If you have spent any time in extraction shooters, you know the feeling: you finally pull out with that one insane drop you have been chasing for days, stash it, stare at it… and then never touch it again, even though it sits right next to your favourite ARC Raiders BluePrint. Your pulse goes through the roof when you extract, then it all just dies the moment the gun hits your stash. That is gear fear. It has been hanging over Escape From Tarkov for years, and now Arc Raiders is walking straight into the same trap, turning what should be a power fantasy into a weird museum of guns you are too scared to use.
Risk, Reward, And The Expedition Hook
On paper, the new expedition system sounds like a clever fix for the usual wipe problem. Most games just reset everyone every season and call it a day, which feels rough if you do not have time to grind. Arc Raiders tries something else: you choose to reset in exchange for permanent bonuses. That pitch is great, especially for players sitting at the soft cap with more scrap than they know what to do with. Extra skill points are the big prize here. Five of them is a massive deal when the level cap is 75 and your perk tree is already overflowing with options you can never fully max out.
When Hoarding Beats Fighting
This is where it goes weird. To get all five skill points, you have to start your expedition with a stash value of at least five million coins. The game stops asking “can you survive the run?” and starts asking “can you sit on your wallet?”. So you grab an Aphelion, an Equalizer beam rifle, or the Jupiter sniper, then leave them on the shelf because their value is literally part of the ticket price. Lose that kit on the surface and you are not just tilted about dying, you are angry because your long-term upgrade just slipped further away. It flips the whole point of the loot loop. You are meant to press your advantage, push into dumb fights, burn through top gear. Instead, people are quietly stacking items and watching numbers go up in the stash tab.
Community Pushback And Better Ideas
You can see the frustration all over the community. The expedition window is short, about six days, and there was not much warning. Players like Darth_Onaga have pointed out that if they had known, they would have played way more aggressively earlier, building up a big cash buffer instead of messing around with random loadouts. Others are already offering cleaner fixes. One suggestion from dancovich is to track the total lifetime value of extracted loot and base rewards on that. It rewards actually playing the game: taking fights, extracting often, taking risks. You do not get punished for burning through kits or testing new builds, because your past success still counts even if your stash looks empty today.
Let Players Use Their Toys
Another idea, from B4kab4ka, has those bonus skill points tied to big achievements: killing the Matriarch, hitting max level, finishing major questlines. Stuff you remember doing, not just numbers in a stash. That kind of structure fits what an extraction shooter is meant to be. Loot is never really yours; you just get to hold it for a while. When the systems nudge you to hide your best gear instead of firing it, something is off. Arc Raiders is close to something really smart with expeditions, but the stash-value requirement pushes players into the exact behaviour that kills the fun. If Embark can shift the focus onto performance, milestones, and how you actually play with your gear, then we get what everyone wants: more runs where you are not scared to pull out your favourite gun or that rare BluePrint in ARC Raiders and just let it rip.
