Are ARC Raiders friendly lobbies dead? Fade's fade protocol explained

ARC Raiders friendly lobbies are ending for Fade, who now challenges every player to a fade on stream. See what that changes in solo raids.

What ARC Raiders friendly lobbies are, and why Fade left them

Friendly lobbies in ARC Raiders are an informal truce between strangers in solo raids: players avoid shooting, sometimes talk over proximity chat, and leave each other alone at extraction. Nothing in the game enforces the agreement.

ARC Raiders is a third-person extraction shooter from Embark Studios in which squads and solo players drop into a map, loot, complete objectives, and try to extract before the timer runs out. Friendly lobbies grew inside that mode as a player convention rather than a feature. Fade, a Twitch and YouTube streamer who plays with a controller, said he had been in "candy lobbies" and wanted out of them. He queued into the Stella map with an Osprey, told chat he was not friendly that day, and announced he would ask players for a fade instead of shooting on sight.

His stated reason was not that friendly players are bad at the game. It was that friendly lobbies hide the thing solos are actually afraid of. A player who never speaks can loot next to you, wait for you to take your hands off the mouse, and shoot when your back is turned. Fade called those players rats, and he said the truce made the raid boring because the outcome depended on someone else's restraint.

That distinction matters if you are deciding how to play. An ARC Raiders friendly lobby is a social agreement between strangers with no enforcement. Extraction shooters do not patch social agreements. They patch weapons, maps, and Arc enemies, and the players negotiate the rest inside each raid.

The phrase "sweaty lobby" came up repeatedly in the stream's chat, and Fade treated it as the alternative to the candy lobbies. A sweaty lobby means everyone plays to kill, which removes the ambiguity but also removes the chance of a quiet loot run.

Fade drew the line further than most. In his words, "I don't trust a soul. I'd rather put them down first. Not finish them. Let them go." That is the rule he actually plays by: knock a player, leave them alive, and take no chances on their intentions.

How the fade protocol works in a solo raid

A fade, in Fade's usage, is a challenge to a fair fight. He walks up, announces that he is not friendly, asks the other player to take out their gun and heal up first, and only then starts shooting. ARC Raiders itself has no fade rulebook, so the protocol is entirely a streamer convention that other players can accept or ignore.

Fade ran that sequence at least six times across the stream. The steps stay the same each time:

1. Announce. Close distance and say some version of "I'm not friendly" on proximity chat, the only reliable way to signal intent to a stranger. Typical lines from the session: "I'm not friendly, brother. Where you at? Take me serious."
2. Offer the reset. Tell the opponent to heal up and take out their weapon before the duel starts. "Heal up and come back," he told one player in the Spaceport raid.
3. Wait for the response. If the other player answers and readies a gun, the duel starts on terms both sides understand. If nobody answers, the challenge is void.
4. Fight, then settle up. Fade lost at least one fade to a player using a Tempest, and he described giving away his loot afterward because the rules he set required it. He lost another to a player he called Zuk and told chat the loss was not a problem.

A no-mic player cannot accept or decline, and Fade's standing rule for that case is blunt: "No mic equals kill 100%." He admitted he had not always enforced it strictly, which is exactly the kind of gap the protocol cannot close. The other common failure is a player who accepts and then fires during the heal-up. Fade called that cheap, and it happened when one opponent shot while he was still recovering.

Some opponents broke the agreement in the other direction. In the Buried City raid, three players stood around a room with weapons drawn and nobody moved until Fade called them out: "Take me serious. I'm a threat." They fought, and the fight ended the way most fades do.

Why Fade switched off the Bobcat and the Rattler 4

Fade's second rule for the session was weapon variety. He described the Bobcat as the gun everyone runs, said he was tired of seeing it, and swapped through an Osprey, a Rattler 4, a Toro, and finally the Arpeggio. He opened the stream 0-and-2: the Osprey went to a Bobcat in his first fight, and the Rattler 4 went to a player holding a Tempest.

The Bobcat complaint has a practical edge. Fade said that if you face a decent player and you do not have a Bobcat while they do, the fight is over. That is a claim about his own experience in solos, not a tested comparison. He offered no damage numbers, no time-to-kill measurements, and no controlled test against other weapons. He also said he would not bring a Bobcat out at all that stream, and he stuck to it.

Weapon	What Fade did with it	Outcome
Osprey	Kept equipped across multiple raids for longer-range shots while testing other guns	Lost to a Bobcat
Rattler 4	Ran with green attachments, called it "ass," abandoned it after one raid	Lost to a Tempest
Toro	Brought out because it had been a while, and to avoid the Bobcat	Replaced by the Arpeggio after one raid
Arpeggio	Praised as fast and "spitting," ran a vertical grip on viewer advice	Lost one in a three-way fight, then won a duel with it
Hairpin	Ran a room-clearing loadout built around it for a knock-count bet	No kills counted, but Fade argued one knock should have
Bobcat	Deliberately left out of every loadout that session	Cited as the reason he lost to other players' Bobcats

The Arpeggio earned the most praise. Fade called it fast, said it was spitting, and noted that he can craft it. He also said he cannot always afford to run it, and he lost one Arpeggio in a raid where he tried to signal a trick to another player and ended up in a three-way fight. He put a vertical grip on it after a viewer pushed back on a compensator, and he liked a silencer 3 for the sound alone: "I might give up functionality."

For players deciding what to bring, Fade's experimenting produced one transferable observation. He said the Rattler 4 with green attachments felt weak, and he abandoned it after one raid. That is his assessment of one build at one point in the game, not a verdict on the weapon across all attachment configurations. He also had an open question about the Arpeggio that nobody answered on stream: whether a level five version changes reload time or only lowers a percentage modifier.

The rats, the teamers, and the trust problems in solos

The word rat appears in the stream more often than any weapon name. Fade uses it for a player who hides, waits, and takes a cheap shot instead of fighting openly. He called one opponent at a loot site a rat after watching him take another player's loot, and he described extract points as ratty because campers sit near them until the timer forces players out.

Teamers are the second problem. In one early fight Fade accused two players of teaming, then changed his mind after one of them failed to shoot him. Later in the stream he warned that players sometimes fake a rat hunt so a partner can flank. Solo queue in an extraction shooter gives you no way to verify a truce before you commit to it, and Fade's response was to stop honoring truces.

Stream sniping is the third problem, and it is specific to streaming rather than to ARC Raiders. Fade suspected one player of stream sniping after the player reappeared in the lobby at the same time, and he ran a betting poll titled "Will Fade get stream sniped by the same rat?" during his final raid. He also said he sometimes forgets to hide the map code. Even players who fight him fairly can find him through the stream, which is why he treats solo lobbies as effectively public information.

None of these problems are unique to ARC Raiders, and Fade does not claim they are. Extraction shooters put strangers on the same map with loot that only one player can carry out, and that structure rewards patience and deception as much as aim.

The pickaxe swing glitch Fade called the "why I ought to" swing

Midway through the stream, a viewer told Fade to take out his pickaxe, spam the attack button, and roll at the same time. The result looked like a fast sliding swing, and Fade named it the "why I ought to" swing after the cartoon gesture it resembles. He later floated other names for it, including the fade whack and the fade stanky leg.

Fade is on a controller with a buggy snap hook, and he described the input as spamming R2 and the dodge button together. He also called it the circle button in one explanation. He did not demonstrate a keyboard equivalent, so the PC binding for the same action is unconfirmed. The exact input is worth writing down carefully because the stream showed several failed attempts, and Fade asked the viewer twice whether he was being trolled before the move worked on camera.

The technique has real costs. Fade said the swing drains stamina quickly, and that two swings emptied a medium shield's worth of movement. He repeatedly ran out of stamina during chases and had to stop, and he described the move as leaving him exposed while he waited for stamina to return. Viewers corrected him on scale: with a heavy shield you lose stamina even faster.

Claim about the swing	Who said it	Status on stream
Works on Wasp Arc enemies and can carry you into a wall slam	Viewers	Fade accepted the Wasp slam claim, did not test it himself
Works on Hornet Arc enemies if you snap onto them	Viewers	Repeated by Fade as secondhand, untested
Works on Pops	Viewers	Fade said "you can swing a pop, too" without a demo
Works on Leapers and Ticks	Viewers	Fade believed the Leaper claim and said the Tick swing does nothing useful
Works with guns instead of the pickaxe	Fade	Tested and rejected: "It doesn't work with a gun"

Fade used the swing successfully to close distance on a player and to chase an opponent up a building, and he also lost an Arpeggio after the swing connected when he expected it to miss. That last one is the risk with an unpatched movement trick: you commit to the animation and the fight resolves on its timing, not yours.

Arc enemies and the bets that run alongside each raid

Fade's stream runs on prediction polls that viewers bet on with channel points, and at least eight ran during this session: whether he would die to a rat, whether he would survive 15 minutes in a raid, how many times he would take fall damage, whether he would take any Arc damage, how many knocks he would get with a Hairpin, whether he would extract, how many kills he would get with a specific gun, and whether the same rat would stream snipe him twice. Right before one raid he supercharged a poll and told chat to go all in so he could "rig the economy," then picked an Arc-heavy map on purpose to make the Arc-damage bet more interesting.

He lost that bet. He picked a map with heavy Arc presence, told chat "I'm about to be a PvE sweat right now," and then took a Wasp hit during a duel. He also noted that killing Arc does not count as a kill for bot-kill polls, though he tried to claim one knockout as a kill after the round ended: the game logged it as "knockout raider 500 XP."

Viewer totals after one round reached 83,000 channel points on a single player, with other payouts landing around 3K, 6K, and 12K.

Fade's broader complaint about Arc is about how much of a raid they control. He said he wanted a mode without them, and he lost at least one fight after an Arc enemy interfered while he was dueling another player. The same raid timer that pushes players toward extraction also pushes them into Arc patrol routes, so the PvE layer shapes PvP fights whether players want it or not.

Player-built tech and settings from the same session

Fade credited a viewer named Random for the pickaxe swing technique and took requests from chat during the raids. That is a normal pattern for streamers who play a live game: a viewer spots an interaction, the streamer tests it on air, and the clip spreads. None of it comes from Embark Studios, and the developer had not documented or endorsed the move at the time of the stream.

Other tips from chat landed the same way. Viewers told Fade to run a vertical grip on the Arpeggio rather than a compensator and he tested it in a later raid. They told him the smoke and gas grenade combo is a working pairing, and he asked whether the tagging effect requires a direct hit (viewers said vicinity is enough). A viewer suggested he test the Bomber, an Arc enemy, with the same weapon, claiming the spread makes it easy to shoot out incoming missiles. Fade never confirmed that one.

One viewer asked Fade about the white flag. He said he had assumed it was a joke until he saw another player use it in a raid. He asked a group of players about it and was told it can be planted and does not stop other players from shooting you. That matches the general rule for extraction shooters: an emote is not a shield. Fade's own reaction when he finally saw one deployed was to keep watching the player holding it, since the flag says nothing about intent.

ARC Raiders update status and the October 2026 question

Fade does not know what the October 2026 update contains. The transcript shows him guessing at its contents rather than reporting them. He said he did not know when a specific item would arrive, told a viewer the fix for a controller bug probably would not land until October, and joked that the update had better include preloadouts. None of those are confirmed features. Embark Studios publishes its own patch notes, and anyone planning around a preloadout system should read those notes rather than a stream.

The controller bug is a separate issue from the game. Fade's snap hook was double-snapping, and he said he had to restart ARC Raiders between matches to clear it. He described it as either hardware or driver trouble on his end, not a documented game defect, and he was waiting on a replacement controller from Gamester after moving from Scuf. He also wondered aloud whether the double-snap and the healing bugs were console-specific.

On one player question, Fade did offer a concrete comparison: the game is not dead. He pointed to roughly 25,000 concurrent players on Steam alone when chat called it a dead game, and said Buried City had been the only consistently entertaining map for fades that day.

The stream also produced a running count of the things Fade wanted changed: fewer Bobcats in every lobby, a mode without Arc enemies, and preloadouts. He was one player asking, not a developer announcing a roadmap.

FAQ

What are ARC Raiders friendly lobbies? Friendly lobbies are an informal player convention in ARC Raiders solos where strangers agree not to shoot, often through proximity chat or unspoken behavior, so they can loot and extract without a fight. Nothing in the game enforces the truce, which is why Fade described them as unreliable.

Did ARC Raiders add a mode with no friendly fire or no PvP? No such mode was announced or demonstrated in this session. Fade said he wanted a mode without Arc enemies, and he mentioned a Chinese version where players toggle a light to signal PvP intent, but those are his wishes and a secondhand description, not features confirmed by Embark Studios.

Does the pickaxe swing glitch still work in ARC Raiders? The transcript shows one streamer performing the swing successfully on a controller during a September 2026 stream by spamming the attack button and the dodge button at the same time. That is a single recorded session, not a verified technique, and patches can change or remove it at any time.

Why did Fade stop using the Bobcat? Fade said the Bobcat is the gun almost everyone runs in ARC Raiders solos and that he was bored of it. He switched to the Osprey, Rattler 4, Toro, and Arpeggio across the session, and he lost fights with several of them.

What happens if you accept a fade and then shoot early? Fade called it cheap and treated it as a broken agreement. He walked away from at least one duel after taking a shot during a heal-up, and he told opponents to reset before starting again.

From a long stream session to a written guide

A four-hour ARC Raiders session produces a lot of material that dies in a video: the exact wording of a challenge, the weapon swaps, the names of the maps that stayed interesting, and the moments where a rule broke down. Anyone who teaches extraction shooter tactics on YouTube has the same problem. The knowledge is in the audio, and search engines cannot read audio.

Skalablog turns a YouTube video into a structured article you can publish and edit. You paste the video URL, the transcript is generated, and an article draft comes back with headings, sections, and the details from the recording. If you have a raid breakdown, a coaching session, or a long stream with tested tactics inside it, that recording can become a written page.

Visit Skala Blog to paste a YouTube URL, transcribe the video, and generate an article.

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