ARC Raiders Cheaters Are Being Banned, but Not Forever

After weeks of the shooter being overrun by hackers, developer Embark Studios has finally started bringing down the banhammer on ARC Raiders cheaters. Unfortunately, the community still appears to be frustrated, as reports suggest many of the cheaters being caught are only being temporarily banned from playing ARC Raiders. While the studio says it is working on upgrading its anti-cheat systems over the next few weeks, players think Embark needs to be more forceful with cheaters and hand out permanent bans immediately.

Despite initial doubts from the gaming community, ARC Raiders has found huge success in its first three months. As the extraction shooter has maintained approximately 90% of its playerbase on Steam, remaining one of the platform’s most-played titles, it’s no surprise that it has also attracted plenty of cheaters. This is an issue that many live-service titles are regularly fighting against, with even the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield often having to update their anti-cheat systems in order to combat the constantly evolving hacks. ARC Raiders has been no different, with cheaters finding ways to increase their field of view, reconnect to previous matches, and more.

Related

How to Get PvE Lobbies in ARC Raiders

ARC Raiders is a PvPvE extraction shooter, but there’s a way players can matchmake with friendly players and enter PvE lobbies, here’s how to do it.

ARC Raiders Is Handing Out Temporary Bans To Cheaters

Last week, developer Embark Studios responded to the severe cheating problem in ARC Raiders, confirming that it was aware of the issues and intends to implement major changes over the coming weeks, including new detection mechanisms to identify and remove cheaters from the game. It now appears as though these updates have begun rolling out behind the scenes, as cheaters are now receiving temporary bans. In a new post on Reddit, user Subsplot showed a new error message being shown to cheaters, which states that they have been temporarily suspended for behavior that violates the game’s code of conduct.

However, fans instantly took issue with the temporary suspensions being handed out, questioning why the bans aren’t permanent if a player has been caught cheating. “1 month only? I hope there is longer suspension for various severity of cheating,” one user responded. Another user sarcastically said, “Suspension? Sure, that’ll teach ’em.” One player suggested a different approach to the situation, calling for Embark to simply place all cheaters in the same lobbies together and “let them player with their own kind forever.” They note that this will prevent cheaters from creating new accounts as “nobody will ever know.”

Some players recently discovered an even wilder way to cheat in ARC Raiders, as it was discovered that developer console commands were still accessible in-game, allowing users to take advantage of certain features that are not supposed to be in the game. Some of the most controversial cheats to come out of the discovery were increased field of views and graphical changes that practically removed any sort of darkness from the game. Thankfully, Embark was quick to address the problem and released a new hotfix update over the weekend that removed the console commands. In a short statement, the studio said the feature was never meant to be player-facing.

Aside from continued anti-cheat updates, players can also expect plenty of balance adjustments and bug fixes in the next ARC Raiders update, which is scheduled to drop on Tuesday, January 13. The first update of 2026 has been highly anticipated by players, as Embark has confirmed that it will see some substantial nerfs to the likes of Trigger Nades and the Stitcher, the former of which has been dominating lobbies for weeks now. The studio has also said it plans to lower the fire rate cap of the Kettle after players were using macros to fire it much faster than humanly possible. Fans can expect to see the specific changes along with the patch notes tomorrow.

Released

October 30, 2025

ESRB

Teen / Violence, Blood