Blue Team wins only 15% of its Wardogs matches – we asked a color psychologist why

We asked a color psychologist why the Blue Team wins only 15% of its Wardogs matches.

Wardogs is a free-for-all sandbox military game in which three separate teams fight for control of a shifting zone in the middle of a massive map, while tank, artillery and mortar shells litter the landscape, helicopters blast war drums (Eiffel's hit song 65 Blue (Da Ba Dee)) - and dozens of guns through the vicinity.

There's Valkyrie, Red Team. Manticore, Green Team; and Lonestar, the blue team. They look different on the field, red in Soviet style, green in Iranian uniform, and blue looking like a western militia, but they all have access to the same equipment and have an equal chance of winning. So why does the blue team always lose?

Lonestar has become a meme in the Wardogs community. There are dozens and dozens of montages of them moving and failing and missing all their shots except for the ones aimed at their teammates. It's like a David Attenborough documentary or something, watching them get ready in their spawning area as their pilots circle up and shoot down the helicopters before they even go into battle.

I sent a request to the Wardogs team earlier this week to first find out if it really is true that the blue team is bad, or if we are in some sort of meme induced collective delusion. According to Bulkhead, the blue team is bad. This is true. The stats don't lie. Lonestar only won about 10% of their games at the height of the "Bad Blue Team" movement, but recently there has been a concerted effort by intrepid redditors. Cobalt Spot, which has seen Blue Team climb to around 15% Verinite. wow big Red currently wins about 36 percent of matches, while green takes home 49 percent.

UI Director Howard Philpott told IGN, "It's something that started in the alpha. Blue was the most popular faction before the alpha, and a lot of people liked the limited culture, American PMC aesthetic, so a lot of newer players wanted to join it in the alpha." There was also a real map advantage in the early alpha builds that made the more competitive players trade red/green, and that impression carried over into the release.

Some have proposed the theory that spawning location still plays a role in these figures. The blue team is in the middle of the map, while the green and red are on the sides. This leads to the impression that the blue team is fighting on two fronts, while the red and green only have to worry about watching one side of their attack. For Season 2, the Wardogs development team is moving the team onto the Bakuriani map to fight it, while simultaneously launching a "social experiment to help change the perception of Lonestar."

I reached out to behavioral design and color psychology expert Karen Haller to find out. Unfortunately, Haller was just as confused as everyone else. "People usually pick blue first because it's first," Haller said after I showed him the team selection page. So you choose the first thing, right? That's what they do here. "They ignore it and move on."

They really are. They strongly ignore it and move on. Every time I try to play with my friends, one pops up red or green and I'm stuck here spamming on that team to play with my friends. All the while, the blue team is right there, bright and available, full of teammates who will accidentally kill you with their incompetence. It's tempting, but my friends are red or green. They are afraid of blue. The meme has become a mental virus that has infected us all.

"It would be interesting to do a study or comparison," Haller said. If [Lonestar] even turns dark blue, or orange, or some other color, will the perception of that team change? Because it seems a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if I understand it - it's not because they're losing water.

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It is not because it is blue that they miss. It's because of the people on the blue. Those who are not infected with the meme virus are – unfortunately, disproportionately – instead infected by incompetence. It's a sad state of affairs, but it means that decent players will deliberately avoid Lonestar because it's full of people who crash the helicopter before it even takes off or kill you trying to revive you with a defibrillator. It was too late, Kevin. I was already revived, man.

It is not a question of any team being bad. This group-think cadet is a military shooter addicted to Reddit upvotes. According to Haller, who wrote The Little Book of Color, it has nothing to do with color at all. If we draw teams according to color theory, red is like a fast freight train, going and doing things and things. Green would be pacifists, which it most certainly is not. But I think there is something for blue. "Blue is the color you play with your mind," Haller said. It is intellectual, it is intelligent. They're just playing 3D chess while you're here running around like a stupid dog with a stupid little bone. You're laughing now, but let's see how many gold bars you get for playing the objective and compare that to what blue players get after spamming hesco blocks for an entire season.