“We were wrong”: Wardogs devs end Season 2’s team-specific cash and XP bonus experiment after a single, tumultuous day

Season 2 of Wardogs, the multiplayer sandbox FPS currently blasting and/or politely driving its way through early access, introduced an un usual “social experiment” when it launched yesterday. In an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of its Lonestar faction, a.k.a the infamous Blue Team, developers Bulkhead began granting bonus XP and cash – the latter being the upgrade-focused game’s lifeblood – to Blue players alone. The hypothesis, apparently, was that more skilled players would give Lonestar a chance, helping boost its dismal winrates and perhaps improve its tarnished image.

One day in, then, how’s it going? “We were wrong. We ***ed up,” says Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer in a video announcing the bonus scheme’s immediate cancellation. Ah!

It turns out that while the promise of free money and experience did indeed incentive a wave of Blue Team picks, some players – to use Brammer’s given term, “tryhards” – were earning far more lucre than Bulkhead anticipated. Given the bonuses were a mere 5% to cash and 2.5% to XP, the developers’ expectation was that the experiment’s incentives were “not, for the median player, substantial enough to actually matter.” Wardogs’ “top” players, however, have been taking home thousands upon thousands of war dollars in those bonuses alone, potentially upsetting the shooter’s progression balance.

The bonus-bribed rush to join Lonestar during match starts also, it seems, caused issues, as players would ditch severs once the blue crew filled up to go try their luck joining the faction elsewhere. Without enough players to slum it on the red and green teams, matches were delayed until all three teams were sufficiently manned.

Thus: one cancelled experiment, a few thousand players with freshly swollen pockets, and likely zero people having switched to the belief that Blue Team is filled with scholars and gentlemen. Still, the video suggests more conventional rebalancing techniques, namely moving spawn locations on the Bakuriani map, have been more effective and improving the troubled faction’s win percentages. Such changes will stay, even if the XP bonus has already been hotfixed out of existence.

Next on Bulkhead’s hitlist is a widely-used vehicle XP exploit, which I haven’t seen in action, but apparently involves repeatedly driving in and out of a faction’s HQ to rapidly amblock minor experience rewards. With the help of Season 2’s more generous XP payouts for logistical feats, among which safe ’round trips’ are counted, perpetrators have been prematurely unlocking late-game vehicles like tanks. The temporary fix, in place for now, is the slowing of vehicle progression rates to their Season 1 levels.