George In The Meta
Why does the blue team always lose in WARDOGS?
By George In The Meta ·
Short answer: it's the players, at this point. Blue gets the people who don't know it's going to get dunked on, and the people who go there to mess about in the helicopter or whatever vehicle they've just unlocked. So it's either people too new to do better, or people who are there on purpose to muck around.
I played my first day on blue on 13 October, and everyone's expectations of the blue team are exactly right.
What happened on my first day on blue?
We lost, and we lost to ourselves. In one game we were about 40 points ahead at one point, and then it went to pieces: people started moving the APC, getting it blown up, and not going where the drill was.
The worst moment was simple. I had the APC and the drill. All the team needed to do was spawn on the APC and give me fuel, and we would have had the gold zone. None of them could do that. Then one of them took the APC and drove it straight into the enemy's FOB, where it exploded.
Someone on our team had bought six SPH-2 artillery pieces and let people use them, which tells you the kind of team blue is: nobody's taking it seriously. I put about 40 shots through one and just sucked with it. Reloading it is a little arrow mini-game, which I didn't even know was a thing. I was there a while, until a duo rolled up in a Ural and killed me and my squad mate, who was in another artillery piece. We had no guns, so all we could do was try to run them over while they fired rockets at us.
Is it the players, the spawns or the map?
The players. The people who go to blue are the ones who don't know blue is going to get dunked on, or the ones who just want to mess about. That guy unlocked a load of artillery pieces on blue because he knew it was something he could do there. The team isn't a serious team.
A bad game on red feels like you're getting outplayed. A bad game on blue feels like your team is outplaying itself.
What does BULKHEAD say about the blue team?
BULKHEAD's Season 02 preview notes say one team has had "a notoriously lower win rate than the other two", and that sentiment around it is the biggest reason players don't want to play on it. PCGamesN's write-up of the blue team (10 October) puts it down to higher uniform visibility and spawn issues, and calls the player sentiment "a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy".
Even BULKHEAD's CEO, Joe Brammer, is in on the joke. On 12 October he quote-posted a clip captioned "The most wholesome use of a Chinook I've ever seen" with two words: "Blue behaviour."
What's changing for blue in Season 02?
Season 02 starts on 15 October with what BULKHEAD calls a social experiment. Per its preview notes on Steam, Lonestar gets a cash and XP win bonus and cash and XP multipliers, for Season 02 only. Its uniforms are more desaturated so they stand out less, all faction spawns move on Bakurani, and any team at least 40 points behind second place gets 20% off at vendors. I've covered the rest of the season in what's changing in Season 02.
Would I pick blue in Season 02?
Probably, yes. I don't really mind if I'm not winning, as long as I feel like I've contributed to the team: I'm doing whatever I'm doing in the play zone. I don't need kills to feel I've contributed.
What I won't be is one of the weasels randomly sitting outside the play zone attacking people while their team has six people in it and is losing.
What would actually fix the blue team?
Rotate the headquarters. There are three teams, red, green and blue, and none of them should always spawn in the same place. I don't know why BULKHEAD doesn't. I assume there might be some lore reason, but I can't see why you wouldn't rotate whose headquarters is where.
Then the people who've learned one route would have to learn a new one. Good. More excitement.
