Rent a Raider: How a Self-Play Session Actually Runs

Voice or text, your call

Voice is faster when things go wrong, and in an extraction game things go wrong at the worst possible moment. A callout that takes two seconds to say takes ten to type, and ten seconds is a squad wipe. Plenty of sessions still run entirely in text, and a raider who knows the map leads almost as well with pings and movement. Neither is wrong. Deciding halfway through the first drop is.

What the raider does once you are in

The raider takes the parts of the run that punish a mistake hardest. That means leading the route, opening the fights that have to happen, and standing in the place where the shooting starts.

A normal run looks like this. The raider sets the rotation and calls the order you move in. They engage first when a patrol has to be cleared, and they break contact when a fight is not worth taking, which is far more often than most players expect. They carry what will not fit in your bag. And when the extraction is live they hold the approach while you go through it, because the player standing at the exit is the one most likely to get shot.

If you die early the session does not stop being useful. That is exactly the situation a second player exists for, and the raider will reshape the rest of the time around what is still recoverable.

What you do

Your half is smaller than you think and matters more than it sounds.

• Turn up on time. The slot is booked. A session that starts forty minutes late is a shorter session.

• Follow the calls in the moment. Ask why afterwards. Most of the calls that sound strange are about something you cannot see yet.

• Say when you are low. Ammo, heals, bag space. A raider planning the next rotation is planning it for both of you.

• Ask questions while it is happening. One narrated run teaches more than a week of solo attempts.

Loot, and who keeps what

Loot is worth settling before the drop rather than after it, because an extraction game starts arguments the second something valuable comes out of a container.

The default is simple. What you pick up is yours. The raider is there so that more ends up in your bag, not so that a share of it ends up in theirs, and anything they are holding purely for space comes back to you at extraction.

If you want a different arrangement, say so before the session starts. Some players prefer the raider keeps whatever the raider finds. Some want one specific item hunted and nothing else touched. All of that is fine. All of it is a line of text before the drop instead of a disagreement afterwards.

Booster tip: put the loot rule in the order chat, not only on voice. Two lines before the first drop settle it for the whole session, and the thread is still there if anyone remembers it differently later.

Where to go next

The rent a raider page lists what a session covers and how the options are set. Everything else for the game sits on the Arc Raiders hub. The same idea runs in Battlefield as rent a booster, where the squad is bigger and the session is built around modes rather than runs. The rules every order runs under are on the safety page.