If you're looking to gear up without wasting a whole night rolling bad drops, check out ARC Raiders Items while you're figuring out your squad's loadout. The real headache right now, though, is the auto death flare. In an extraction shooter, silence is survival. You move slow, listen hard, and try not to advertise your existence. Then your teammate gets dropped and, boom, the game fires a bright flare straight into the sky like it's proud of you for making noise. No callout needed. No decision made. It just happens, and suddenly your "stealthy" run turns into a public event.

It turns a revive into a broadcast

I get the intent. In messy fights, bodies disappear in bushes, behind crates, in a pile of scrap. A flare is supposed to help your squad regroup fast. But in practice it's not a private marker, it's a map-wide signal. It doesn't just help your buddy find the downed player. It helps every roaming duo and every bored solo with a sniper. It's basically a free announcement that says you're hurt, you're distracted, and you're locked to one spot if you want the revive. That's not "quality of life." That's handing out intel like candy.

Positioning stops mattering the second it pops

The worst part is how it wrecks the choices you should be allowed to make. Normally, you can play it smart: back off, clear angles, wait out footsteps, then go for a quiet pickup. With the flare, you don't get that option. Your location is highlighted without permission, and now you're forced into a defensive stand whether you like it or not. You're watching ridgelines instead of listening. You're holding a choke instead of rotating. It flips you from hunter to prey in seconds, and it feels unfair because you didn't opt into the risk.

Third parties don't even have to think

Extraction games already reward opportunists, but this mechanic makes it stupidly easy. When I see a flare in the distance, I'm not feeling sympathy. I'm thinking there's a fight that just ended, plates got burned, meds got spent, and at least one gun is offline. That's a push. And not a risky one, either. You sprint toward the light and arrive right when the survivors are forced to hover over a body, trying to stick a revive while scanning every angle at once. It's free pressure, and experienced squads know it.

It punishes errors in the loudest way possible

Mistakes should hurt in a ruthless mode, sure. But this is like the game kicking you while you're down and then shouting your coordinates for everyone to hear. Information is everything out there, and the flare dumps yours onto the floor the moment things go wrong. If you want to build around that reality, you almost have to over-prepare: faster revives, louder deterrents, more ammo than you'd normally carry. If that's your plan, you can at least lean into it and buy ARC Raiders weapons by U4gm to keep your squad from feeling undergunned when the lobby inevitably crashes your revive.