WARDOGS Patch 0.11 Helps Community Servers. Its XP Farm Ban Needs Work

WARDOGS, the 100 player tactical shooter from Bulkhead and publisher Team17, entered Steam Early Access on September 10 and promptly fell over. Players could not join servers, got kicked mid match and sat in login queues. Some shared screenshots showing more than 300,000 people ahead of them, GameSpot reported. Five days later Bulkhead posted that it had sold 2 million copies.

My take: the post from that week worth studying is patch 0.11. Bulkhead called community servers "the lifeblood of FPS games like ours" and admitted it had rushed its plan for them. By way of apology, it put a 5% end of match cash bonus on them for a week. Other studios should copy that. The same notes carry an XP farm rule that permanently bans any account tracked in a known farm server for more than a few minutes, with no word on how to recognize one before joining. I would fix that rule before it bans someone who just picked the wrong server.

What Bulkhead told players stuck in the queue

On launch day Bulkhead shipped Launch Stability Hotfix #1. It listed the problems players were hitting in plain words, from failed server joins and kicks during play to long login queues. Everyone logged in would be forced to restart and go back into the queue, and Bulkhead would let people in "in controlled batches." The post said the team would be working through the night. A few hours later the 1.25 million copies post thanked players for their patience and apologized for the delays in a few short lines.

That told queued players what was broken and what Bulkhead was doing about it, on the game's Steam page where any owner can find it. It gave no timetable, and GameSpot pointed that out. Someone sitting behind 300,000 people wants a rough estimate more than anything else, even one that later turns out wrong.

GameSpot also reported Bulkhead acknowledging "incorrect bans" and saying the queue was partly down to a Steam rate limit it was working with Valve to raise. Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer took the blame himself. On launch night he posted on X, as Dexerto reported, "I gotta take the L on this one guys, we've got it but it's on me here."

The worse call was a queue jump. Brammer told PCGamesN that Bulkhead got "about 11" streamers into the game ahead of the queue. "That's on me, that was my decision. It is a bit unfair," he said, adding that the streams entertained people and carried announcements about server restarts. GamesRadar+ reported on in-game server announcements admitting it: "The devs put influencers in a queue jump." Players still in the login queue could not see those, and none of Bulkhead's launch week Steam posts mention streamers.

It showed up in the reviews. On September 11 Dexerto had the Steam rating at Mixed, 66% according to SteamDB, with many reviewers accusing Bulkhead of letting streamers skip the line. By September 16 it was Very Positive, 81% of about 63,000 reviews.

Patch 0.11 is the community story

Before launch, Bulkhead's 11th Reason NOT To Buy WARDOGS post pitched community hosted servers as "the ultimate protection" against cheaters, because admins there can instantly ban bad actors. Players could pre-order those servers through three approved hosting partners: QONZER, BisectHosting and xREALM. Then launch week showed the browser for finding them was, in Bulkhead's own word, poor.

The patch 0.11 notes, posted September 12, put the admission right after the maintenance schedule: "Community Servers have been underserved and the server browser experience as a whole has been poor." The fixes are the boring, correct ones: separate Community and Official browsers, text search, more reliable filters, and community server IDs that persist between matches. Coming later: favorites, tiered priority queues for community servers, a message of the day prompt, better warmup activities, no AFK kicks while a server is seeding, and team switching controls. The notes even tell anyone looking to grind to jump in a community server.

The same notes get tough on the economy. Abusing cash exploits brings a timed ban and resets cash and XP to zero. Content that teaches an exploit "with no regard for reporting the issue" counts as advertising cheats and brings a permanent ban. XP farming gets the harshest treatment: "We track every server you enter," and any account tracked joining a known farm server "for more than a few minutes" is banned permanently.

I get why Bulkhead is strict. The notes say the economy links every player into one shared universe, so farmed cash and XP touch people who never went near a farm. The tutorial rule is also narrower than it sounds. Bulkhead says "there is a difference between promoting and alerting," and that testing an exploit once or twice is fine.

The XP farm rule is the one I would change, and Bulkhead did ask players whether it should adjust its stance. The notes never explain how to recognize a farm server before joining one, in the same patch that sends grinders to community servers. Bulkhead's bans have already misfired this month: UI/UX director Howard Philpott told PCGamesN its zero tolerance anti-cheat stance "very, very quickly turned into banning our legitimate alpha testers." Flag or remove farm servers in the browser first, then ban the accounts that stay.

What to copy for your own launch week

• Post status on Steam too. News posts show on the store page and in owners' libraries. Plenty of buyers never join your Discord.
• Give queued players a rough timetable. Say when the next update comes, and correct it when it slips.
• If streamers skip the queue, say so in the status post. Players stuck in line can watch them on Twitch.
• Treat community hosts as staff. If partners sell your servers, give the admins a direct contact and patch notes before players see them.
• Tie the apology to the thing that broke. Bulkhead's 5% bonus sends players to the community servers it admitted neglecting.
• Flag bad servers before you ban people for joining them. If a few minutes in a server can cost an account, the browser should say so.

WARDOGS peaked at 428,666 concurrent players on September 13, per SteamDB. Bulkhead's notes say community admins and hosts "keep a game running well beyond its peak player days," and patch 0.11 was its first launch week post written for them. The farm rule works against them. A player who fears the wrong community server could cost them their account has every reason to stay on official ones.

COM3UNITY LABS grows and runs communities and builds the software behind them, and the first thing we check in a launch like this is whether players can find the people hosting their games.