Bulkhead is already walking back part of Wardogs Season 2. The studio pushed a backend update on Thursday (October 15th), only hours after the new season went live, removing the cash and XP bonus it had handed to the Lonestar faction, which most players simply call Blue team. The same update slows down Driver progression and fixes an exploit that let some players reach tanks far earlier than intended. In a video posted with the announcement, Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer was blunt about it, telling players, "We were wrong, we f***ed up."
The official Wardogs account shared the list of changes on X with the full video attached. Check it out below:
Why The Blue Team Bonus Backfired
The bonus came from what Bulkhead called a faction balance experiment in its Season 02 patch notes on Steam. The studio wrote that one team had a notoriously lower win rate than the other two, and that while there were valid complaints about Lonestar's uniform visibility and some of its spawn positions, "sentiment around the blue team is the largest driving factor for players not wanting to play on that team." To change that, Lonestar got a cash and XP win bonus plus teamplay multipliers for Season 2 only, and every faction's spawn on the Bakurani map was moved and rebuilt.
The numbers were small on paper. The developers confirmed in the video that the bonus was 5% extra cash and 2.5% extra XP, which works out to maybe 100 to 200 extra XP over a full match for an average player. The top players earning around 25,000 XP a game were picking up roughly 600 extra each match, though, and those were the players who rushed to Blue first. "This was an experiment," Brammer said. "We thought we'd have this in for about a week." Instead, Blue started winning by far the most matches, and the rush to join it slowed down how quickly games could fill and start.
Brammer did push back on one piece of criticism. "The only comment with this that has annoyed me is when people say they didn't address the core issues," he said. "Well, actually, we did rebalance the entire spawn setup for Bakurani, and we did test that quite a lot and see that the difference had balanced out." The new Bakurani spawns are staying, and so is the Lonestar-only "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" music tape by Eiffel 65, which the developers joked is the real blue buff.
Driver Progression And The Early Tank Problem
The second fix targets the Driver role. Season 2 sped up every role track, and the patch notes say reaching level 20 now takes less than half the playtime it did in Season 1, with the total XP needed for level 20 dropping from 250,000 to 111,500. According to the developers, Driver went well past that. The share of players running Driver jumped from about 10% last season to around 18%, and the studio's own data showed the top Drivers, along with logistics and pilot players, moving 40 to 50% faster than everyone else. That put tanks like the new T-72B3 into matches before most players had anything that could answer them.
A temporary fix that moves Driver streaks back toward Season 1 pacing is already live, and Bulkhead hopes to raise it again in the next hotfix while the exploit gets patched. Players who abused it in the most obvious way, such as repeatedly leaving and re-entering a zone, will get a 24-hour temporary ban. The developers said fewer than 1,000 players were involved, out of roughly 310,000 in the game at the time.
Limited Mode Servers Are On The Way
Bulkhead also previewed Limited Mode servers, which the team calls "prim servers" in the video as a working name. They will replace the current low level servers and cap out late game gear like level four armor, heavy tanks, and artillery, so players can keep enjoying the early to mid game even after they level up. They are planned for a mid-season update called 0.25, which the developers are aiming to release around the end of the month or early next month.
The rest of Season 2 added four new weapons, four new vehicles including the Flakpanzer Gepard anti-air vehicle, the Molotov, and rain with thunder loud enough to mask footsteps. Check out the Season 2 trailer below:
How Players Are Reacting
Player reaction has been split right down the middle. Of the more than 5,100 Steam reviews written since Season 2 went live, about 2,590 are positive and 2,560 are negative. The most helpful negative reviews focus on the bonus and the early tanks. One of them reads, "Matches take longer to start because people will just straight up leave if they are not on the team that gets extra rewards for the same tasks." Another simply says, "Wipe was today and there's already tanks." The new region-based ping limits have drawn negative reviews as well, mostly from players in places like South Africa and Australia who relied on servers outside their region. Some players replying to the studio on X have gone further and asked for Season 2 to be wiped again with the fixes in place.
Plenty of players are giving Bulkhead credit for moving quickly, though. One positive review argues that some of the recent negative reviews come from "Ping abusers who can no longer plague EU and US servers." On X, Wynn Gaming said they were glad the bonus was disabled and that it was "cool to see the devs willing to quickly correct and experiment." Check out the post below:
Wardogs Still Has A Huge Player Base
Even with the rough start, Wardogs is still pulling big numbers. SteamDB shows about 226,000 players in the game at the time of writing, with a 24-hour peak of 298,596. The all-time peak is 428,666 concurrent players, set on September 13th, three days after the game launched into Early Access on September 10th. Bulkhead announced 3 million copies sold in just over two weeks, and the game's overall Steam rating sits at Mostly Positive, with about 73% of more than 123,000 reviews recommending it. The game is published by Team17 and costs $39.99 on PC.
Did Bulkhead make the right call by pulling the Blue team bonus so quickly, or should the studio have wiped Season 2 and started over with the fixes already in place?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.