So the May 11, 2026 Expedition 3 reset went live, and a chunk of us got hosed on skill points. I burned through the last weekend hitting the 100k damage cap with two friends in coordinated lobbies, signed up for the Caravan, and ended up with one measly point instead of five. If you're hunting fixes, patch notes, or even just Raider Tokens cheap while you wait for Embark to sort this mess out, you're in the same boat as half the Discord. The Arc Raiders skill points bug is real, it's account-wide, and the dev team has officially copped to it.
What's actually broken with the Arc Raiders skill points bug
The short version: Expedition 3 ran from April 28 to May 11, 2026, and rewards were tied to damage dealt to ARC and other Raiders. 20,000 damage got you 1 point, 50,000 bumped it to 3, and 100,000 maxed you at 5. A ton of players who clearly cleared the top bracket got dropped to 1 point or zero. Community Manager Ossen confirmed the team is digging into the account discrepancies and looking at restoration options.
The why is uglier than the what. Skill points are one of the only things that survive these 60-day wipes. A vet who ran all three Expeditions since the October 30, 2025 launch should be sitting on 15 bonus points. Most of us are stuck at 11. That's a real power gap when you're trying to skip early-game gating on a fresh character.
How to file a support ticket that actually works
If you got shorted, document everything before memory gets fuzzy. Grab your estimated total damage during the window, list the chunky targets you tagged - Matriarchs, Queens, that kind of thing - and note roughly when you triggered the Caravan departure. Send it to Embark support and check the official Discord for hotfix news, since they post there before anything hits social or the in-game menu. And if you haven't reset yet? Don't. Sit on it until there's a formal fix, or you risk eating the same loss with no proof you ever earned the points.
Why the damage-based system probably broke
Expedition 1 and 2 used stash value thresholds - 5 million and 3 million respectively. Expedition 3 flipped that on its head with damage tracking, partly to push aggressive play over passive hoarding (you didn't even need to extract for damage to count). My guess, take it with a grain of salt, is the validation layer for the higher tiers never synced properly. People watched their progress trackers roll back hours before the deadline. The fact that so many got exactly 1 point suggests the system defaulted to the floor bracket when the higher checks failed. That tracks with the kernel-level anti-cheat rollout and the Riven Tides update wrapping up the same week - too many moving parts at once.
What we still don't know about Expedition 4
No word yet on whether restoration will be a manual point injection per account or a blanket grant to everyone who participated. Embark also hasn't said if Expedition 4 (penciled in for mid-July 2026) keeps the damage metric or reverts to wealth-based. The Caravan itself still asks for a stupid amount of Topside materials and weapons, and you still get cosmetics plus Pluzhkin upgrades on top of points - assuming the points actually land this time.
For now, hold your reset, file the ticket, and keep an eye on the Discord. If you're stockpiling gear or grabbing currency from U4GM to prep for the next cycle, just know the meta around damage farming might not survive Expedition 4 at all. Hopefully the next roadmap drop clears some of this up.