If you have sunk years into extraction shooters, you kinda know how these games treat a wipe. One day you log in and your stash, your builds, that lucky drop you bragged about for a week – gone, all in the name of a fresh season. It keeps things alive, sure, but it stings. Arc Raiders tried to soften that blow with its new Expedition Project, turning leftover loot into permanent bonuses for your next character. On paper, that sounds smart, a way to give your old runs some long-term value and maybe push you to chase better ARC Raiders Items before the reset hits. But once Embark actually broke down how the system works, the mood shifted fast from “cool idea” to “are you kidding me”.
How The Numbers Really Work
The big problem is how those Expedition bonuses are tied to stash value. When the Expedition leaves, the game basically empties your locker and converts everything into a single number. That total decides how many extra skill points your next Raider gets, up to a max of five. The catch is brutal: you need one million Coins of value for just one point, and five million Coins for the full five. Anyone playing a couple nights a week, or juggling work, kids, and a backlog of other games, looks at that and thinks, “Yeah, no chance.” You do not feel like you are planning an endgame strategy, you feel like you are clocking into a second job.
Communication That Came Way Too Late
What really winds people up is not only the grind, but the timing. Players have been clearing projects, selling off gear, and tidying their stash with zero clue that hoarding was secretly the winning play. One Reddit post that got a lot of attention came from someone who said they stopped keeping junk once they finished their upgrades. They were just cruising toward the wipe. Then the blog drops, and suddenly they are told they should have been sitting on piles of scrap for weeks. You can see why that feels rough. It is not that folks hate long-term systems, but you cannot spring the rules on them after most of the season is already gone.
Effort, Reward, And Just Walking Away
There is also this weird gap between what the game asks and what it gives back. One player mentioned they happen to have around a million Coins, so they will snag a single extra skill point, then tap out because there is “no way in hell” they grind four million more. That kind of comment keeps popping up. People look at the curve and decide the juice is not worth it. In an extraction game, the loop should pull you into one more run, one more risky raid, not make you stare at a spreadsheet wondering if a tiny permanent buff is worth tens of hours of farming. When players start saying they will just hop to another title instead, the system stops feeling like endgame content and starts feeling like a tax.
What Needs To Change Fast
Right now, the Expedition Project feels like a punishment wrapped in a reward screen, and that is a shame because the core idea is not bad at all. Lowering the Coin requirements, scaling bonuses more gradually, or giving players clearer milestones would all go a long way. Even just explaining the system earlier in the season would have changed how people played and how they valued their stash. Instead, a lot of Raiders are staring at empty lockers and thinking they backed the wrong strategy. If Embark listens and tweaks the system so that smart play across a season matters more than raw grind, you might see players excited to stack up their best gear and chase new cheap Raiders weapons instead of wondering why they bothered logging in at all.