Somebody on the ARC Raiders subreddit paid for a wallhack, loaded into thirty PvP raids with a Jupiter and a Safekeeper augment, and wrote up what he saw. The mods deleted it. Someone reposted it. That repost is now the top thread on the subreddit by a wide margin, sitting at a 0.97 ratio with nearly a thousand comments, and the only argument inside it is whether the number he came back with - 76% of PvP lobbies had at least one other cheater - is too low.

The original write-up is still up under u/DanteDaDemon's account, 680 hours, zero bans, methodology in the body. The reposted version is the one the front page is reacting to. The top reply under it is one word and a number: "40 CENTS?" That is the price of one raid's worth of ESP if you buy the hundred-pack. The second-top reply is a raider saying he has felt this for months in heavy PvP lobbies and is relieved someone finally did the work.

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The mood number didn't move. It's flat at 53 for the second day, three points under the weekly average. That undersells what today actually was. The cadence fight from earlier in the week is gone. The burnout posts are gone. Every top-ten thread that isn't a meme is downstream of the cheating post, and every meme that isn't about Riven Tides spawns is about the cheating post.

The thread that should not have been deleted

Whatever the mods thought they were doing, removing a methodology post about cheating during a week when Embark themselves put out a dev message about cheating is the kind of decision that produces exactly one outcome, which is the post going up again with "deleted by mods for no reason" in the title and four thousand upvotes behind it. The author wrote "Let there be free speech" in the body, which is funnier than it should be given the actual content is a price list for cheat subscriptions.

The meme version showed up a few hours later, by u/Ejm60: a guy realizing why his fully loaded kits keep dying in the first three minutes. The funniest comment under it is not actually a joke. u/DustlnTheWind says he has video of a duo in voice chat calling out his exact kit, admitting they were cheating, and then aimbotting with Renegades. He ends with: why do you think Embark's 5/7 post was about cheaters.

The 1000-hour goodbye

The other discussion thread on the front page is u/MEXLeeChuGa quitting after a thousand hours, and the "it's not what you think" in the title turns out to be: it's exactly what you think. He loved the game. He cannot tell anymore whether the players killing him are good or paid. The top reply, from u/JanSvoboda83, points out ESP is in Trials too and that Embark giving Cantina legends a special color variant has made the cheating problem worse, not better, because now there is a flex attached to it.

This is the gap between yesterday's column and today's. Two days ago the argument was whether the new release cadence would hold long-time players. The honest answer turned out to be that the cadence is not what's losing them.

What's not in the cheating thread

A few things did escape the gravity well. u/Sirdoless's Riven Tides meme about getting jumped by four Wasps, two Hornets, two Fireflies and a Rocketeer above the cranes is the cleanest dunk on the map's enemy density so far. u/Madden2OOO's extract clip of a kid standing too close at the button with his gun out is a 2k upvote PSA that the correct move was the one he made. The PS5 beta data putting US weekly players at 972k is sitting under all of it with 86 comments, which on any other day would be the lead.

Not today. The repost is pinned by the front page itself, the price of a cheat is now a sub-wide in-joke, and the only question raiders are asking each other is what Embark does next. u/Bonfire_Monty's suggestion is to put all the cheaters in lobbies with each other and let them sort it out. It's the lightest thing in the thread and it has the highest agreement rate of any proposal so far.