Cheaters are the bane of pretty much every competitive multiplayer videogame in existence. It never really made much sense to me because it doesn’t seem like much fun—it’s a lot of work just to grief some random guy, which when you get right down to it is really all that’s happening—but some people just can’t help themselves. And for the rest of us, it sucks.

It really sucks in a game like Arc Raiders, where falling victim to cheaters means the loss of all the stuff you worked so hard to earn: It’s not just damaging to your ego, it has a material impact on your future fortunes. But Embark Studios is not without sympathy, and it seems that in at least some cases, your loot will be returned to you if it was lost to a cheater.

Seems like you get your items back if there were cheaters(unfair play) in your game. W Embark

from

r/ArcRaiders

Reports of returned items began to surface over the weekend on Reddit (via Kotaku), where users shared post-match messages saying their items “were lost during unfair play,” but had been returned and were available to reclaim.

“We’re committed to building an environment where gameplay is about skill, teamwork, and fun, not unfair advantages,” the in-game message states.

Other players chimed in to say that they’d also been given their stuff back after an encounter with cheaters, and of course to throw props to Embark for not leaving them hanging. There’s also an interesting bit of discussion in one of the threads about more intrusive kernel-level anti-cheat systems used in games like Battlefield 6: One user wrote, “Fighting cheaters will unfortunately always be an uphill and reactionary battle, unless the game goes full invasive mode and act like a computer virus having more access than it should and we all know no one wants that,” which prompted several others to say that’s exactly what they want if it means fewer cheaters.

It’s an interesting perspective, given how the sentiment against kernel-level anti-cheat is usually so negative, but one I can’t personally get behind: My own PC doesn’t support SecureBoot or TPM 2.0, which means I can’t run Battlefield 6 at all. And I just wanted to play the campaign!

So naturally, I feel like this is a very good approach to managing a situation that can have serious long-term consequences for games as well as the people who play them. Cheaters suck, but if we’re stuck with them (and it sure seems like we are) then minimizing the impact they have on everyone else seems like the next-best thing to be done.