Wardogs developer Bulkhead is rolling out a significant patch following a recent surge in player numbers, which saw the game reach a peak of over 425,000 concurrent players over the weekend. The update, deployed via scheduled maintenance on Monday, September 14, primarily targets long-standing issues with the game's server browser experience, particularly for community-hosted servers.
Server Browser Overhaul
Bulkhead has openly admitted that the server browsing experience has been inadequate. "Community servers have been underserved, and the server browser experience as a whole has been poor," the developer stated in the patch notes. The studio acknowledged a failure to provide the necessary care and passion for community servers, which it now recognizes as the "lifeblood of FPS games." To rectify this, the patch introduces a new front-end server browser interface, splitting options between community and official servers. While acknowledging that matchmaking is more suitable for a game of Wardogs' scale, the developer aims to support community server administrators.
The update also removes filtering from official servers, as there are currently no official modified game modes to filter by. Conversely, filtering for community servers has been improved for reliability, and a text-based search function has been added. To further enhance usability, community server IDs will now persist across matches and restarts, allowing players to join specific servers more easily, though the IDs themselves will be longer for security reasons. A quick bar feature now includes options to "Show Empty/Full" servers, alleviating the need for extensive scrolling. Additionally, server naming requirements have been updated to enforce alphabetical ordering and limit excessive spacing, with bonus end-of-match cash rewards coming to community servers next week as an apology.
Upcoming Features and Server Capacity
Bulkhead is prioritizing a list of community-requested quality-of-life features. While not impacting Season 2 content, these additions are intended to provide immediate improvements. Planned upcoming features include community server favoriting, tiered priority queues, a Message of the Day prompt, improved warmup activities, AFK kicking during seeding, and team switching controls. The developer has also increased server capacity in the Asian region to better support its growing player base there.
Stance on Economy Exploits
The patch also addresses exploits within the game's economy. Bulkhead is taking a firm stance against players who abuse bugs for gain. Exploiting cash exploits and bugs will now result in a timed ban, with the duration dependent on previous offenses, and a reset of all cash and XP to zero. Creating content that tutorializes such exploits will be considered advertising cheats and result in a permanent ban. XP farming is deemed the most serious offense, with accounts found to have joined XP farming servers for more than a few minutes facing permanent bans. The developer has stated it is open to feedback on its policies and encourages player communication. The patch notes also indicate that various cash exploits have been fixed and GPU crashes have been addressed.