Wardogs Season 2: Blue Team Bribery Bonus Axed After One Day

Ever jumped into a game expecting a fair fight, only to find everyone and their dog stacking one team because of a juicy bonus? That's exactly what happened in Wardogs Season 2. Just one day in, Bulkhead Interactive is scrapping the Blue team bribery bonus it announced last week. And the studio is owning it: "We were wrong. We fucked up," said CEO Joe Brammer in a new video.

The plan was simple: give Blue team players a 5% Lonestar cash boost and 2.5% XP boost for Season 2, plus new Bakurani spawns, to help balance win rates. But it backfired spectacularly. Blue team is now winning "by far, the most," Brammer admitted. The boosts might not sound huge, but they had a massive effect on top-tier players—the so-called "tryhards"—who squeezed every last drop out of those percentages. Median players didn't get much, but the top end swung the whole meta.

Bulkhead co-founder Howard Philpott added that they expected some swing, but "I don't think we expected it to be this much of a swing." The bonuses also messed with matchmaking: Philpott said the bonus was "impacting people joining games and starting games," presumably because players who couldn't get on Blue would bail and try another game. So much for a quick fix.

Predictably, the community saw this coming. PC Gamer's Morgan Park called it last week, saying Blue would instantly become the most popular team. And honestly, if you dangle a competitive edge in front of gamers, they're going to jump for it—especially when it's performance-based. Percentage boosts are a risky business, and this is why.

But it's not all bad news. Bulkhead is pushing a backend update that removes the Blue cash and XP bonus, fixes driver progression, and addresses a driver exploit that let players access tanks too early. Players who clearly abused the exploit—less than 1,000 in total, according to Brammer—will get a 24-hour ban and have their cash and XP wiped. Ouch.

Other changes, like the new Bakurani spawns, have actually worked and will stay. Brammer called the whole thing an "experiment," and sometimes that's what you have to do—especially in the early stages of a popular game with teething issues. It's a misstep, but not an egregious one. Bulkhead is holding its hands up and moving on.

So, what do you think? Were you one of the players who jumped on Blue for the bonus, or did you steer clear? Will you be hopping back into Wardogs now that the bribery is gone? Let us know!