ARC Raiders now permanently bans cheaters on the first offence: 'No warnings, no second chances'

Embark Studios has rewritten how ARC Raiders punishes cheating, and the new rule is as blunt as it sounds. "Permanent bans are now standard for all known cheat programs and, as a matter of policy, any account caught using cheats is permanently banned. No warnings, no second chances," the studio wrote in an anti-cheat update posted to the game's official site.

Embark says it got this wrong

The post, credited to executive producer Aleks, opens with an admission rather than a victory lap. "Early on, we were overly cautious about applying permanent bans to first-time cheaters," it reads. "We've heard the frustration from the community, and we agree that we should have handled this differently." That is a fairly direct concession that the softer first-offence policy players had been complaining about was a mistake.

What else changes

Sanctions now follow the copy of the game, not just the account. Licence restrictions stop a sanctioned copy being used on a different account, and Embark has tightened its handling of linked accounts so that any account ever associated with a banned copy also gets a permanent ban.

Hardware bans — which block the game at the machine level — are also in play, and Embark says it has lowered the threshold for applying them. It is not yet able to hit every offender: "We are also actively working on a solution to increase the number of systems that we can target with a hardware ban," the post says, with that work hoped for "later in the year."

On detection, ARC Raiders already runs Denuvo's kernel-level protection alongside Anybrain's detections and Embark's own machine-learning models. The studio says it is now testing Elytra, the in-house anti-cheat currently used in THE FINALS.

The teaming numbers

Embark also shared results from its crackdown on queue teaming — coordinated players dropping into solo lobbies together. "Five days later, we saw 85% fewer players engaging in this behavior," the post says, and "spoiled raids dropped from around 1 in 50 to 1 in 300, with no meaningful impact to queue times." Those figures describe teaming specifically, not cheat software.

All of this lands a week before Frozen Trail, the game's next major update, which is due October 8.

Why it matters

Extraction shooters live or die on whether a lost raid feels fair, and ARC Raiders has spent months with cheating as its loudest community complaint. A first-offence permanent ban plus hardware-level enforcement is close to the harshest stance a live shooter can take.