u/PirateCompetitive931

I was told PvE players were a vocal minority.

Hot take: you should play the game to get the rewards. That's how games work. Call it carrot on a stick, FOMO or whatever, live service games with progression have you play the new content for new rewards.

The reason for that is maintaining engagement, which assures a consistent flow of potential revenue through in-game purchases, which allows the developers to continue development.

In a game like Helldivers, that relies on warbonds (which can be unlocked via free alternatives) and has NO paid DLC, it's unreasonable to hold Arrowhead to such unfair expectations when engagement incentives are the INDUSTRY NORM. Think of any live service game and it probably uses those engagement tactics.

Let's be reasonable.

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Been seeing a lot of blame put on ABMM, which doesn't make sense.

First of all, people claim to hate ABMM for nebulous reasons such as splitting the playerbase and removing unpredictability from the game.

However the player base was always split in the sense that some players preferred a PvE playstyle, which tends to be more social.

PvPvE players demand care bears in their lobbies, so that the game is a mix of PvP and PvE players. But that would only make the care bears quit, which would create the same situation we have now with ABMM. After all, PvE players would not enjoy being easy kills and getting farmed by PvP players.

Another thing is that PvE content like the matriarch or close scrutiny would be close to impossible to complete in purely mixed lobbies without ABMM, and that's a serious design issue that people never talk about.

TL;DR: ABMM is the glue that retains most players and allows people to play the PvE content of the game. If it is removed in order to reintegrate PvE players into PvP lobbies, it will only result in most of them quitting, thus changing absolutely nothing.

It is genuinely scary to see so many people claim that the playerbase is 40-50k on PC. We have a real education problem.

Concurrent player count means the number of unique players online AT THE SAME TIME. That's NOT the total number of people who logged in!!!

The total active playerbase will always be many times higher than the concurrent playercount. And Steam only represents around 50% of sales, with consoles being the other half or so.

The game is doing extremely well. You can compare the Arc Raiders charts with any other paid live service game right now.

I've seen a lot of discourse over the matchmaking system, and one really dumb thing that gets posted regularly by PvP players is that ABMM is the reason why Arc Raiders declined.

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That's really stupid. Say that ABMM was completely removed and that the lobbies were completely random. A considerable part of the player base would quit playing. Without ABMM (which was introduced in early December), the concurrent player loss would've been far more severe.

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Getting stomped by full kitted kinetic bobcat PvP players as a new/PvE player every single game would drive a lot of people away, regardless of your opinions on "tension" and "unpredictability". This is plain to see.

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Same thing when people mention that in regards to Dune Awakening, saying that PvE "killed" the game when the steam charts show a very steep decline after launch, before any significant PvE catering.

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It does not make sense to say that catering to the casual/PvE crowd accelerated player loss, when that catering is only a thing because Embark sees that the carebears represent a significant amount of players.

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In conclusion, ABMM saved the game from losing even more players more rapidly.

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First of all, it's obvious that the PvE/carebear community in Arc Raiders isn't just a minority. If it were, surely Embark wouldn't have modified their matchmaking system by introducing ABMM in December.

Regarding the PvE (or perhaps PvP-lite) mode, "Rebellion", coming to the Chinese version of Arc Raiders, a lot of people posted in favor of such a mode in the global version of Arc Raiders.

However, some other people are apparently against any PvE mode ever. Why is that? Well for some people (whom we will call "rats" for lack of a better term), their enjoyment of the game is reliant upon access to Carebears to stomp. A PvE mode threatens to steal all of the gullible PvE noobs away from PvPvE lobbies, which is scary for them.

Basically, rats want to play with the bears, but the bears don't really want to play with the rats. So I think that if we do get a PvE mode, it's going to be interesting to see the reactions to it from the rat community.