"We Worked Together": 1 day into Wardogs Season 2, the Blue Team Bribe reward will be removed

Bulkhead's attempt to make life better for the Blues worked a little too well.

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A day after the second season of Wardogs, Bulkhead Interactive has decided to scrap the bribery scheme it announced last week to help players join the blue team. The problem isn't that the plan didn't work—it actually worked pretty well.

"Lone Star Cash and Bonus XP. Season 2 only. New Bakurani Spawn."

We're looking at how we can help a particular team's win rate." -Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer (via "Road to Season 2" developer)

Brammer admitted in a new video (via RPS): "We made a mistake. We cursed."

The blue team now has "by far, the most wins," Brammer said, even though the actual increases aren't that significant: 5% Lonestar cash and 2.5% XP.

"Middle" players didn't get much out of these percentages, but Bulkhead found that "top tier" players saw a significant increase.

"We're removing the Blue XP award, the cash bonus," Brammer said. We made a mistake." Bulkhead co-founder Howard Philpott added that the studio thought Blue Team's rewards might work that way, but said, "I don't think we expected it to fluctuate this much."

I can't say that I am very surprised by the result. I'm not a Wardogs player, but I've been around long enough to know how these things go: if you hang a competitive advantage over gamers, they'll look for it. Percentage increases are particularly dangerous because they are performance-based and likely to get out of hand, especially in the hands of, as Brammer puts it, "tryhards."

And it's not just the extra XP and cash that's the problem: Philpott says the bonus also "affects people who join and start games," presumably because if they can't be blue, they'll leave and try their luck with another game.

(Quick side note: I'm not a fan of the term "tryhard". Of course I try hard! Why wouldn't I be? My nephew called me once and I told him that maybe if he'd tried harder he wouldn't have kicked his ass so much. He was 12 and I got some disapproving looks at the Christmas party.)

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PC Gamer's Morgan Park, a Wardogs guy, also made the call last week when the plan was unveiled: "The XP and cash bribes are a drastic move, but it should have a real impact. It's unclear how big the increases will be, but I expect Blue to immediately become the most popular team in Season 2 by a wide margin."

While this outcome was predictable, I don't find it particularly egregious. Brammer called it an "experiment," and sometimes that's what you have to do — and the early stages of a hugely popular video game with teething problems can certainly be one of those times. Brammer also noted that other changes aimed at rebalancing, including new spawns on the Bacorani map, are and will remain in effect.

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Along with removing the blue team bribe, Bulkhead is also fixing issues with driver progression, and is fixing a driver exploit that allowed players to access tanks too quickly: players who "clearly" use the exploit (fewer than 1,000 in total, according to Brammer) will be banned for 24 hours and lose XP.

Andy has been gaming on PCs since he was a teenager, starting with text-adventure and primitive action games on the cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longtime love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He started writing video game news for The Escapist in 2007 and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until he joined the famous PC Gamer in 2014. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports and Henry Cavill. A lot of Henry Cavill.

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