ARC Raiders Cheating: A 5-Raid Test

ARC Raiders cheating ruined a zero-to-hero run across five straight raids in September 2026. See what the footage shows and what Embark can do.

ARC Raiders cheating and the zero-to-hero run

ARC Raiders cheating surfaced in five consecutive Stella Montis raids during a zero-to-hero challenge recorded on 20 September 2026, according to the footage published by the creator Shady. The run started from an emptied stash with no container looting and no free loadout, so the only path to a first kill was a Raider Tool. That constraint is what made the cheating visible: with nothing to lose, the recording shows what a normal player meets when they bring nothing at all.

The stated goal was to rebuild one million coins in pure PvP profit while surviving each raid on a different map. Stormy weather aside, the challenge never reached the midpoint. Each death reset progress, which is why the video's thesis is not "the game is broken" in general but "the fair-chance premise of the challenge was not available."

What the five-raid sequence actually shows

The footage is a sequence of encounters, not a controlled experiment. Each raid below is dated by the recording session, and the cheating label comes from either a direct confession on voice chat, a kill that the creator says passed through geometry, or an account profile the creator judged to be a fresh Steam account.

Raid one: the first confession

The first encounter on Stella Montis ends with a player approaching the unarmed creator and speaking over proximity chat. The creator calls the player a cheater in the moment, and the clip is the strongest evidence in the set because the accusation happens on the recording rather than in post. Nothing in the clip independently proves which software was running.

Raid two: the Snap Hook and the bodyguard

A player using the Snap Hook traversal item finds the creator immediately. The creator then spends most of the raid trying to stay near that player, wins his confidence, and eventually kills him in the back to take a Bobcat. The creator describes this as ratting and says the alternative was fighting aimbot and wall-hack tools with an Anvil.

Raid three: the audience confession

The third raid repeats the pattern. A player recognises the creator, says he watches the videos, and the encounter ends with deaths on both sides. The creator again asks on mic whether the other player is cheating; the answer he reports is confirmation rather than denial.

Raid four: the freeze

In the fourth raid a viewer joins and offers help. The creator later says the first player who killed him froze him in place, which he treats as a cheat rather than a desync. This is the raid where the map itself stops mattering; the same behaviour appears regardless of where he drops.

Raid five: the same account twice

The fifth raid closes the loop. The creator recognises the name and profile picture of a player from an earlier raid and says it is the same person back to back. That repetition, not any single kill, is what pushes him to abandon Stella Montis and move to Blue Gate.

Raid six: Blue Gate, and the duper

Changing maps does not change the result. On Blue Gate a player he accuses of wall hacks also runs a trading stall the creator calls a duper operation. One player in this raid does bring a gun and behaves normally, which the creator notes as the exception.

The pattern across all six raids is consistent: an unarmed player who loots nothing is still found, tracked, and killed by players who move through geometry. None of this is a statistical sample of ARC Raiders lobbies. It is one creator's session, and it is evidence of what he experienced, not of how often it happens to the wider player base.

Why the cheating problem matters more in extraction shooters

Extraction shooters make cheating more punishing than most genres because the loss is not a respawn. A player who dies loses the gear, the time invested in that raid, and, in a zero-to-hero run, the entire accumulated streak. The creator's one-million-coin target was structured so that a single team wipe ended the challenge, which turns one bad encounter into a session-ending event.

The economics also favour the cheater. Gear in ARC Raiders has resale value, so an account that can see through walls and freeze targets converts directly into loot that can be traded. The video shows a trading stall run by an accused cheater, which is the loop that makes the behaviour worth repeating.

That loop explains why the creator's frustration lands on the anti-cheat roadmap rather than on individual players. He says an upcoming update is worthless without anti-cheat changes, and he frames the request as wanting to keep enjoying the game rather than wanting to win every fight. Treat that as the speaker's opinion from the transcript, not as a claim about what Embark Studios has committed to deliver.

What the footage does and does not prove

The video is first-hand footage from one player, so every cheating claim in it is the creator's judgement at the moment of the encounter. Confessions on voice chat, fresh Steam accounts with no friends, and kills that appear to pass through walls are all consistent with cheating, and none of them alone is proof that a specific cheat was running.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. First, the clip cannot distinguish aimbot from wall hacks from freeze exploits from a bad connection, and the creator himself moves between those labels. Second, a video that selects the worst encounters from a seven-hour session will always look worse than the average session. The honest reading is that this creator hit an unusual cluster of encounters, and that the cluster is severe enough to have ended a challenge he had prepared for.

The strongest claim the evidence supports is narrow: during a recorded session on 20 September 2026, a player who carried no weapon and looted no containers was repeatedly found and killed by players he identified as cheaters, at least one of whom confirmed it on mic.

Report, block, and record: what a player can control

Individual players cannot fix an anti-cheat system, but they can make each encounter usable as evidence. The steps below follow what the creator did in the footage and what extraction-shooter communities generally ask for.

1. Keep the clip, not just the memory. Save the full encounter rather than a highlight, because context is what separates a suspicious kill from a provable one.

2. Report through the in-game system first. That is the channel the developer reads and the one that attaches the report to the match.

3. Note the account details visible on the death screen. Fresh accounts with no friends list and no play history are a pattern worth reporting, though they are not proof on their own.

4. Do not chase a rematch with the same player. In the recording, the creator's repeated encounters with one account came from staying in the same queue, not from a matchmaking failure he could fix.

5. Change maps only if you want a different experience, not as a fix. Blue Gate produced the same result in the same session.

If you record content for a living, the same rules apply with one addition: save the raw file. The creator's session is only reviewable because the full encounters exist, including the boring parts where nothing happened.

The bigger point: fair chance vs fair fight

The most useful sentence in the whole video is the creator saying he was not asking to win every fight, only for a fair chance to attempt the challenge he had emptied his stash for. That distinction is the real subject. Anti-cheat quality is usually discussed as a win-rate problem, which invites the response that every death feels unfair. The zero-to-hero format removes that excuse, because the player starts with nothing and expects to lose most fights anyway.

When a player who has accepted near-certain death still cannot get a single clean encounter, the complaint is no longer about difficulty. It is about whether the rules of the match are the same for everyone in it. That is a narrower and harder request to dismiss.

For the creator's part, the video ends with a request rather than a verdict: he says ARC Raiders is his favourite game and he would rather have made the planned challenge video. Whether the anti-cheat situation improves is an open question, and anyone who wants to keep playing should treat it as one.

As for the challenge itself, the premise is still sound. Empty the stash, take the Raider Tool, survive on a new map each raid. It just needs a lobby where the other players are playing the same game.

The same problem shows up outside gaming, and the same fix applies. Extraction shooters reward evidence over assertion, and the creator's video works because the raw encounters are kept. If you already have knowledge, a breakdown, an interview, or a hard-won lesson sitting inside a YouTube video, that recording is the raw footage. Skala Blog transcribes the video and turns it into a structured article, so the explanation you gave on camera becomes something people can search, cite, and read.

Gustavo dev doido

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