cheating, exploits, and so on.