With the FPS Wardogs dominating the Steam charts, developer Bulkhead is paying close attention to the game’s various systems. The studio recently dropped a new patch that makes some necessary changes for server stability, while confirming that the team has their eyes on cheaters and exploiters.
As part of Patch 0.11, which came out on September 14, Bulkhead announced that should any dogs of war take advantage of Wardogs’ economy by farming servers, they’ll find themselves either temporarily or permanently banned from the game.
“As an early access game, we’re not perfect, and we never will be,” Bulkhead said in the patch notes. “But if you do find something and take advantage of it, we have decided to come down hard.”
To be specific, Bulkhead outlined three different scenarios that will come with three different repercussions depending on the type of exploit you partake in.
Scenario 1: Stockpiling money by abusing cash exploits and bugs will result in a timed ban, with the length determined by whether you were banned previously. Your cash and experience will get reset, too.
Scenario 2: Showing economy exploits through tutorial content will be treated as “advertising cheats,” resulting in a permanent ban. However, if you happen to stumble upon an exploit and share that with Bulkhead on Discord or social media, that’ll be seen as an “alert,” which prevents you from being permanently banned.
Scenario 3: If you’re farming experience via server exploits, which Bulkhead says will result in “the most serious bans,” your account will get banned permanently.
The studio clarified, though, that it’s open to feedback on this policy, stating that these positions could change if enough people believe they’re too harsh.
“In the very early stages of finding these issues you may find yourself getting away with it, but it doesn’t take long for our backend data to flag abusers,” Bulkhead said, “Effectively, if you find something and you then keep doing it, over and over again, that is abuse of an exploit. If you figure something out and test it once or twice, no biggy, thanks for helping us QA.”
Wardogs is currently Steam’s hottest game right now, with over 320,000 people playing at the time of writing. It didn’t have the smoothest of starts, but the kinks are getting ironed out as the days go on. Players are a little riled up at the moment, though, particularly because people don’t know how to close the door behind them.