WARDOGS drops Blue team bonuses after Season 2 imbalance

WARDOGS developer Bulkhead Interactive is removing the cash and XP bonuses that were intended to attract players to the Blue team, after the Season 2 experiment immediately pushed the team too far ahead. Studio CEO Joe Brammer said the team had got the balance wrong and that the bonuses would be removed. ¹

The change comes just one day into Season 2. Bulkhead had introduced a 5% Lonestar cash bonus and a 2.5% XP bonus for Blue players, alongside a new Bakurani spawn, as part of an effort to improve the team's win rate. The studio's expectation was that the incentives would make Blue more appealing without deciding the outcome of every match. ¹

Instead, Brammer said Blue was winning “by far, the most”. While the bonuses looked modest on paper, Bulkhead found that high-level players were benefiting much more noticeably than typical players. That created a snowball effect: the team intended to receive a small helping hand became the obvious choice for players looking for a competitive advantage.

Why the bonus is being removed

The problem was not simply that Blue players earned more cash and experience. Bulkhead also said the bonus was affecting who joined games and who started them. Players who could not select Blue were reportedly leaving and trying again, putting pressure on matchmaking and making the team imbalance visible beyond the scoreboard. ¹

Brammer described the decision as a failed experiment rather than a permanent change of direction for WARDOGS. The Blue cash and XP bonuses are being removed, while other Season 2 changes are staying in place. In particular, a new spawn arrangement on the Bakurani map has reportedly helped with balance and will remain.

That distinction matters. The studio is not rolling back the whole season; it is removing the part of the update that created the strongest incentive to pick one team. The official WARDOGS description presents the game as a large-scale combined-arms shooter built around tactical gunplay, vehicles, building and destruction, with up to 100 players divided across three teams. ² A team-specific reward therefore has an outsized effect when it influences both individual progression and the flow of live matches.

Driver progression and an exploit fix

Bulkhead is also addressing problems with driver progression. The studio said it is fixing an exploit that allowed some players to access tanks too quickly, with fewer than 1,000 players believed to have taken advantage of it. Players judged to have used the exploit very clearly will receive a 24-hour ban, and their cash and XP will be wiped. ¹

That response is separate from the Blue-team bonus change. The bonus was an openly announced system that produced an unintended result; the tank issue concerns players using a progression exploit. Treating the two problems differently is a sensible approach: one needs a balance correction, while the other needs an enforcement response and a technical fix.

Our opinion

Bulkhead made the right call by removing the bonus quickly. A 5% cash increase and a 2.5% XP increase do not sound dramatic in isolation, but live-service economies are judged by their consequences, not their numbers. If the strongest players were extracting substantially more value from the same bonuses, the change was never going to remain a small nudge for long.

The more serious warning sign was the effect on player behaviour. Once a bonus starts influencing which team people join, whether they stay in a match and how quickly they can progress, it stops being a minor perk. It becomes the first thing players optimise around. Removing it after one day is much less damaging than allowing the imbalance to become the accepted shape of Season 2.

The next test is whether Bulkhead can make the change legible in-game. Players need to know that the Blue bonuses have gone, how the updated rewards work and whether the Bakurani spawn changes are producing a fairer spread of wins. If the studio communicates those details clearly and keeps watching the data, this should remain a short-lived launch stumble rather than a defining problem for WARDOGS Season 2.

WARDOGS is available in development on PC through Steam. ³