'We f**ked up': 1 day into Wardogs Season 2, the Blue team bribery bonus is being dropped

One day into Wardogs Season 2, Bulkhead Interactive has decided to scrap the bribery plan it announced last week as a way to help convince players to join the Blue team. The problem isn't that the plan didn't work—it actually worked far too well.

THE PLAN:

• "Lonestar cash and XP bonus. Season 2 only. New Bakurani spawn."
• "We're looking at how we can help the win rate of a certain team." -Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer (via "Road to Season 2" devlog)

THE REALITY:

• "We were wrong. We fucked up," Brammer admitted in a new video (via RPS).
• Blue team is now winning "by far, the most," Brammer said, even though the actual boosts are not terribly substantial: 5% Lonestar cash and 2.5% XP.
• "Median" players didn't get much from those percentages, but Bulkhead found that "top tier" players were seeing significant boosts
• Bottom line: it's gone.

"We're removing the Blue XP bonus, the cash bonus. We were wrong," Brammer said. Bulkhead co-founder Howard Philpott added that the studio thought Blue team bonus might work out this way, but said "I don't think we expected it to be this much of a swing."

I can't say I'm terribly surprised by the outcome. I'm not a Wardogs player, but I have been around long enough to know how these things go: If you dangle a competitive edge in front of gamers, they're going to jump for it. Percentage boosts are especially risky because they're performance-based and so much more likely to go spinning out of control, especially in the hands of, as Brammer put it, "tryhards."

And it's not just the extra XP and cash being earned that's a problem: Philpott said the bonus is also "impacting people joining games and starting games," presumably because if they can't be a Blue, they'll leave and try their luck with another game.

(Quick side note: I'm not a fan of the term 'tryhard.' Of course I'm trying hard! Why wouldn't I be? My nephew called me a tryhard once and I told him that maybe if he tried harder he wouldn't get his ass kicked so hard. He was 12 and I got some disapproving looks from other people at the Christmas party, but I stand by it.)

PC Gamer's Morgan Park, who is a Wardogs guy, also made the call when this plan was unveiled last week: "XP and cash bribes are a drastic move, but should have a real impact. It's unclear how big these boosts will be, but I expect Blue will instantly become the most popular team by a wide margin in Season 2."

Predictable as this outcome was, I don't see it as a particularly egregious misstep. Brammer called it an "experiment," and sometimes that's what you have to do—and the early stages of a massively popular videogame with teething issues can definitely be one of those times. Brammer also noted that other changes aimed at rebalancing things, including new spawns on the Bakurani map, have proven effective and will remain.

Alongside the removal of the Blue team bribery, Bulkhead is also fixing issues with driver progression, and is fixing a driver exploit that's letting players access tanks too quickly: Players who are "very clearly" taking advantage of the exploit (less than 1,000 in total, according to Brammer) will be given a 24-hour ban from the game and have their cash and XP wiped.