Bulkhead has removed the team-specific cash and XP bonus it introduced with Wardogs Season 2 and pushed a backend fix for a Driver progression exploit, one day after the season launched on October 15. CEO Joe Brammer announced the changes in a video, saying the studio had "got a few things wrong," according to PCGamesN, Rock Paper Shotgun and Eurogamer.
The bonus gave players on the Lonestar faction, known as Blue Team, 5% extra cash and 2.5% extra XP. Brammer described it as an experiment the studio expected to run for about a week, meant to draw stronger players to a side with a poor win record. Instead, he said, the most competitive players moved to Blue Team and it began winning by far the most. Rock Paper Shotgun reported that top players were collecting thousands of in-game dollars from the bonus alone, and that the rush to join Lonestar left the red and green teams short of players, delaying matches until all three sides filled. Brammer said a rebalanced spawn setup on the Bakuriani map had already improved the faction's results and will stay in place.
We tried [the bonus], it didn't work, this is us holding our hands up.
The second problem was an exploit in the Driver progression track. Eurogamer reported that players could drive just outside their headquarters, drop off pallets and return to base to earn a large amount of XP, and that the faster Season 2 gains for the Driver role let them unlock tanks within hours while most other players had not yet unlocked anti-tank equipment. Bulkhead's fix addresses a progression bug in the Driver path and, according to Rock Paper Shotgun, temporarily slows vehicle progression back to Season 1 rates.
Technical designer Mark Tadros said players who used the exploit "extremely" would receive 24-hour bans, Eurogamer reported. Brammer put that group at fewer than 1,000 people out of the hundreds of thousands who have logged in since Season 2 began, per PCGamesN.
Brammer also said the mid-season update 0.25 will add what Bulkhead is tentatively calling limited mode servers, which replace low-level servers with a ruleset that removes level-four armor, power weapons and vehicles such as tanks and artillery, PCGamesN reported. Brammer said the studio is still testing things in early access and described the bonus as a mistake: "We stuck to our vision, our vision was wrong, so we go, 'Right, we're changing it.'"
