Bulkhead looked at the smoking crater that was the Wardogs Season Two launch and finally said the quiet part out loud: they messed up. The update dropped on October 15, and the player count did exactly what you would expect a shiny new patch to do. But can a nice little spike in the Steam charts really paper over a community that spent the entire weekend sharpening pitchforks? The studio has now admitted, in writing and on video, that the whole thing was a misfire. Shocking nobody who was actually there.
The Wipe That Never Quite Landed
The whole pitch for season two was a clean slate, a wipe that would drag everyone back to square one and let the grinding begin anew. According to Bulkhead’s own social media post, that fresh start “never really landed” and they fessed up to deliberately speeding up progression, calling it “the wrong call.” So instead of a level playing field, players were sprinting past Tier 4 armour and hopping into MBTs within days. The wipe was supposed to reset the clock. Instead, it just made the clock spin faster. Brilliant stuff.
Blue Team Got Bribed and It Went Poorly
The piece of the puzzle that actually lit the fuse was not the wipe at all. Bulkhead decided to fix Lonestar’s dismal win rate by handing Blue Team players a 5% cash bonus and a 2.5% XP bonus as a little treat. The theory was that skilled players would give the sad blue faction a chance.
The reality was that every tryhard on the server stampeded toward Lonestar to farm the bonuses; Blue started winning by far the most, and matchmaking went sideways because players were bailing on lobbies when Blue filled up. CEO Joe Brammer went on camera and said, and I quote, “We were wrong. We fucked up.” That is a direct quote from a man watching his experiment detonate in real time. The bonus was gone within a day.
The Tank Exploit Was the Cherry on Top
While the Blue Team bribery scheme was busy imploding, another fire was raging. Players figured out that driving just outside their HQ, dropping off pallets, and scooting back to base gave a ridiculous amount of Driver XP. Combine that with the faster Driver progression Bulkhead had already baked into the patch, and people were unlocking tanks on day one while everyone else was still figuring out which end of the gun goes bang.
Bulkhead smacked the exploit down, fixed the Driver XP path, and handed out 24-hour bans to the worst offenders, a group that numbered fewer than 1,000 players. Fair enough. But the damage to the season’s first impression was already done.
Players Asked for a Reset and Got a Maybe
The comment sections under Bulkhead’s posts filled up with people demanding an immediate hard reset. One player put it bluntly: “Bro, the season isn’t balanced at all; it’s been a few days, why can’t you do a hard reset now rather than play it out with the current state for a long time?” A reasonable question from someone watching the house burn down. Bulkhead said no.
Their reasoning was that a knee-jerk reset over the weekend would be unfair to everyone already enjoying the climb. Instead, they promised to significantly bring forward Season 3 and some of its content to give players the proper fresh start they were owed. Details are supposedly coming in a dev vlog. I will believe it when I see it.
My Take: Stop Fixing Things That Are Not Broken
My honest opinion is that Bulkhead’s biggest mistake was not the wipe or the progression speed. It was the Blue Team bonus. You cannot hand one faction a financial advantage and then act surprised when the player base behaves exactly like a player base. That is like putting a free pizza stand in the middle of a marathon and wondering why everyone stopped running.
The tank exploit was a bug. The Blue bonus was a choice. And it was a bad one. The fact that Brammer owned it so quickly is genuinely to his credit. But owning a mistake and avoiding the mistake are two very different skills.
The Steam Numbers Are Still Fine Somehow
Wardogs is doing just fine on Steam despite the weekend of chaos. The game hit a peak of more than 336,000 concurrent players on launch day before settling back into a still-healthy six-figure crowd. That is a massive audience by any measure.
The forums are on fire, the Discord is a war zone, and the game is still packing lobbies. Early Access is a messy business, and Wardogs is learning that in public. Bring on Season 3. Bring on the fixes. And please, for the love of everything, leave the faction bonuses in the bin where they belong.
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