Wardogs and the Blue Team blunder: Bulkhead admits it “screwed up” and changes course

It’s rare for a studio to speak this plainly. Bulkhead, the team behind Wardogs, has publicly admitted that the start of the second season was a stumble, and summed it up in three words that are already doing the rounds everywhere: “we screwed up”. As reported by IGN Spain, the studio describes what happened as an experiment that didn’t go as planned and says it is changing course.

The root of the problem is a specific design decision: the new season introduced experience (XP) and money bonuses for players who agreed to play on the Blue Team, with the aim of improving that side’s poor reputation. It might seem like a minor detail, but in a competitive game, tweaking the incentives on one side of the map means tampering with the very core of game balance. And for anyone who plays seriously, that matters a great deal.

What you need to know

• Bulkhead, the developer of Wardogs, openly acknowledges that the second season’s launch was rocky.
• The studio calls it “an experiment” that didn’t work.
• The season gave XP and money bonuses to anyone who played on the Blue Team.
• The goal was to improve that side’s poor image within the community.
• Bulkhead has decided to change course following the criticism.

What went wrong and who it affects

The studio’s reasoning is easy to follow: if one side has a bad reputation and people avoid it, offering extra rewards looks like a quick way to spread players out more evenly. The problem is that incentives are never neutral. When one side offers more progression and more resources, it stops being a choice of playstyle and becomes a choice of profitability. That changes who shows up to each match, what drives them and what accumulated advantage they bring with them.

Casual players may not have cared, or may even have enjoyed levelling up faster. But for organised teams and anyone climbing the ranked ladder, this kind of change breaks how the game reads: progression stops reflecting performance alone and starts reflecting which side you picked. For content creators, it also complicates something as basic as advising people on how to progress or which side to play, because the rules of the meta shift for reasons that have nothing to do with skill.

An experiment in production

The most striking part is the word the studio itself chose: experiment. Trying out ideas is healthy, but doing it straight into a season launch, with the whole community on board, turns players into guinea pigs. The source doesn’t spell out the full details of the fix, so we’ll have to see in-game how the system ends up and whether it truly tackles the underlying issue: why the Blue Team had a bad reputation in the first place.

Our take

Here at the Underworld Lordz newsroom, we value honesty. It’s rare to see a studio say outright that it got something wrong, and a timely “we screwed up” builds more trust than ten statements full of corporate euphemisms. Owning a mistake quickly and fixing it is exactly what we ask of any developer that wants to keep a competitive scene alive.

That said, honesty doesn’t erase the design flaw. Buying balance with XP and money is a band-aid, not a solution. If one side has a bad reputation, there’s almost always something behind it: maps that work against it, less appealing objectives or a sense of being at a disadvantage. Covering that up with rewards only hides the symptom and, on top of that, introduces a new distortion into progression. For a competitive player, the priority is that every match is won through skill and coordination, not by picking the better-paid side.

Our advice to Bulkhead is clear: run future experiments on test servers or in optional modes first, and address the Blue Team problem through match design. If they pull that off, this stumble can end up as a footnote. If they fall back on shortcuts again, the goodwill earned with this apology will run out very quickly.

What do you think?

Some believe that incentivising one side is a legitimate tool for balancing player numbers, while others think it muddies the competition. We have a pretty clear view, but we want to hear yours. Are you fine with a game rewarding one side more to balance matches, or would you rather everything came down to your skill alone? Let us know in the team chat or on our Discord.