WARDOGS Season 02 Is Live, and Bulkhead Already Walked Back the Blue Bonus

Season 02 took a little longer than planned to arrive. Bulkhead's maintenance window was supposed to wrap around 4:30 AM Central, but the studio extended it while servers restarted across regions. Update 0.2.0 finally went live a little after 5 AM on October 15, with a short "Season 02 is now LIVE" post on Steam and the trailer pinned to it.

The full patch notes are long. New guns, new armor, rain, a rebuilt progression curve, and a lot of price changes. Most of that is still in the game. The one paragraph everybody fought about on day one is not. About 11 hours after launch, Bulkhead pulled the blue team bonus and admitted the launch hadn't gone to plan.

The new stuff

The headline content is easy to list. Four weapons: the TCX-SPR assault rifle in 7.62x39, the PP-19 Bizon SMG, the Evo-3 Ultra LMG and an M14 marksman rifle, the last two both in .308. Four vehicles: the Wolf-110 light transport, a Wolf-110 with a ring-mounted M2, the T-72B3 main battle tank, and a Flakpanzer Gepard for anyone tired of Little Birds. Three buildables: a manned M2 MG Nest, a Large Shelter, and a Wooden Step, which the notes describe in full as "A step. Made of wood."

There's also a Molotov that burns foliage, an infrared range finder that now runs on batteries (about 80 seconds of active use), and a Level 4 helmet that muffles your hearing, narrows your view and fogs up when you sprint. Heavy armor still protects you. It just costs you awareness now.

Rain changes how you listen

Rain is the feature in the trailer, and it does more than make things look wet. Spotting range drops in the rain, Molotov fire gets weaker, and destroying a roof lets the weather pour through. The best detail is thunder. Every player on the server hears the same strike at the same moment from the same direction, and Bulkhead says it's "loud enough to mask footsteps, so use it strategically."

If you logged in on launch morning and saw clear skies, that was expected. The WARDOGS Updates account explained that rain is "a randomised weather event on map change," and that players "should see rain within 24 hours across all regions."

The Wolf-110 and Wolf-110 [M2 Browning] in the new rain preset. Image: Bulkhead, via the Season 02 patch notes on Steam.

The guns that ran the meta got cut

The balance pass is aimed squarely at the high-calibre rifles. Bulkhead's reasoning is that .308 and 7.62x54mmR rounds were tuned for sniper rifles, then ended up in assault rifles, DMRs and LMGs that fire much faster. Base damage drops 25% for .308, 20% for 7.62x54mmR, 19% for 7.62x39 and 16% for .50 cal, and that applies to vehicle guns firing those rounds too. The FAL is still the hardest-hitting assault rifle per shot, but it now sits much closer to the M4 and the new TCX-SPR.

Armor got trimmed as well. Level 3 damage reduction drops from 55% to 50%, and Level 4 from 65% to 60%. Suppression was rebuilt so near misses from small and medium rounds hit much harder, which should make a well-placed LMG feel like an LMG again.

Two smaller changes stood out. Parachutes now open slower and won't open at all below roughly 10 meters, and the notes add a warning: "Make sure you trust a pilot before getting into their aircraft." Progression is also much faster. Level 20 now takes 111,500 XP instead of 250,000, which Bulkhead says is less than half the playtime it took in Season 1. That faster curve is part of why day one moved so quickly. This is a fresh season too, and VICE's breakdown of the reset says levels and Cash start over, with leftover Cash converted into Gold Bars.

The Lonestar experiment

Lonestar, the blue team, has been the game's punchline since alpha. Bulkhead told IGN that blue wins about 15% of matches, compared with 36% for red and 49% for green. Co-founder Howard Philpott told IGN Middle East that it started at around 10% in alpha, "so that then led to the perception: blue is bad, don't join blue."

So Season 02 moved every team's spawn on Bakurani and launched what the patch notes call "a social experiment." Lonestar got a cash and XP bonus for winning and extra multipliers for teamplay actions. The notes put it simply: "Lonestar has cash... and Lonestar needs you." Any team that falls 40 or more points behind second place also gets 20% off at the vendor, and that part wasn't mentioned in the walk-back.

Lonestar's Season 02 recruiting drive, which lasted less than a day. Image: Bulkhead, via the Season 02 patch notes on Steam.

Then the stampede

It worked far too well. Within hours, longtime blue players were saying they couldn't get on their own team. "I've been on the Blue Team since day one, and now it seems impossible to join," one player replied to the official account. Another complained that "Blue is now the new green. You spend 10 minutes rapid fire clicking the mouse trying to compete with macros."

Not everyone wanted a rollback. "It's still in EA, so it's still not perfect," another player wrote. "Try going back to Season 1 and play Blue team." The new team-switch rules add some friction too. Once a team is more than 10 points ahead, switchers are locked in for 15 minutes and can't see the map or use the spawn vehicle until they reach the control zone.

The bonus wasn't the only thing speeding people up. Players were also reaching tanks hours into a fresh wipe. One described the trick as "buying supply crates for vehicles and purchasing one fuel and landing in the cold zone to get paid." Another said "people got tanks in like an hour."

Bulkhead walks it back

At 3:58 PM Central, the official account posted this, in full:

We're holding our hands up and we got a few things wrong.

We are pushing a backend update:

▫️Removing Blue Cash & XP Bonus ▫️Driver Progression Fixes ▫️Fixing Driver Exploit Preventing lots of players from accessing tanks too early ▫️Coming Soon: Limited Mode Servers (No Power Weapons & Vehicles)

Full details in the video here:

The video attached runs about ten and a half minutes. There was no separate Steam announcement or hotfix note as of Friday morning, so that post and the replies under it are the official record for now.

Those replies filled in some gaps. To the supply-crate report, WARDOGS answered that "those abusing it are being temp banned and cash/xp reset to 0. It's very easy for us to track." To the player who brought up hour-one tanks, it said "Yep, we dropped the ball here. No excuses." And to a player who said they appreciated Bulkhead realizing it "didn't work as intended," the studio replied: "We're sure we'll make a mistake again. We appreicate the opportunity to iterate."

The change appears to be live. "The cash and xp bonus no longer shows up on the team select screen," a player noted on the Steam forums.

Players liked the honesty, not the timing

The post drew more than 1,500 replies and 4,200 likes by Friday morning. A lot of it was relief. "These Devs Are The BEST," one player wrote. Another said "it takes real soldiers to put their hands up and say they were wrong!"

The sticking point is that nobody's progress got rolled back except the exploiters'. One of the most-viewed quote posts came from Mydia: "The problem is the nolifers dont care about the lower xp, they already grinded their things." They ended it with "Full wipe is in order." On Steam, one poster put it more bluntly: "Proceeds to give all the unemployed 12 hours of free bonus exp while battle dads just got home to play."

Re-wipe calls kept coming Friday. "Top tier gear shouldnt be available on day one of a new season," said one player, who added that they "Love the weather, love the changes to weapon damage." Another asked for "a weekend wipe next time to allow those who have responsibilities to hopefully grind to mid tier." Bulkhead hasn't said whether a re-wipe is on the table.

Some players think the experiment taught something anyway. "Blue team is not weak, but has the weakest players cause all sweats were joining green?" one asked under the post. We didn't find any press coverage of the walk-back as of Friday morning.

What else is worth knowing

A few smaller changes will matter to anyone running a regular group. Squad leaders can now pick a squad intent from a preset list, and everyone can see it on the squad list before joining, so a squad can say what it is doing instead of hoping people read chat. Players who seed empty servers earn rewards and a vendor discount, official servers now enforce region-based ping limits, and community server admins can set their own. The Wager vendor, where you bet your own cash on your own performance, isn't in yet and opens later in the season. Bulkhead hasn't posted anything new about it, or about the rain rollout, since launch.

If you missed the community side of Season 1, our 100K Clip Challenge recap covers how that wrapped up.

If you'd rather wait out the re-wipe argument in a squad that actually plays together, there are dozens of WARDOGS units listed on Milsim Units.