Like many multiplayer shooters, WARDOGS has been facing its share of cheaters and hackers. While developer Bulkhead Studios hasn’t yet figured out a permanent solution to this problem, the team has instead decided to limit the servers that players can join depending on the ping they experience. In the process, the studio has essentially region-locked the player base.
As one might have expected, this has turned out to be a controversial decision, with many players complaining about not being able to play with friends that live in different countries or even continents. Studio CEO Joe Brammer has taken to social media to discuss this decision, and has acknowledged that the team is essentially “harming a % of players to protect the larger.” According to Bulkhead, players will not be able to join servers if their ping is higher than 175.
“Today we have begun the process of controlling regions. Over the next few hours, we will be reducing the maximum ping on a server to be 175 after we have decided that protecting the largest amount of players from an influx of regions that are more prone to cheating.
“It’s disappointing for us to have to put these divisions in place with social experience being such a core focus of WARDOGS, but we must prioritise the largest group of players over the minority. Region locking is in progress on the backend, but is more than a switch to make a meaningful impact to the desired effect.”
Despite Brammer noting that the team is “sorry we let it get to this point that we are forced to make this decision”, his post has been met with quite a bit of criticism, with many saying that they will be pursuing refunds as soon as they can. As one social media user puts it, the team is “only helping only 2 regions” while “basically ending every other region.”
“What about all the people who don’t hack on these servers? Plenty of us have spent hours upon hours playing this game with friends from around the world.
“There will be so many of us who can’t play at all now because your fix to a problem is just restricting everyone else outside of NA and EU and forcing us to play on cheater-ridden servers as if we don’t matter too.”
Another poster said, “As an American with Australian friends this is a bull**** change.”
In a separate post, Brammer has said that the team is continuing to look for a solution and that the current region locking is only a temporary measure to curtail cheaters from getting into more populous servers. “We’re working on solutions for global players,” he said before saying that the situation “sucks”.
In the meantime, Bulkhead Studios has continued to support WARDOGS with post-launch updates. The team recently kicked off the shooter’s second season and has apologized for the state of the game’s progression system. To address these issues, the studio has said that it is already working on releasing Season 3 sooner than originally planned.
