Speaking as someone who's only been playing ARC Raiders for about a week, this does happen pretty often. The game uses Aggression Based Matchmaking, so there is still PVP if you want it. But if you want to be friendly, team up and chat with randoms you meet, and generally coexist with fellow players, it's totally doable and actually happens fairly often.

Bumped into a guy on the map Blue Gate in a residential area. He was in a rush to get somewhere, but when I told him I was new to the game he stopped and gave me a couple blueprints for guns and a few tips for the map we were on.

My experience has been the adoption of Discord for communication in game has been a negative factor in the social aspects of gaming. Before, games needed to implement their own comms, which would encourage players to communicate as part of the game experience. But now it's expected that you'd talk on discord instead, so there's less need for games to be a social experience.

I used to Play a lot of Team Fortress 2. Like thousands of hours over 8ish years. It was the only multiplayer game i played. I would just hop on and talk to people and it was great. Aroumd christmas, people would send around gifts. At the time, i wasn't a big fan of christmas, because i didn't have nephews or kids yet and it seemed kinda poimtless, so i would usually just play the game, thinking maybe there would be people online who are lonely around the holidays. I used to work in a bar around holidays, it's brutal.

So i lived in a bubble of positivity for quite some time. Going back to games like Overwatch and CoD in the pandemic was pretty brutal.

Like og wow

These are the players that get angry when people say they don't want to play the game. And then act clueless when the game is dead due to low player counts. The people that also don't want to play in lobbies with other high level players and only want to Noob Stomp.

Its why I call this genre of game "Scum Sponge." Because it attracts all of the worst people on the planet due to the game design rewarding that kind of player behavior. I am thankful for it, because it means other games have less of them.

A shame. You could've seen the people who yell I'M FRIENDLY I'M FRIENDLY before shooting you in the head.

That's your choice, and I've met a couple people like that, but you could have just blocked them and moved on. I've also had a rando save my stupid ass twice in one raid because I kind of suck at extraction shooters.

In the end, I've had about as many meetings where I was ganked as where people just randomly helped me, and a whole lot more where we both said hi and went on our way.

Arc is not the game for you. That is insanely bubble wrapped behavior.

Why though? It's just pixels, laugh and go again, you have unlimited free kits, and every raid is different.

The game puts you in different lobbies depending on your play style. Care bears get matched with other care bears. Murder bears get matched with other murder bears. If you are finding yourself only getting matched with murder bears, examine your play style.

Most of my experience has been good and friendly but there are certain maps that murderers tend to frequent. Stella mons has been where I've found most player killers. Overall though, people chat and team up successfully all the time

I bet the big difference is time. When do you play vs the journalist?

8pm central time vs 8am central time, vs 3am central time probably bring in very different people.

Kinda like how a bar or pub shifts during a day.

Hell, I wish more games just had humanity. It might be due to me being antiwar, but when playing MMOs (whose MO is pretty much always 'kill each other' PVP) I wish folk were not so quick to kill, especially not when the kill isn't imperative. Face it, some of the best ever moments in gaming are when folk have the option to kill each other and dont. A shred of humanism.

Universal signs in COD existed to plead for mercy, such as switching to a knife and looking away. In Black Ops II there's a rave room in a map and several players spent a minute bobbing their characters around until someone else came and mowed the other team down. One time in Battlefield I spent the majority of a game (no mic mind you) chilling on a roof with half a dozen players from two teams. I came to multiplayer FPS games for the combat, stayed for the randoms I met.