Wardogs is a free-for-all sandbox military game where three separate teams battle for control over an ever-changing zone in the middle of a massive map, as tanks fire shells, artillery and mortars pepper the landscape, helicopters blast the drums of war (Eiffel 65's hit song Blue (Da Ba Dee)) through proximity chat, and dozens of try-hards run and gun.
There’s Valkyra, Red Team; Manticore, Green Team; and Lonestar, Blue Team. They look different on the field, with Red rocking a soviet style, Green wearing Persian gear, and Blue looking like a Western paramilitary, but they all have access to the same equipment and have equal chance to win. So, why the hell does the Blue Team always lose?
Lonestar has become a meme in the Wardogs community. There are dozens and dozens of montages, showing them bumble and fail, missing all their shots except the ones aimed at their teammates. It’s like a David Attenborough documentary or something, watching them gear up in their spawn area as their pilots spin up and crash helicopters before even getting into the fight.
I sent a request to the Wardogs team earlier this week to find out, first off, if it’s actually true that Blue Team sucks or if we’re in some kind of meme-induced mass hallucination. According to Bulkhead, the Blue Team sucks. It’s true. The stats don’t lie. Lonestar only won around 10% of its games at the height of the “Blue Team bad” movement, but a concerted effort has been made by intrepid redditors lately to wash off the cobalt stain, resulting in Blue Team climbing to around a 15% winrate. Big woop? Red currently wins around 36% of matches, while Green takes home 49%.
“It’s something that started back in alpha. Blue was the most popular faction pre-alpha with a lot of people liking the limited lore, the American PMC aesthetic, so a lot of newer players tended to join it in alpha,” UI director Howard Philpott told IGN. “There was a genuine map advantage in the early alpha builds too which made the more competitive players swap to Red/Green and that perception persisted and spread into release.”
Some have theorized that spawn location still plays into these figures. Blue Team is located slap-bang in the middle of the map, while Green and Red are off to the sides. This leads to a perception that the Blue Team is fighting a war on two fronts, while Red and Green only have to worry about watching one side of their assault. For Season 2, the Wardogs development team is moving team spawns on the Bakuriani map to combat this, while simultaneously launching a “social experiment to help change the perception of Lonestar.”
I reached out to color behavioral design and color psychology expert Karen Haller to get to the bottom of this. Unfortunately, Haller was just as confused as everyone else. “People would normally pick Blue first because it's first,” Haller said after I showed her the team selection screen. “So you pick the first thing, don't you? You don't go across and ignore it because that's what they're doing here. They're ignoring it and going across.”
They really are. They are massively ignoring it and going across. Every time I want to play with my friends, someone will jump in Red or Green and I’m stuck here spamming on that team to play with my mates. The entire time, Blue Team is right there, lit up and available, full of teammates who will accidentally kill you with their incompetence. It’s tempting, but my friends are in Red or Green. They fear Blue. The meme has become a mind virus infecting us all.
“It would be interesting to do a study or a comparison,” Haller said. “If [Lonestar] changed to even a dark blue, or it changed to an orange, or it changed to another color, would the perception of that team change? Because it seems to be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if I've understood it — it's not because it's Blue that they're losing.”
It’s not because it’s Blue that they’re losing. It’s because of the people who are on Blue. The ones who aren’t infected by the meme virus are — unfortunately, disproportionately — infected by incompetence instead. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it means the decent players will purposely avoid Lonestar because it’s full of the kinds of people who crash a helicopter before it’s even got off the ground or kill you by trying to revive you with a defibrillator. It was too late, Kevin. I was already revived, you bum.
It isn’t about any team being bad. It’s about groupthink, a military shooter hivemind addicted to Reddit upvotes. According to Haller, who wrote The Little Book of Color, this isn’t anything to do with color at all. If we map the teams to color theory, Red is fast like a freight train, running in and getting stuff and things done. Green would be the peacemakers, which definitely isn’t the case. But I think there’s something to Blue. “Blue is the color that you play with your mind,” Haller said. “It's intellectual, it's smart.” They’re just playing 3D chess while you’re over here running after the zone like a stupid dog with a stupid little bone. You laugh now, but let’s see how many gold bars you get for playing the objective and compare that to what Blue players end up with after spamming down hesco blocks for an entire season.