Tracking player telemetry is a part of every modern game right now, especially live-service games. As you play, the way you move and shoot is all added fed back to studios to help understand how the wider playerbase reacts the way it does, and Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios tracks a lot of data.
With two games under its belt, The Finals and Arc Raiders, Embark data engineer Mattias Andersson revealed that the studio was tracking tens of terabytes of player data every day when Arc Raiders was at it speak. Obviously, the extraction shooter’s player count has substantially dropped since its launch success, but Embark is still keeping track of tonnes of data.
Speaking at a Nexon developer conference, thanks GR, Andersson explained that they “track every bullet in the game”. They said: “We track where the players are. We track whenever a bullet hits something. We have miniguns in our game, at least in The Finals, so this is a lot of bullets to keep track of.”
When Arc Raiders was at its peak earlier this year, even outselling Battlefield 6, the extraction shooter’s massive playerbase resulted in almost too much data. “We were tracking more than 100 billion events per day when Arc Raiders was at its peak,” they revealed. “That is 30 terabytes of data per day. And we do all this with less than two second latency into [the data tool] BigQuery. So as soon as you fire a bullet, two seconds later, I can run a query in BigQuery and find out if you hit or not.”
All of this tracking informs the developers how to fix bugs, how to balance weapons, and even how to fine-tune its anti-cheat solution. Yes, the developers are tracking your aim bots and wallhacks, obviously. Furthermore, and controversially, it also informs the game’s aggression-based matchmaking system.
“We try to find out how aggressive a player you are,”Andersson said “We want to know who shot first in any encounter. Who was the one who started shooting at the other player? And then we try to make sure that people who want to PvP a lot get matchmade who PvP a lot, and the people who never initiate fights, the friendly players, get moved in together with the more friendly players.”
As Embark continues to advance Arc Raiders for the future, with new maps, modes, and potential features like player trading, this massive amount of user data will continue to be used. Of course, there are no longer peaks of 400,000+ crowds jumping into the game every day, so there is less data to work with.
Nevertheless, there is essentially a version of Big Brother out in the rust belt, watching your every move, and shoving it into an absolutely massive database somewhere. Every missed shot, every jump down a hole, every accidental self-kill. All of my mistakes….
