In a post to Arc Raiders’ official Discord server, Ossen, Embark Studio’s community lead, said that the “Hidden Bunker” activity has been pulled “from the rotation to prevent unfair exploits while [the team] are working on a fix.” It follows as players have been using the various wall exploits to kill each other and glitch into rooms and steal loot for free.
The Hidden Bunker is one of the handful of map conditions that rotate in and out of the game. As far as activities go, it’s not terribly exciting: activate a bunch of satellites, download some stuff from a bunker, hopefully score some good loot underground, rinse and repeat. But this activity only takes place on the Spaceport map which is proving to be a tricky area for wall exploits.
The underground portion of the map hasn’t been without its glitches and exploits. Some players have found themselves spontaneously falling through the map while exploring it. Meanwhile, on Spaceport in particular, the walls seem to be quite susceptible to folks glitching their way inside, where they can shoot other players invisibly and without consequence.
Embark’s solution to a popular glitch? Burn players alive
Perhaps the most insidious of the recent wall glitches saw players phasing into rooms they’d otherwise need keys for. For a while, players were reporting that they’d unlock doors only to find the rooms completely gutted. Personally, I stopped using auto-fill when matchmaking because I was tired of matching with folks who just wanted to spam this glitch. All you had to do was hop on each other in front of the door, combine that with some sprinting, and bam, you could phase through the wall with enough effort.
Embark Studios decided the best way to solve this wall-glitch problem was to set up traps inside these rooms that, should someone enter without unlocking the doors properly, would burn them alive. Embark described this solution as a “Hot Fix” in its patch notes. I have seen incidents, however, of this defense mechanism going off and burning players to death outside of the locked rooms, too, so it’s not a perfect solution.
Sometimes unfortunate glitches happen. But in a game like Arc Raiders where you risk losing all your stuff because someone’s cheating, it stings a bit more.
Though in other good news, Embark Studios seemed to be able to prevent door glitches in real life, as a group of players recently tried to trigger the door glitch at the studio’s IRL HQ in Sweden.
Thankfully, no ill-gotten loot was stolen and no one was set on fire.