Bullshit.

I am an entirely passive player. I don’t start PvP, I don’t participate in it unless someone starts shooting at me.

Yet I am constantly being shot at. In about 80% of matches I get attacked, typically from people extraction camping. It is enough that I have moved to other games because I can’t make much progress losing everything in most matches.

Embark’s Art Director Robert Sammelin has said in the past about matchmaking: “It’s quite complex, so we do analyze behavior and match accordingly.”

And then one YouTuber's anecdotal experience. Wow, sounds conclusive.

I noticed the same thing when I started doing only loot runs (I didn't shoot anyone, I'd just loot and GTFO). It used to be that running into PvP was pretty much expected but eventually the loot run matches went so that other players would sit in the open looting and nobody shot them, which is something you wouldn't do if you were in a lobby expecting to get shot. I wasn't willing to go as far as to assert that's the matchmaking algorithm but my matches have definitely become more peaceful as I've stopped picking fights with other players.

I noticed this a while back, everyone was always friendly until this random guy started shooting at me, me and someone next to me doing the same quest ended up taking him down when he came down off the control tower, and I finished him off. After that the next several rounds were always shoot on site

I've been humming and hawing over if I should get this game.

My assumption was that people would play friendly or cooperate more in the early days, and then straight PVP would take over quickly. Is this the case?

The reason I assume this would happen is that there's very little incentive to take the risk to cooperate when you could end up getting shot in the back and have your loot stolen.

The game sounds like if you were to try and min max, your best option would be to manipulate others to take advantage of any good will. Eventually, people would stop working together and just go straight to PVP as cooperative play would become too much of a risk or a waste of time.

Edit: I also don't know how to incentivize people to play with a variety of playstyles. If they want cooperation and spontaneity to be a feature in the game, I feel like they would need to have some kind of incentive to make people play in a variety of playstyles. Otherwise, people might just completely gravitate to straight pvp.

Again I could be completely off the mark as I haven't actually played the game, just watched others play it

It worked really well for CSGO at least for me. I had a lot of nice lobbies