ARC Raiders tones down lightning strikes and offers compensation after server issues

Embark has pushed out a new patch for ARC Raiders that tackles two things at once – reduced lightning strike frequency during the Electromagnetic Storm, and promised compensation for players who lost their gear due to last week's server problems.

According to the patch notes, lightning strikes during the storm were occurring "too frequently," and that's now been addressed. Frequency should be noticeably lower the next time you head out into the elements chasing loot.

No hard numbers were given, but community reactions paint a pretty clear picture – rounds were descending into pure chaos. One player wrote on Reddit:

"Had the most chaotic round ever trying to do the leaper trials on EM dam with my gf" in duos. "Pure care bear lobby and it was insanity with bodies everywhere," they added, saying they're "kinda sad" that it's gone.

That reaction turned out to be pretty common among commenters.

"The EMS frequency was hilarious and fun," another player said. "Jesus Christ you'd think people would appreciate having a TINY bit of a challenge but no. Everything has to be made safe for idiots."

Others did call the lightning "obnoxious," so there's clearly a camp that wanted the change too. Embark finds itself in the classic situation where there's simply no version of this that satisfies everybody.

On the server side, Embark addressed the fallout from last week's outages, which caused some players to lose their loadouts even after a successful extraction. The studio is reviewing affected cases and plans to return items where possible over the next few days.

Embark acknowledged it doesn't usually "offer compensation for every incident," but the scale of the problem made this one worth an exception.

The ARC Raiders patch also includes a handful of other fixes and tweaks. But for many players, the real comfort is probably just knowing that surviving the first few seconds of a round is no longer a coin flip.