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4 min readWritten by ClutchBot News Desk WARDOGS

WARDOGS scraps Blue team XP bonus a day after Season 2 launch, patches tank exploit

Bulkhead admits the Blue cash/XP bribe 'backfired badly' and rushes a hotfix alongside bans for driver-exploit abusers and a tease of upcoming Limited Mode servers.

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WARDOGS scraps Blue team XP bonus a day after Season 2 launch, patches tank exploit

What happened

Season 2 of WARDOGS launched on Wed 14 Oct 2026 (AEDT) with a headline experiment: a cash and XP bonus for anyone who queued into the perennially unpopular Blue (Lonestar) team. Less than a day later, on Thu 15 Oct 2026, Bulkhead Interactive scrapped it. Bulkhead decided to scrap the bribery plan it announced last week as a way to help convince players to join the Blue team — because it worked far too well. Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer acknowledged two major issues with the launch, the first being the cash and XP bonus meant to fix Blue's bad reputation — "This was an experiment - we thought we'd have this in for about a week," Brammer explained.

The numbers themselves were modest — Brammer said the actual boosts weren't terribly substantial: 5% Lonestar cash and 2.5% XP — but co-founder Howard Philpott admitted the studio thought it might work out this way, but "I don't think we expected it to be this much of a swing."

What changed

The backend update, pushed via X on 15 Oct 2026, covers four things:

  • Blue bonus gone — the cash/XP incentive is fully removed.
  • Driver progression fixed — an exploit with the Driver progression track let players level up fast by setting a nearby FOB and making rapid trips back and forth, letting exploiters grab tanks extremely quickly.
  • Exploit bans — players who leaned on the XP trick "extremely obtusely" will be hit with a 24-hour ban, which Brammer estimates totals "less than a thousand people" out of the hundreds of thousands who've logged in since Season 2 began.
  • Limited Mode Servers incoming — confirmed for mid-season update 0.25, this will replace low-level servers with rules that remove level-four armour, power weapons and vehicles like tanks and artillery, capturing an early-to-midgame experience for players who prefer it. No firm date yet.

What players are saying

Reaction on Steam's WARDOGS discussion boards has been sharp and largely frustrated, even with the backpedal. One thread titled "Blue Bonus killed the Game" argued the developers don't really know what they're doing and should have just removed Blue entirely. In another thread, players complained that reversing the bonus doesn't undo the damage, noting people hit level 100 within two hours with tanks and attack helis, keeping that gear to ruin the rest of the season while everyone else gets dominated by exploiters. A third thread piled on over gear access, with one poster saying people had mosins, Gepards, tanks and attack helis less than 12 hours into the season, making it "almost dishonest" to call the complaints whining, and another saying flatly they just wanted a refund, calling it a badly designed game full of cheaters and exploiters. Not everyone's purely negative — some discussion threads clarify that tanks unlocking at driver level 20 is achievable legitimately, separate from the exploit itself, suggesting part of the outrage is confusion rather than universal condemnation.

What it means for you

If you're playing OCE, nothing here requires action unless you abused the driver/FOB supply-drop exploit — if you did, expect a 24-hour ban and a reset of cash/XP, which Bulkhead says affects well under 1,000 accounts globally. Everyone else keeps their legitimate progress; the Blue bonus simply stops applying from this patch onward. If you've been avoiding servers early in the season because high-level players were already rolling tanks and helicopters, that gap should narrow now the exploit is closed — though the community's biggest complaint is that the fix doesn't claw back what exploiters already banked. Keep an eye out for Limited Mode Servers in update 0.25 if you'd rather play without armour, tanks or artillery in the mix.

What to watch next: Watch for the mid-season 0.25 patch notes confirming a release date for Limited Mode Servers, plus whether Bulkhead follows through on the 24-hour exploit bans.

Sources

Researched and written by ClutchBot News Desk (Claude + live web search) for The Clutch Club — PapaKow's community. Community voices are paraphrased. Spotted something wrong? Tell us in the Discord.