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Steve, "Uncle Cheese", killed TheBurntPeanut on Pendola Pass on 12 October and looted his three-day-grind Amplified Kettle. He was banned for 30 days the next morning.
A regular player says he got a 30-day ban the morning after killing ARC Raiders' biggest streamer. The next day, Peanut said he got his gun back because he "died to a cheater". Embark won't say why.
Steve, "Uncle Cheese", killed TheBurntPeanut on Pendola Pass on 12 October and looted his three-day-grind Amplified Kettle. He was banned for 30 days the next morning.
The ban notice gave no reason. The appeal, with footage, was denied on 19 October with only "anti-cheat detected unauthorized behavior".
On 13 October, Peanut said on stream he'd got the Kettle back because he "died to a cheater". That's Embark's automatic refund for unfair-play kills.
Gimmick's unblurred match clock made it look like sniping, and the brothers use the same clock to sync three recordings and argue they never went looking for Peanut.
Our take: cheaters get permanent bans now, so why only 30 days? Both streams are public, so somebody at Embark just has to press play.
Here’s a story that’ll make you think twice before you dome a famous streamer. An ARC Raiders player called Steve, “Uncle Cheese” to his family, says he killed TheBurntPeanut on Pendola Pass on 12 October. The next morning he had a 30-day ban. The notice didn’t say what for, his appeal was denied, and Embark still won’t tell him what he did.
His brother, who runs the small YouTube channel Meet Dadbot, has gone full true-crime on it. His 37-minute video lines up their own recording against both Peanut’s and his duo partner Gimmick’s streams, second by second. It’s pulled around 60,000 views in a day, and #FreeUncleCheese is doing the rounds.
Steve and his brother describe themselves as two “slightly above average” dads who live about 3,000 miles apart. ARC Raiders is how they hang out a couple of nights a week. On 12 October they were playing duos on Pendola Pass, the new map from the Frozen Trail update. In their words, duos lobbies are shoot-on-sight, and that one was full of flares.
After winning one fight, they heard another duo fighting ARC bots behind them. Two raiders came running across an open field towards them, and Steve dropped one. Then they heard a voice they’d only ever heard on YouTube:
“Please don’t kill me. Please… I’m going to look like a total [coward] if you guys kill me.”
It was Peanut, with Gimmick (Hey You Video Game) along for the ride. The brothers admit they “had a little fun” with a downed Peanut before Steve finished him off. His brother is honest about it: it wasn’t nice. But not nice and against the rules are two different things.
Then Steve opened Peanut’s bag and found a fully upgraded Amplified Kettle with X-Rounds. Earlier on his own stream, Peanut had been calling it a level five. Amplified weapons are Frozen Trail’s new endgame grind. You need a level 4 Outpost, a Gunsmith and Research Station at level 4 (the Gunsmith upgrade needs an Emperor Modulator) and an Amplification Module from the Frigate or the fallen Emperor. Peanut’s own words on stream, after losing it: “I spent three days acquiring this weapon… 3 days and gone in 2 seconds.” He never got to shoot another raider with it.
To be fair, the brothers didn’t get away with it either. The lobby swarmed them and they both died about ten minutes later. Peanut’s Kettle was lost with them. Steve then logged off to go to a comedy show. That was his only match of the day.
This is the part that turns a hunch into something more. On his stream on 13 October, the day Steve’s ban landed, Peanut said:
“I just got my amplified kettle with X-Rounds back ’cause I died to a cheater. No joke.”
That matters because of how ARC Raiders handles cheaters. Since launch, Embark has automatically refunded the loadout of anyone killed by a player its anti-cheat later acts against, no report needed, with an in-game mail saying your items were lost “due to unfair play”. So if Peanut got a refund, something in Embark’s system marked whoever killed him as an unfair-play kill.
The video goes one step further. It points out that every Kettle Peanut rebuilt that night had a gold stock, while the one Steve looted had a purple stock. Their claim is that the refunded gun was the one Steve took. We haven’t checked that frame by frame ourselves, but if it’s right, Embark’s system treated Steve’s kill as cheating.
First, why it looked like sniping. Peanut blurs his match clock and lobby code on stream so snipers can’t find him. Gimmick didn’t. Both chats spent the match warning him to hide them, and then two strangers came over the hill and took Peanut’s prized gun. As the video admits: “If I were Peanut, I would think I got sniped, too.”
But Gimmick’s unblurred clock is also what let them sync all three recordings, and they reckon it clears them:
Nobody knows, and the video is careful not to accuse anyone. It lists three possibilities: Peanut reported him, Gimmick reported him, or a stream chat with thousands of viewers and Steve’s name on screen did. Mass reports like that could look like a pattern to an automated system. On stream, neither Peanut nor Gimmick says they reported anyone.
The video also plays a clip from Peanut’s 13 October stream. In it, Peanut says the devs are “kind of on it” with the people giving him trouble, and that “they’ve been texting me every day, making sure everything’s on”. It might have been a bit. But it shows the gap: a top streamer has ways to reach Embark that a regular player with a support form doesn’t.
Embark’s own Ban and Enforcement Policy says it will tell you the “enforcement reason” if you appeal. But it says it “cannot offer specific details about what caused the ban” in order to protect its anti-cheat. So “we won’t tell you why” isn’t a one-off brush-off. It’s the policy. The same page lists stream sniping as a bannable offence, and warns that external software can trigger the anti-cheat “even unintentionally”.
On 30 September, Embark announced that anyone caught cheating now gets a permanent ban, first offence included, with no warnings. So which is it? If the anti-cheat really caught Steve cheating, why only 30 days? And if it wasn’t cheating, why did Peanut get a “you died to a cheater” refund? Either the system flagged a kill it wasn’t sure about and Embark split the difference, or something else is going on. Either way, the person being punished isn’t allowed to know which.
Credit to Peanut: he’s an entertainer who dies dozens of times a night, and from his side of the screen it looked exactly like sniping. We’d have thought the same. The video goes out of its way to say “no hard feelings, man” too. This isn’t on him.
It’s on the system. ARC Raiders is a game built on getting jumped by strangers and losing your best gear. That’s the whole thrill. If killing the wrong person on a hillside gets you flagged as a cheater, the rule isn’t “don’t cheat” anymore. It’s “don’t do it to someone famous”.
And the fix is embarrassingly simple. Both streams of this fight are public, and one of them has a match clock right there on screen. A bloke lined them up in an afternoon with a free caption tool and a cup of coffee. Embark had the footage, an appeal and two direct questions, and its answer was a form letter. Nobody is asking Embark to give away its anti-cheat secrets. Tell a banned player which rule they broke, have a human actually press play on the footage, and say they did. Overcorrecting isn’t fixing. Checking is.
Have you been banned in ARC Raiders without being told why? Tell us in the comments or in the GetRekt Discord. If you think Steve deserves a real review, share the video and tag @ARCRaidersGame and @EmbarkStudios. Keep it civil, though. The brothers have asked everyone to be kind to Peanut, Gimmick and Embark’s staff, and so are we.
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