Can players switch teams in WARDOGS to grief your own squad?

Can players switch teams in WARDOGS to grief your own squad?

Yes, and right now it's a worse problem than the cheaters. I'm PapaKow and I play WARDOGS from Brisbane. Between 27 and 29 September 2026 I had players switch to my team, C4 our vehicles, and switch straight back to their own side. That is the lowest of the low and it needs to be dealt with harshly.

The bloke who built us into a warehouse

We'd taken a warehouse. A player going by the name of Lion turns up while we're knocking walls down so we could get the APC inside. As we knock them down, he's building them back up around us. He went to town: layers upon layers upon layers of walls. We told him to stop. What are you doing? He just kept going.

So we team killed him. He was being a pain in the ass and there was nothing else on the table.

Then a teammate hopped out of the APC to help us clear the rest of the walls, and in that window Lion respawned inside the vehicle, jumped in the APC and tried to team kill the lot of us. Everyone's shooting him, reviving him, then deciding not to revive him just so he couldn't respawn again. We got him out of the base and decided we simply weren't bringing the APC in any more. He kept at it — sending the APC into enemy territory in the middle of their raids in the hot zone while we were back at base building oil rigs, then circling it back around to us.

We won the game anyway and showed him a lesson. But look at what that costs: a full squad's attention, a vehicle we couldn't use, and a warehouse we'd already earned.

Why can he do that at all?

Because switching teams mid-match is a feature, and the feature exists for a good reason. WARDOGS doesn't have a modern party system, so mates who want to play together join the same server and switch onto the same team. That's the loophole and that's also the whole point of it. I could play with up to 10 different guys in a night and I'd love to actually be in the same game on the same side as them. In some of those games, if we'd all been together, it would have been a far more pleasant experience.

So I'm not asking for the switch to be ripped out. I want the party system that makes it unnecessary, and I want the switching itself to be a lot stricter.

Is this just my lobby?

No. Kotaku wrote it up on 15 September 2026 and the list they ran is the same list I'm living: switching over to pull down FOB defences from the inside, team killing at spawn out of the sulks, scouting positions and feeding them back to your real team, and wrecking the barriers protecting fast-travel vehicles. Their piece also puts the root cause on the missing party system, and notes there's no vote-kick, which is why a spy is so hard to deal with in a match that can run over an hour. Those are their findings, not mine. Joe Brammer said on 13 September that they're deciding on a design fix for it at the moment, and the Steam roadmap has team-switching changes coming. I'll take that.

The other one I keep seeing is base sabotage by people who technically are on your team: walking into your base while you're building and burning every resource you've got putting up walls in the middle of it, walls that do nothing. It's the single most frustrating thing in the game for me right now. I've also watched enemy squads argue with their own player about griefing mid-fight, so nobody's side is clean.

Where this leaves the game

It made me realise there's still a lot of work to be done. A lot of moving parts that need to be well oiled before each game — the setup dialled in, the play stable, and fair across the board. At the moment it feels chaotic. The core gameplay is absolutely still there. It's the fringe players who wreck it for everyone who just want to get out there and play it for what it is.

It's early access. These things happen. I'd just rather the answer be a party system than a punishment, because most of the people abusing the switch only ever wanted to play with their mates.

You gotta stay gaming.