8 Nov 2026 4 min readWritten by ClutchBot News Desk

WARDOGS Season 3 lands Tue 12 Nov with Sabatulo map, wipe, and 185,000 cheater bans

Bulkhead resets progression, adds a Limited Mode and urban map, while banning nearly 5% of its playerbase for cheating.

What happened

WARDOGS Season 3 goes live on Tuesday 12 November, landing in Australia at roughly 12pm Brisbane (AEST) — that's 1pm Sydney/Melbourne/Hobart (AEDT), 12:30pm Adelaide (ACDT) and 10am Perth (AWST), based on the global rollout time Bulkhead has flagged. The season was confirmed in Bulkhead's "Road to Season 3" post and devlog video, both published on 6 November, confirming the date and laying out the season: a new urban map called Sabatulo, three-month seasons, items unlockable on more than one role's track, and a Limited Mode with weaker gear.

The same devlog doubled as an anti-cheat reveal. Bulkhead is banning 185,000 WARDOGS accounts for cheating, in a wave that began on 6 November, after analysing 187 million hours of gameplay with machine learning and AI, finding that 4.89% of players worldwide used some kind of external modification software. Regionally, 5.7% of copies sold in the EU were flagged for cheating.

What changed

New map — Sabatulo: The beating heart of the third season — a small-form environment with tight corridors and narrow angles, where every player sees the map for the first time at the same time, learning it together.
Limited Mode: Tweaked servers offering an alternate way to experience the main mode — tightening ammo types, weapons, armour tiers and vehicles, with cash and XP earned there spendable in default mode too.
Full wipe, slower pace: levels and cash reset on 12 November, with progression aimed at matching Season 1's pacing rather than Season 2's.
Three-month seasons: a deliberate slowdown from the rushed Season 2 cycle, giving the studio more dev time between drops.
185,000 bans + boosting crackdown: beyond individual cheaters, Bulkhead infiltrated boosting servers where players were farming cash and XP, wiping their progress, resetting XP to zero and banning everyone on those servers, and server owners lost hosting rights, with money already paid not refunded.

CEO Joe Brammer framed it as a reset: Season 3 is about giving players a fresh battlefield to explore together and progression that feels worth their time, with longer seasons giving the team room to build properly.

What players are saying

Reaction on Steam discussions has leaned positive on the bans specifically. A top thread titled "Biggest Cheater Ban Wave Ever?!" said devs "just deleted 185,000 cheaters from the game," calling Season 3 "looking promising", though some pushed back, with one reply countering that bans targeted gold farmers rather than cheaters specifically. Steam reviews are split between celebration and suspicion of manipulation — one review explicitly warned the game is being review-bombed by banned cheaters and gold farmers, telling readers not to trust every negative review, though acknowledging false bans can happen. Bulkhead itself anticipated this, with the studio expecting banned players to review-bomb WARDOGS on Steam and asking the wider community to leave reviews either way. This isn't WARDOGS' first review-bomb rodeo — the game swung from a rough Mixed launch score to Very Positive within 48 hours back in September, and more recently sat around 55% positive through a rocky Season 2.

What it means for you

If you're grinding ranked or ladder on OCE servers, expect a clean slate Tuesday — gear, cash and levels reset, so there's no catch-up disadvantage starting fresh. Limited Mode is worth trying if you've felt outgunned by high-tier loadouts; it's opt-in and shares progression with the main mode, so there's no downside to switching back and forth. The ban wave should mean noticeably fewer obvious cheaters in OCE lobbies short-term, though Bulkhead admits the full restricted-items list for Limited Mode is still being finalised, so check patch notes before building a loadout around it.

What to watch next: Bulkhead's full Season 3 patch notes are due the week of Mon 9 Nov Brisbane time, ahead of the Tue 12 Nov launch — watch for the finalised Limited Mode restrictions and whether Steam reviews dip as banned players respond.

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.