If you have been dropping into Arc Raiders this past week and it suddenly feels like every lobby is out for blood, you are not imagining it, and it is not just your luck or your stash of ARC Raiders Items painting a target on your back. Raids that once felt mixed now turn into tense cat‑and‑mouse chases where every squad seems laser focused and weirdly coordinated. A lot of players started wondering if the casual crowd had quietly left or if something had changed behind the scenes, because the pace and pressure in matches jumped pretty hard.

What Aggression Based Matchmaking Actually Does

Embark has now admitted there really is something new running in the background, and it is not just tighter SBMM numbers or a simple skill bracket. They have rolled out aggression based matchmaking, ABMM for short, and the idea is pretty simple even if the math underneath is not. The game watches how you move around the map, how often you shoot first, how quickly you chase gunfire, and whether you back off when a fight gets messy. If you are the kind of player who sprints towards every third‑party chance and wipes squads on sight, you get sorted into lobbies with others who play the same way. If you are more of a slow looter who only fights when pinned in a corner, the system tries to keep you away from the worst of those hunter squads.

Why Embark Is Doing This Now

The studio says this is layered on top of the usual solo, duo and trio queues, not replacing them, which matters for anyone worried that Arc Raiders is about to become a full blown sweatbox. The pitch is that they are trying to protect the ecosystem, not just shield new players for one or two matches. Extraction shooters can be brutal when you are learning how the guns feel and you get deleted by a stacked trio that has 500 hours and every route memorised. ABMM is meant to bend things a bit so that hyper aggressive players spend more time fighting each other instead of farming quieter squads. It will never feel perfect, and sometimes you will still run into streamers or cracked teams, but it gives the designers one more lever to stop the whole game tilting around a small group of killers.

The Hidden Stats And Player Behaviour

The part that has everyone talking is what actually counts as aggressive under this system because Embark is deliberately not spelling it out. They are not going to post a checklist telling you that two quick kills or a certain number of pushes per match flip a switch on your account. If they did, people would immediately start gaming it, playing slow and fake passive for a few raids just to drop into easier lobbies before going full send again. So we are stuck guessing. Is it your PvP to PvE kill ratio, how many fights you start versus how many you finish, how often you extract after wins versus staying to hunt. You do not get a pop‑up saying you have been tagged as a wolf, but you can feel it when every other squad pushes like they have nothing to lose.

What It Means For Your Raids

So if your last handful of runs felt way harder than usual, there is a decent chance the game has quietly decided you are dangerous and is now matching you accordingly, which is both frustrating and kind of flattering. You might notice fewer easy third parties, more clean rotations from enemy teams and way less time to relax while you are looting. On the other side of it, players who mostly want PvE can keep grinding, gearing up and maybe even looking at services like U4GM when they want to speed up their progress or pick up extra in‑game resources without feeling like they are just fodder for high tier PvP squads. If Embark keeps tuning ABMM with real match data instead of sticking to a rigid formula, Arc Raiders could end up in a spot where both wolves and sheep still queue up each night, and both groups actually stick around.