The servers of shooter Arc Raiders had a bit of a “wobble” on Sunday, as many would-be raiders of the arc queued up to get in. Developers Embark have now decided to offer those affected by the outage some free in-game as a make good for said server swoonage.
The wobble came on November 2nd, as the game was hovering around the 300 to 330k concurrent player mark. It’s left a brief, but unmistakeable dip in the SteamDB graph. Think one of those heart machines having a quick blip before regular beats resume.
Cue messages from the studio on Discord and the Tweeter late yesterday. “We appreciate your patience as our servers had a wobble on Sunday,” reads the latter. Scrappy must’ve pecked a few wires loose, he’s been put on the naughty step. As a token of our thanks, we’re sending 500 Raider Tokens to all Raiders who logged in on Sunday.”
A “Server Slammer” variant of the hiker backpack has also been sent out to players who were present, so if that’s you, there’s a good chance both are already waiting in your inbox. Buying 500 tokes will set you back around £4 / $5 worth of real money, so it’s a decently valuable gift in return for persevering through a technical hiccup that looks to have had relatively minimal impact in the grand scheme of server swoons.
Embark could easily have just shrugged and moved on without dishing out any goodies. From a cynical and PR-savvy perspective, it’s an easy win requiring a bit of cash sacrifice, but likely returning plenty of value in the most important battle any shooter faces – the one over player hearts and minds. It’s also just a nice thing to do.
If you want a verdict on Arc Raiders before giving it a go, here are some thoughts from Edwin and a comment from Ollie, while James has checked out how it runs on the Steam Deck.
