ARC Raiders appears to be dishing out permanent bans for cheaters, and it may be thanks in part to a very popular VTuber

ARC Raiders dev Embark Studios may be fighting back hard against hackers and cheaters, and a Peanut could have been the one who turned the tide.

Hugely popular streamer TheBurntPeanut, who is a VTuber that digitally imposes his eyes and mouth onto a peanut, is by far the largest content creator in ARC Raiders, routinely bringing in over 40,000 viewers while live. While he built his channel on Escape From Tarkov, he has exploded in popularity with ARC Raiders, so people are bound to listen when he complains like he did recently.

“Embark, fix this, or I’m fuckin’ out of here,” he said in an impassioned plea after being stream-sniped by hackers for multiple games. “I’m actually out of here. Give us something, or I’m actually out of here, this is ridiculous. If those guys are not IP-banned from this game, I genuinely don’t think I’m gonna play it.”

Peanut followed up this morning, saying that he was “just heated at that moment because the same three cheaters had been following us for a long time without getting banned,” but reiterated his love for the game and dev Embark Studios, saying that the team “is incredibly passionate about it and is working hard to continue making it great.”

But the most recent development this morning came from fellow content creator THump, who posted a screenshot apparently from one of the hackers who revealed in a Discord channel that they had been permanently suspended from the game.

“Just wanted to let you know that they just banned one of them permanently 30 minutes ago,” THump said. “After a month long of them doing nothing, your rant made the difference in them finally taking action. Use your voice more.”

TheBurntPeanut was hardly the first to sound off about cheaters ruining their games. Streamers like Ninja and Nadeshot had been vocal for weeks before this recent development, and it led to a response. On Jan. 8, Embark announced that it was aware of cheating being an issue and was working on an update.

“We’ve seen the discussion around the topic of cheaters in ARC Raiders,” Embark Studios community manager Ossen said on the game’s Discord. “Please know that we are taking this issue very seriously and are listening to, and acting on your feedback. Over the next few weeks, we are implementing significant changes to our rulesets and deploying new detection mechanisms to identify and remove cheaters.”

For now, it’s unclear if these potential bans are part of a wider swath of anti-cheat efforts from Embark, or if this was targeted due to their very public cheating and stream-sniping. The hope is that cheaters and hackers from now on will be detected and taken care of, because it’s not realistic or expected for Embark to target individual cheaters, because not everyone will have the platform like Peanut to draw attention to them.

Destructoid has reached out to Embark Studios for comment on the bans.