On your very first drops into ARC Raiders, the game hits you hard, and it only starts to feel fair once you stop treating it like every other extraction shooter and start thinking about how you handle your ARC Raiders Items. You do not want to mash "accept" on every squad invite or wander into the loudest parts of the map. Instead, queue Solo and make a beeline for Stella Montis. Forget the Dam Battlegrounds and The Blue Gate at the start; those zones look tempting but usually just mean you get farmed by players who already know every angle and spawn.

Why Stella Montis Matters

Early on, Stella Montis is basically your training ground, even if the game never calls it that. The terrain's easier to read, you get cover without needing crazy movement, and there are enough ARC machines around to keep you busy. You are not there to flex your aim; you are there to figure out where people rotate, where bots spawn, and how extractions usually play out. Run the same routes more than once. Notice which buildings get hit first, which corners feel unsafe, and where you tend to get surprised. Once you know the flow of that map, every other zone becomes less scary, because you already understand how the game wants to punish people who sprint around with no plan.

Leaning On The Free Loadout

The trick that saves your sanity is the Free Loadout. Do not bring in anything you care about while you are learning. Just hit the free option and go. That gear is basically disposable, which means your brain is not screaming every time you hear footsteps. When you die, you lose nothing from your stash, and that changes how you play. You can take weird routes, experiment with flanks, and make mistakes without feeling gutted. Use that free gun on ARC machines first, clear your PvE objectives, and grab whatever loot you can safely reach. If another player shows up, your default move should be to slip away, not to test your starter pistol against some guy sliding, rolling, and snapping headshots like it is his full-time job.

Surviving The Sweat Bracket

The rough part is the first 30–45 minutes of matches where it feels like everyone else is cracked out and hunting for you. There is a decent chance the game is quietly throwing you into lobbies full of hyper-aggressive players. If you try to fight them early, you just feed their kill count and reset your run. Let them have it. If they chase you down, fine, you respawn, grab another Free Loadout, and drop again. The goal here is not your K/D, it is to get through that messy bracket while the matchmaking slowly realises you are not rushing fights. Over a few raids, things calm down. You start to land in lobbies where people pause before shooting, where someone might ping an extraction instead of mag-dumping you on sight.

When The Game Finally Opens Up

Once you are out of the chaos, ARC Raiders suddenly feels like a different game. You will bump into players who talk on voice, wave you over for trades, or even team up for a quick push on an ARC patrol. That is when your map knowledge and your earlier patience start to pay off. You keep using the free gear when you are unsure, only risking better items when you are confident about the route and the lobby mood. If you ever feel like skipping part of the grind or topping up on resources, services like RSVSR exist for players who want to buy game currency or items in RSVSR and get into the good stuff faster, but the core of the experience still comes from those early rough runs where you learned not to panic, not to overfight, and to let the game come to you a bit more.