Recently, ARC Raiders welcomed a new merchant - Ermal from Nomadic Envoy.
This NPC seems quite generous, offering items including extra stash space and the special storage feature of Expedition Vault, which allows you to carry up to five valuable items the next time you open an Expedition.
This sounds great, but many players on the forums are urging others "not to trade with him." Why is that?
Next, I will explain the ins and outs of this matter and what you should do.
What does Ermal offer?
Since this is a new NPC in ARC Raiders, many players may not yet know what he offers, so I'll give a brief introduction before we begin.
This new merchant named Ermal specializes in providing high-value items to players who have reached level 25. As I mentioned at the beginning, his most attractive items currently are two:
First, Extra Stash Space. In ARC Raiders, the number of loot you can take home is limited, constrained by your stash space. Ermal's extra stash space allows you to permanently increase this capacity. In the brutal world of PvEvP, more stash space means more potential for wealth accumulation.
Secondly, Expedition Vault. It's well known that whenever an Expedition begins, participating players lose all their weapons and items, starting from scratch. This mechanism has led many players to avoid participating in Expeditions.
To address this, Embark designed Expedition Vault - you can place five items in it before starting an Expedition, and these items will remain with you; you won't lose them when starting an Expedition.
In addition, you can trade various rare in-game items, blueprints, cosmetics, equipment, and more.
Why "Don't trade"?
However, the reason ARC Raiders players are saying "no" is that this new feature has many problems.
Unreasonable Pricing
After players painstakingly farm materials in the game to exchange for items at Ermal's shop, they quickly discover that the prices of all the items he offers are prohibitively expensive, whether cosmetic or ARC Raiders BluePrints.
One player, after defeating various ARC enemies and farming all available materials, found that he couldn't even exchange for a blueprint for a rifle called Tempest at Ermal's. If he couldn't even exchange for a gun, there was no way he could get Extra Stash Space or coveted Expedition Vault.
In fact, because the five item slots in Expedition Vault need to be unlocked one by one, this player discovered that unlocking all five slots required five times the amount of materials he currently possessed.
This absurd design makes Ermal's items a luxury in the game, unaffordable for most players. Some players complained that if Expedition Vault was designed to solve a problem, why did it create a new one? It's like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Trading Mechanism Design Flaw
This is the most frustrating part. In ARC Raiders, other Projects allow you to submit materials little by little. For example, if you need 100 parts, you submit 10 today, 20 tomorrow, and the system remembers your progress.
However - Ermal doesn't support batch submissions! You have to gather all the materials at once and then dump them all on him. This also means that if you want Extra Stash Space, you need to cram a large amount of specific materials into your inventory.
This is an absurd, vicious cycle: materials used to unlock Extra Stash Space cannot be stacked in your inventory; each one takes up one slot. However, you must carry all the materials with you to trade with Ermal.
So, if you want to unlock Extra Stash Space, you need extra inventory space, and if you need extra inventory space, you need to unlock a certain amount of Extra Stash Space first.
This ridiculous situation has led players to question: Did the game developers actually test their new feature beforehand? Or have they run out of programmers?
Also Read: ARC Raiders Patch 1.26.0 & 1.29.0: Why Bettina Is Now a Top-Tier Weapon After Two Updates?
Developer's Response
Fortunately, the developers of ARC Raiders didn't ignore this situation. They took immediate action and released Patch Notes 1.29.0, stating that during the first week of Ermal's release, only one Extra Stash Space and Expedition Vault will be open to gather initial price feedback, which will be gradually adjusted later.
In other words, the current price is just a test, and it will probably become more normal next week. After all, most of the current price feedback is negative, as I mentioned above.
Therefore, players are advised not to trade with Ermal now. Next week, once the developers see the overwhelming complaints about prices from players this week (such as farming materials only to find they can't exchange them for anything), they will likely significantly adjust the prices.
At that time, the same materials will be able to exchange for more items.
Additionally, players also hope that a "phased submission" function can be added to Ermal. Although this feature isn't live yet, since the developers are already collecting feedback, this obviously absurd issue will most likely be fixed.
That concludes the information about the new merchant Ermal in ARC Raiders and why there's so much negative feedback about it on player forums.
As for how the developers will fix it, we'll have to wait until next week to find out, but I believe they won't let us down again.