I jumped back into ARC Raiders after Shrouded Sky and, yeah, the mood is still great. The problem is what the quests are asking you to do now. You can't just play a clean raid and let the objective happen naturally. You end up planning a route like you're speedrunning, watching other squads, and wondering if you even brought the right kit. Half the time I'm thinking about stamina, angles, and timing instead of the fight, and that's a weird place to be for a game with such cool scavenging. Even looking at ARC Raiders Items can feel more relaxing than racing the whole server to a single interaction.

One Spot, One Winner

"Worth Your Salt" is the one that really shows the flaw. Celeste asks for a prototype battery, you charge it, you place it in a container. Simple loop, right. Except the drop-off is basically a shared, one-time switch for everyone in the raid. If another Raider taps it first, you get there and the prompt's gone. No alternate container, no "try again," nothing. So you either extract and requeue or wander around doing busywork while the clock bleeds out. That isn't tension, it's dead time, and it turns a solid idea into a coin flip.

When The Story Trips Over Itself

Then there's "Keeping the Memory." You carry a helmet back to a memorial and set it on a stake. It should be a small, personal moment. Instead it's another server-side object, which means only the first person there gets to be the hero. Everyone else arrives like, "Oh. Someone already did the job I was sent to do." It messes with the fiction. Celeste's talking to me, not to a queue. And it's hard to feel invested in a world that keeps telling you your part in it has already been completed by a stranger.

How Players Actually Respond

You can hear the coping strategies forming in real time. People strip gear to run faster, slam Adrenaline Shots, avoid fights, and cut straight across open ground because the button matters more than the raid. You'll even get that awkward moment where three players stand near the marker, all on comms, all annoyed, waiting to see if the interaction somehow resets. It's not that the tasks are "hard." It's that the design punishes normal play and rewards being first, not being smart. If Embark wants these quests to land, they need to be instanced per player or at least offer multiple valid hand-in points so the raid doesn't hinge on a single click.

A Better Kind Of Pressure

I'm not asking for everything to be free. I like risk, and I like having to choose between fighting and running. But the pressure should come from machines, noise, and bad decisions, not from a one-and-done objective that evaporates because somebody else arrived twenty seconds earlier. Give us repeatable interactions, parallel locations, or even a fallback step that still counts if the main spot is used. Until then, a lot of raids will keep feeling like admin work, and it's a shame, because the game deserves better, just like the hunt for ARC Raiders Legendary Material deserves to feel earned instead of rushed.