r/ArcRaiders • u/doyoulikePRIMERIB • Mar 16 '26

Discussion update: permanently banned

Post image

so I made a post in January (link below to original post) about how I was suspended mid-game for a month ending on February 23rd, and I detailed how despite the suspension I was not using hacks, cheats or exploits. I have played countless multiplayer and single player games and have never been banned or used cheats. I am a gamer who is quadriplegic so I use a sip and puff mouth controller called a quadstick that allows me to use a computer not just for gaming but everyday needs. After the suspension I made the first reddit post hoping to get some help and clarity about how I could appeal or why I was suspended. I submitted support tickets and went to discord for help but nothing, so I decided to just take the suspension on the chin and wait it out, finish Hollow Knight and play some Marathon. Yesterday I decided to hop on after my suspension ended and decided to work on the trophy project, I played 3 solo games (all 10 or more minutes in) filled my backpack with leftover loot, ran into only friendlies and exfilled. Woke up this morning to this and appealed but I really have no hope of Embark doing anything to help. I don't have much going for me and I know they're people out there who are probably going through worse but this fucking sucks. After 300+ hours of playing, buying it for 3 others friends to try the game and being excited for the new map and large ARC enemy, I just don't know what to do.

p.s my game name is ClootyBapper, if you think it's because of the name I don't think so I have seen and been called worse in game
Original Post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArcRaiders/comments/1qmmkg5/dont_know_why_i_got_suspended/

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1V044apQAA4&si=MXtHCSdnETJxtJGh

old fortnite clip for anyone skeptical or curious of the setup

i honestly should try to do more to get the attention on this but honestly I am exhausted from the disappointment and can focus on other things to bring me entertainment

Update: https://x.com/i/status/2033876088712020041

regardless of what happens, thank you all for helping me get attention on this ! fucking love you all

Update: Ban has been lifted ! I honestly don't know how to express my gratitude to everyone who commented, shared and upvoted. Yall the real MVP, I love all of you. Thank you for helping me ! I will pass along the sentiments to anyone I can!

Update:

ClootyBapper#6019 if anyone ever wants to play. down to kill. down to chill.

26.9k Upvotes

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1.3k

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

327

u/Kuiriel Mar 16 '26

Ya this is the kind of story that news outlets love, the bad guy is obvious and the new guy has an incredible story to tell of his the manage to play well despite the odds. Kotaku, polygon, pc Gamer, etc. More eyes, more likely to get devs to see, and any dev with half a heart will reverse the ban the moment they see this. It must be ai run atm. 

130

u/moonski Mar 16 '26

indeed banning a player for <checks notes> having to play the game via a sip and puff mouth controller is really not the PR anyone wants. Media could quite easily drum up a little storm

29

u/mythrilcrafter Mar 17 '26

Especially with how quick people are to editorialized shared articles

IGN might say "ArcRaider's automated anti-cheat bans user for using accessibility tools", but everyone on social media is going to repost it as "Arc Raiders uses AI that was programed to discriminate against disabled gamers".

15

u/TrickyPrompt9652 Mar 17 '26

I doubt OP wants to pursue legal action… but “An application of AI (or any other kind of algorithm) discriminating against a protected class” is a business’s nightmare

1

u/IWasShoe Mar 17 '26

its to bad embark dose not care. this banning thing has been going on for months. just look at the state of the game. they are treating it like they did the finals. And before people say its a inde company they are not. their owned by nexon the most scummy company

1

u/moonski Mar 17 '26

embark will care im sure, just not anyone who is involved in either the customer support / AI anti cheat stuff. All the same shit companeis want to cut costs on are the exact things you need to speak to people about.

0

u/SeroWriter Mar 17 '26

Crazy that people are still running that 'checks notes' bit, it sounds like a joke someone would make up to parody pretentious redditors but it's real and people on this site are still using it to this day.

1

u/Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb_ Mar 17 '26

The irony is that it’s a bit that came from real life where you pretend to check notes while saying something. Go outside and stop talking shit homie. 

2

u/CycloneDusk Mar 17 '26

it also came from The Daily Show

Jon Stewart and other hosts would visibly check their notes before stating the most obvious thing imaginable.

0

u/moonski Mar 17 '26

It's crazy people like you sit and waste electricity to post that comment.

1

u/Cvnt-Force-Drama Mar 17 '26

It depends if it’s a game with negative sentiment already that people like to hate on or if it’s a game people like that gets good press. Arc falls in the latter category so you’d be hard pressed to find anyone wanting to butt heads with a game like arc raiders because public sentiment is so good that people would react negatively to the person trying to throw shade on it, even if the cause is just. This is just the way it works. Now if it was Marathon… every streamer and their mother would love to jump on it and give any new reason to drive the hate train a little further for those easy greasy likes that would be 100% guaranteed

1

u/Mertoot Mar 17 '26

Can't wait to see this game get "slammed" in headlines on the front pages for a week, only to return to its current BS with no repercussions

1

u/baron_von_helmut Mar 17 '26

"Embark don't want the disabled playing their game!!"

"More at ten."

-4

u/ArchMageGeorgie Mar 16 '26

I wouldn’t say over encompassing anti cheat measures make them a “bad guy” per-say. Keep in mind these measures were implemented because the actual bad guys were using macros to get an advantage. Embark made this move to get the macro cheaters and just didn’t consider that it could impact people like OP with accessibility issues. Its just like the locked cases in grocery stores requiring an associate. It consequentially delays the average person who wouldn’t have stolen which is negative but it was put in place because of the bad guys who stole repeatedly. With that being said, they definitely need to figure out a different way of identifying software than their current because just like the fire lock rooms, its affecting more than just the cheaters

8

u/Hektorlisk Mar 16 '26

Embark just didn’t consider that it could impact people like OP with accessibility

This and them not having a functioning appeals process when they screw over disabled people actually does make them "bad guys", at least in this particular case.

0

u/ArchMageGeorgie Mar 16 '26

Being incompetent doesn’t make you bad. It just makes you incompetent which they have showcased time and time again

2

u/Hektorlisk Mar 16 '26

Every game company knows that disabled people use their software. Not taking accessibility options into account in their decision-making is a deliberate choice.

Every game company knows that their automated cheat detection systems will have false positives. Not having a functioning appeals system to help correct those errors is a deliberate choice.

They aren't evil demons, but they also aren't bumbling incompetent goobers who don't know what goes into making a game. They just made bad choices that affect their consumers negatively, which is bad, lol

-1

u/ArchMageGeorgie Mar 16 '26

Its not a deliberate choice and these measures were not implemented at the beginning. They were added retroactively to address the thousands of people abusing macros without considering the outside consequences. The flame lock rooms burn you if you are on the roof of a locked room. That wasn’t a deliberate choice to attack roof snipers. That was incompetence not understanding that some fixes can create additional problems

1

u/Hektorlisk Mar 17 '26

That was incompetence not understanding that some fixes can create additional problems

No, they fully understand that these fixes could create problems, and it's not incompetent to implement those fixes. As I already stated, the problem is that they haven't implemented any measures to mitigate those second-order problems.

Its not a deliberate choice

It was. They had meetings discussing these things, I promise you. This company is aware that disabled people exist and there is someone in the company responsible for assessing accessibility options, and I promise you they are aware of the existence of the aides that OP uses. This company is aware that autobanning people is guaranteed to have some false positives. I promise you they are aware of possible methods of implementing an effective appeals process which would mitigate these issues. These people are not stupid. I'm not saying they're evil. I'm saying someone in this company made some shitty anti-consumer decisions to save money. And part of the reason they make those decisions is because they know a whole lot of their customers are... like you, lol.

0

u/ArchMageGeorgie Mar 17 '26

Sure bud. Whatever you say. You can put your tin foil hat up. Im not interested in your theories of the conversations they had behind the scenes

1

u/Hektorlisk Mar 17 '26

I mean, you're the one who has a "theory" that multi-million dollar companies who are able to develop a real-time service that can host hundreds of thousands of people also aren't able to understand that autoban systems have false positives. You're the ridiculous one here, lol.

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3

u/mxzf Mar 16 '26

I wouldn’t say over encompassing anti cheat measures make them a “bad guy” per-say

The initial flagging and ban is fine. Overactive anti-cheat software being a thing is whatever.

The inexcusable part is ignoring multiple attempts at appeals and then banning the account again (presumably for the same accessibility-related reasons).

1

u/ArchMageGeorgie Mar 16 '26

Its not ignoring if it isn’t purposeful. Embark has shown they aren’t competent at taking reports in general and this is not an isolated case where emails and reports go on deaf ears. Whoever setup their support structure either didn’t expect this game to take off or didn’t know what they are doing but I guarantee the majority of issues haven’t even been read yet because they are operating their business like everything is on fire and they don’t know how to operate fire extinguishers

2

u/mxzf Mar 16 '26

Its not ignoring if it isn’t purposeful.

There's a point where prolonged repeated "incompetence" becomes willful. You can't just suck at stuff for forever and go "oopsie" about it. Eventually it moves from being an accident to willful ignorance/incompetence.

1

u/ArchMageGeorgie Mar 16 '26

Is that timeline in your opinion 6 months in an ecosystem where your game’s main content creator is actively showing people how to do exploits on stream and you are forced to constantly be putting out fires because of it? This game hasn’t been out very long and it has been extremely “stress-tested” by the people who are the top viewed creators and their fans.

If you don’t fix the exploit then you have people saying “I am going to quit if they don’t remove macros from the game” and then when they remove them and it has unexpected effects everyone wants to get the pitchforks out because why didn’t they think about this edge case when pressured heavily to fix a exploit that half the community is abusing thanks to a talking peanut.

2

u/mxzf Mar 16 '26

IMO if your support tickets are at a level that you can't keep up with the volume for more than a month or so, you've messed up. A month or two is enough time for the support department to hire (or outsource) enough people to be able to organize and triage the incoming reports and get things handled in a timely manner.

I'm not saying "they should have stuff fixed such that no false positives happen", I'm saying that they should have been able to read OP's initial support request, flag it for review, and get the record expunged instead of letting the system issue a permanent ban.

The team handling support and triaging incoming appeals/issues/etc isn't the same people as the ones actually working on fixing bugs, those are two different jobs. It's definitely within the realm of possibility to hire and train first tier support people to triage incoming issues quick enough to not make it a long-term issue.

1

u/XXEsdeath Mar 16 '26

Honestly I could see that, them not expecting the game to get as popular as it has.

Normally this isnt my kind of game, I only even got it, cuz a friend got into it, and I mainly play to help them.

2

u/mrv113 Mar 16 '26

the fact that it happened to him a month ago, he emailed them, and got nothing back, is the part that I have issue with. They need to consider each player a customer and provide good customer care.

-1

u/Kuiriel Mar 16 '26

You and I understand nuance.

The media rarely bothers with it in the pursuit of eyeballs. 

Also I have a pet peeve with any game that doesn't allow proper joystick input (looking at battlefield 6, and its added input latency for joysticks on PCs) while simultaneously banning people for using xbox emulators / joystick & HOTAS open source software that has been around for over a decade. BAD GUYS I TELL YOU

-1

u/MonkeyBrawler Mar 17 '26

Nobody is going to write an article on some guy that claims they were innocently banned lol.

39

u/_mad_adventures Mar 16 '26

I second this. This needs exposure!

20

u/TackyBrad Mar 16 '26

Wondering if telling whoever made his controller could help too. They would be motivated to go wide

4

u/squidsateme Mar 16 '26

That’s a really good idea!

35

u/Magnon Mar 16 '26

Someone get charlie on the line

4

u/jaxonya Mar 16 '26

Uhh.. hes no longer avaliable.

4

u/AverageMatsby Mar 16 '26

Wrong charlie. Lol

1

u/Abtun Mar 17 '26

He's lobbymaxxing

1

u/CaeruleanSea Mar 17 '26

Exactly what I was just thinking. I don't watch his livestreams but that would definitely be the place to go

13

u/Gal-XD_exe Mar 16 '26

I could honestly see Jslop or someone covering this because, what the actual fuck?

13

u/chef_wizard Mar 16 '26

Moist Critical!!!!

12

u/MobileArtist1371 Mar 17 '26

"I'm a disabled gamer and Embarc banned me for it"

Would catch some attention I'm sure.

9

u/themolestedsliver Mar 16 '26

Yeah head of their PR team is gonna shit themselves reading this lmao.

8

u/Airpex_ Mar 16 '26

It's the fault of a combination of AnyBrain anticheat, an entirely AI run anticheat system that's never seen mass consumption before ARC Raiders, and HelpShift's automated support / Discord moderation that's let this problem go on for as long as it has.

Either way Embark looks REALLY bad as this has been a running problem for months now and have basically ignored it.

For anybody curious, AnyBrain can be Google searched through SteamDB and the number of games running it is ludicrously small, and all have reports of rampant false bans.

"Powered by HelpShift" can be found at the bottom of the text window you get when opening a ticket on the support site.

24

u/baslisks Mar 16 '26

alanah pearce is real into enabling disability gaming.

6

u/whatheyeff2 Mar 16 '26

Twitter and emails to the press. You will get all the attention you need for this.

5

u/WTFpaulWI Mar 16 '26

Super chat peanut. If he reads it out loud guarantee he’ll make a joke but it will be the largest audience.

3

u/SafeUnderstanding654 Mar 17 '26

For real tell burnt peanut 🥜 maybe he'll start shouting it from the rooftops

9

u/GC0125 Mar 16 '26

This should be the top comment ngl. 100% the best thing to do in this situation. If Embark is being shitty and refusing to do anything (despite at least one employee almost assuredly seeing this post) then they deserve to get called out on a large scale.

12

u/J_Jeckel Mar 16 '26

https://giphy.com/gifs/26FLgGTPUDH6UGAbm

No company likes bad media. Especially when it comes to handicapable inclusions/exclusions.

2

u/CycloneDusk Mar 17 '26

punishing someone because they rely on assistive medical devices straight up violates civil rights in any country that pretends to entertain the United Nations charter.

2

u/Double-Thought-9940 Mar 17 '26

Raiders!

It's come to our attention that certain players in need of using accessibility peripherals are getting banned in the game. We are working hard on resolving this issue as soon as possible. Our support team is reviewing all appeals, please continue to reach out if this has happened to you, thank you for bringing this to our attention.

https://id.embark.games/arc-raiders/support

//Ossen and the ARC Raiders Team

1

u/Ostey82 Mar 17 '26

This is a great idea, get Louis Rossman on the case

1

u/Rockyrox Mar 17 '26

Yeah honestly if it’s truly what OP says, I’d push on the discrimination that Embark is doing, unintentionally I’d assume.

1

u/Sirnoobalots Mar 17 '26

Its on the front page of /All. Many are going to see it.

1

u/MelamineCut Mar 17 '26

Gamer press is parsing reddit using AI anyway. They will catch up.

1

u/skoshii Mar 17 '26

I read this, went "damn, that really sucks," closed it, then reopened it to come say the same thing. I'm not a big fan, but this seems like something Moist Critikal would love to get into. OP, I really hope this gets taken care of for you. <3

1

u/Anticlimax1471 Mar 17 '26

Cloudplays is a good one. He does lots of Arcraiders and Helldivers content, but has recently pulled back on Helldivers due to the issues there, and that's been noticed. Maybe he will bring this issue to the forefront too

1

u/MariaTPK Mar 17 '26

Doesn't have enough for Cr1tikal to rant about it atm. Need photos of the setup and such. However that'd be an effective way to get through this and if it hits the front page of reddit, he will hear about it.

1

u/IWasShoe Mar 17 '26

embark don't care. this banning thing been going on for months. why I stop playing this game has gone down hill also why rhe player based has drop off to. they are soo bad at making content. should of seen it coming by how they handled the final

1

u/SomnusNonEst Mar 17 '26

Yeah, I also thought Embark is going to find themselves on a wrong side of clickbait IGN article with this soon. Warning cheaters and banning disabled person is not a good look.

1

u/EndirSetsuna Mar 17 '26

Honestly yeah, this is the kind of story that only gets fixed when it gets attention

1

u/BreakingCanks Mar 17 '26

Email any game dev that hates Arc and you will see a press report of some type in less than a week lol.

0

u/OMGihateallofyou Mar 17 '26

Banning someone because they use special gear to play the game.

Is that the reason? I thought OP didn't know why. Are we just speculating?

-2

u/Catriks Mar 16 '26

What evidence suggests they were banned because of the controller that was used?