Some Arc Raiders Players Are Angry Over The $5 Million Expedition...

Prestige rewards are a bit redundant if everyone gets them.

Last week I was: marveling at how OP Undertaker is in Elden Ring Nightreign's Forsaken Hollows DLC.

This week I've been: rounding off my stash value to $2 million so I can enjoy the rest of the season.

As someone who was skeptical of the value of the Expedition in Arc Raiders at first, I'm more surprised than anyone that I actually kind of like Embark's approach to the rewards now it's revealed what we're getting. You earn a special bragging rights skin for completing the base Expedition, along with 12 slots of permanent extra stash space, but also temporary boosts to XP, repairs, and Scrappy materials next season. In a sense, you trade all of this for the things you lose, such as blueprints, quest progress, and workbench upgrades. We also get up to five skill points above the level cap for every new Raider we start, at the cost of $1 million per point in coins and stash value when the Expedition leaves.

Now, yes, that is an astonishing amount of money, but I think it achieves the balance of what a Prestige mechanic is supposed to be about. Completing the Expedition is an optional grind for more invested players, but getting all five of those skill points is a grind within a grind, only for the most hardcore among us, i.e. 200-hour players who already had millions stashed away, making it an achievable goal for them within the timeframe, with the Expedition departing on December 22.

That's the point of a Prestige mechanic, especially a multi-layered one like this—only the top percentile are going to get those five skill points, and if we all got them, what's even the point in the first place? I'm pretty sure Embark didn't pull $5 million out of thin air, considering it must know the average and median value of all of our stashes, so it ultimately represents the percentage of people it thinks are in that top strata and that it wants to get those skill points to maintain a healthy game.

The reaction to the $5 million stash value announcement has been more negative than positive. Here are some critical quotes from Reddit and the official Arc Raiders Discord server over the weekend:

While there were some dissenting voices mixed in among these complaints, I think these (over)reactions miss the point. After 90 hours with Arc Raiders, I'm almost at $2 million (i.e. two bonus skill points), and that's where I'm going to stop, because ultimately I don't think three skill points, in a skill system peo

Source: PC Gamer