Three days of wallhack discourse and the subreddit finally found something worse: the guy in your own squad. u/mysteryscott5's clip of a random-fill teammate torching his squad with a Flame Spray is sitting near the top of the discussion tab with 611 comments, and the only argument in there is whether this kind of griefing deserves the same ban hammer as ESP. The consensus answered itself before the thread hit 100 replies. Yes. Same hammer.

The useful fix is buried in the comments. u/vault_nsfw's suggestion - cap friendly fire damage so it can't drop a teammate below 1 HP, then flag repeated friendly hits for review - is the kind of thing that should not require 1,900 upvotes to surface, but here we are. The angrier replies just want fire damage between squadmates off entirely. The cooler ones point out that the same anti-cheat work order Embark has been promising would catch this too, if it ever lands.

The other thing that happened today is that PVE players started celebrating in public. u/Pappuniman's meme about being back in friendly lobbies is the day's runaway top post at a 0.96 ratio, and the comments underneath read like a different game. Six-stack flag-waving on the Matriarch's hull. Eight raiders in one elevator. u/Kusina's line is the cleanest summary of the mood: "hearing distant hullcrackers and immediately relaxing instead of panicking is true character development." The PvE crowd has built an entire parallel server culture while the PvP threads have been busy litigating wallhacks, and today is the day they showed up to wave.

Not everyone is happy about it. u/FoxSin-117 posted a warning that PvE lobbies have become a hunting ground - a Betrayer parks in the carebear bracket and farms the friendlies, who are not expecting it. u/Komone's writeup of getting ratted under the Blue Gate tunnels by exactly that kind of player is the long version of the same complaint. Both posts are getting a softer reception than they would have a week ago. The PvE crowd has waited months for lobbies that feel like this and they're not interested in being told to be paranoid in them.

The cheating threads, by exhaustion

The quit post hit anyway. u/TeacherRadiant5835 wrote a goodbye thread about ESP killing the game for him, and his own follow-up comment - "At a basic, human level, it takes all of the joy out of the game that I felt when I landed in back in October. I'm genuinely gutted." - is the most upvoted thing he's written. The reply guys are split between sympathy and the now-standard counter-thread from u/Ok_Honeydew180 telling everyone to shut up about cheating already. That post is at a 0.81 ratio. Even the people sick of the discourse are sick of being told to be sick of it.

The news under all of this: Update 1.29 drops tomorrow with a new Trader and cosmetics. No mention of anti-cheat. The thread is polite but cold. A trader is not what anyone in either of the day's two big fights asked for.

The small stuff that was actually fun

u/Buddy_Kane_the_great's Powered Descender trick - sleep through the descent, roll on landing, no damage - is the most-shared clip in the technical-tips bucket and the top reply is somebody admitting they cannot bring themselves to try it. u/Wadae28's grey-rarity weapon thread drew 183 comments of legitimately good fake-gun design, including u/Titanium_Nutsack's pitch for an ARC-cell rifle that reloads off Tick corpses. Somebody should send that to Embark instead of another trader.

The rotation of villains keeps tightening. Last week it was wallhackers. Earlier this week it was the Bombardier. Today it's the guy in your own squad voice channel laughing while he sets you on fire. The PvE refugees noticed the pattern and decided to stop playing the game the rest of the subreddit is mad about.