You said Cody, but here's way too much text. (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Saturday, February 28, 2026, 11:10 (1 hours, 59 minutes ago) @ Vortech

Its hard to get the character from Thursday night day one of a network stress test release as all of that is bound to influence the population that shows up, but so far it is absolutely not going to be the Kumbaya fest of arc raiders. Simply not having aggression-based matchmaking will cause that. But also Marathon broke the prox chat in the test yesterday so that also made things only ever go in one direction.

There has been ZERO chill. Everything is shoot on sight.

Rook seems underbaked. You go in against teams of three, but they have zero incentive to just let you be. You're probably loaded with stuff since you've been scavenging, and you're easy pickings since you're solo. It seems like the best bet is to get out via guarded exfils, and utilize your hacking / cloaking to make the bots ignore you while you are waiting for the countdown. Nobody seems to use the guarded exfils.

Late Thursday night I switched to solo queue and had a MUCH easier time of things. I basically had the rook experience without being a rook. Using a low level kit to get some kills lost to the limit and exfil out. but I’m not sure if that was down to people going to sleep.

Solo is much easier. You only have to worry about yourself, and you can just stay quiet to mind your own business, or to get the drop on other people. Groups of three moving quietly seems super rare.

The other issue is if people at large even really want an extraction shooter. Arc raiders got a bit of popularity from trying to be more accessible and so they chased that so hard it’s not really giving people the extraction shooter experience. The earlier ones never really took off. You “win” about as much as in Apex/fortnite, but it feels more frustrating to lose when it actually hurts you by losing your stuff. Bungie has already said people are doing contracts and leaving faster than expected, which is making the more risk tolerant and the pvp focused people feel like the runs are empty.

It's been two things:

1. People are going in with free sponsored kits to knock out the contracts, then just leaving when complete since it doesn't matter if you lose it.
2. People are dying to bots before you find other players.

I feel like it's a weird choice to make so many of the contracts not require exfiltration, but I kind of get it because if all of them did, then most people would never ever progress. But it creates this weird situation from point 1.

I still have seen zero people choose non-aggression, let alone cooperation.

Yup. Zero chill at all. Either shoot it, or run away from it. I'm totally guilty.

And it does feel like maybe the best gunfeel and most team/class based shooter Bungie has ever done which is saying a lot.

Tuning the sensitivity and deadzones made it feel pretty spot on for me.

The visual style and sci-fi dystopia writing is right up my alley, but is another thing making me wonder how many people even want this.

No OLEDs on Tau Ceti. I backed the right tech after all.