They’re Not Mad About Losing PvP, They’re Mad About Losing Their Targets

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:39:56 +0100

The Entitlement to Ruin Someone Else’s Game: ARC Raiders and the PvE Toggle

I’ve noticed something happening in ARC Raiders during Embark Studios' trial of its new PvE toggle. Some players seem to feel entitled to make other people miserable.

A little history

ARC Raiders didn’t start life as the PvPvE extraction shooter it is today. When Embark Studios first revealed the game in 2021, it was pitched as a co-op PvE game where squads teamed up to take down giant machines. Then, during development, the studio decided the game simply wasn’t fun enough, delayed it, and pivoted to PvPvE. The thinking was that the threat of other players, and the chance of losing everything you’d looted, would add the tension the game was missing.

The game launched on 30 October 2025, and it found a huge audience, many of whom had no interest in shooting other people. Players nicknamed it the “Extraction (Don’t) Shooter,” and plenty of them have been asking for a PvE-only option ever since.

Embark listened

In September, Embark announced a one-week PvE toggle test running from 13 to 20 October 2026. Their own data was hard to ignore: 37% of players fall into the “friendly co-op” group, a share that has grown steadily since launch, while pure PvP players make up 34% and have stayed flat. More than half of surveyed players said they wanted a dedicated PvE option. Even 40% of the pure PvP players said they wanted fewer hostile encounters.

So for one week, players can choose between the classic PvPvE experience and a mode with zero player-to-player damage. PvE comes with reduced loot, and some high-tension content stays PvPvE-only. Nobody’s PvP experience is being taken away.

And yet…

Now you have people making posts like this one on Reddit, from a player with more than 700 hours in the game who says the PvE mode has them thinking about quitting.

To be fair to them, they don’t describe themselves as a PvP hunter. They say they mostly play peacefully, but they love the risk of running into someone hostile. Their complaint is that since the toggle went live, the friendly players are moving to PvE, and the normal lobbies have become noticeably more aggressive. They tried PvE and found it boring. What they want is a world full of friendly players where a fight could break out at any moment.

But read that again. The thing they’re mourning is the presence of players who would rather not be in that fight at all. Those players were never there because they wanted the risk. They were there because, until this week, there was nowhere else to go. Give them a choice, and many of them take it. That isn’t the PvE mode breaking the game. That’s people finally getting to say what they actually wanted.

Then the post takes a darker turn. The author says they’re frustrated enough to want to make life difficult for people in PvE mode, and to encourage others to do the same, so the mode disappears as quickly as possible.

That’s the part that bothers me. Not “I’ll keep playing the mode I like.” Not “I’ll make the case to the developers.” It’s: I’ll harass the people who opted out, until their option is taken away.

Gearing up on someone else’s peace

Another Reddit user was honest about it. They’ve spent the last few days in the friendly, low-risk lobbies, on their best behaviour, levelling up their gunsmith and research benches. Now that the upgrades are done, they’re ready to go back to shooting players. They’re already picking their moment, the Frigate, where they want to snipe at the Raiders below and cause panic. And they’re pretty sure plenty of other PvP players are doing the same thing.

Sit with that for a second. The peaceful spaces in this game exist for people who want to play without being hunted. Some PvP players are using those spaces to safely build up their gear, and then taking that gear straight back to the people they were just pretending to get along with.

They want the safety when it benefits them, and the right to take it away from everyone else when it doesn’t.

“It’s bad for the long-term health of the game”

One argument I keep hearing comes from streamers. LoochyTV, whose content I genuinely enjoy, has said more than once on stream that a PvE mode isn’t good for the long-term health of ARC Raiders.

I think that’s copium, and Embark’s own numbers say so. Friendly co-op players are now the single largest group in the game, and that group has been growing steadily since launch. Pure PvP players haven’t grown at all. More than half of surveyed players want a dedicated PvE option.

If the fastest-growing part of your player base keeps getting shot by the part that isn’t growing, that’s the long-term health problem. Giving those players a place to stay is how you keep them.

Fun to watch isn’t the same as fun to play

I also think there’s an honest reason streamers feel this way, and it’s not a bad one: PvE is boring to watch. Nobody tunes in to see someone loot a building in peace and walk out. The tension, the ambushes, the last-second extractions, the betrayals: that’s what makes good content.

I’m living proof. I watch Loochy’s PvP. I enjoy it. But when I sit down at night to play with my friends and my wife, I don’t want to be somebody’s content. I want to spend an evening together fighting the ARC, not lose an hour’s progress to a squad that’s been hunting peaceful players all session.

Those are two different experiences, and both are valid. But the health of a game is measured by the people playing it, not just the people watching. A mode that keeps players like me logging in doesn’t take anything away from streamers who’d rather fight. It just means the people they’re fighting actually chose to be there.

We’ve seen this before

All of this reminds me of Twitter, back before Elon Musk bought it. In 2015, Twitter added the ability to export and import block lists, building on community tools like Block Together. People facing harassment, very much including trans people, could share lists of known abusers and block them all at once.

And some people got furious, as though being blocked was an attack on their free speech. As if they had a right to an audience that didn’t want them.

That attitude was so common it got its own name, thanks to David Malki’s 2014 Wondermark comic, The Terrible Sea Lion. “Sealioning” came to describe someone who forces themselves into a conversation uninvited, then acts wounded when they’re told to leave.

The same entitlement, different arena

That’s exactly what this feels like. These players aren’t complaining about losing PvP. PvP is still right there, full of people who want it. They’re complaining about losing access to people who didn’t want the fight, and about losing an easy way to make their own game better at someone else’s expense.

They don’t want to engage in PvP with people who want to engage in it. They want to force it on players who don’t. And when those players are finally given a way out, some of them would rather harass them until the door closes again.

A PvE toggle doesn’t take anything away from people who love PvP. It only takes away their access to people who never consented to the fight. If that’s what you’re upset about, it was never really about the game.

Gaming on Marti Abernathey