George In The Meta
What gets you banned in WARDOGS?
By George In The Meta ·
Short answer: exploiting the cash or XP economy, and cheating. This week BULKHEAD banned a Twitch streamer and around 20 of her players for roughly a week each over a FOB money exploit, and said the decision is final. Teamkilling, in my experience, gets you kicked from the server, not banned.
What got players banned this week?
A cash exploit built around a FOB. Per a player's breakdown of the streams, a premade squad of about 20 built a FOB on the edge of the combat zone, packed it with bunkers, then arranged for the enemy to capture it, game after game. It was reportedly making the group $300,000 to $500,000 a game.
If that scoreboard is from those matches, the money was per player, not for the group: the top 17 each earned between $362,000 and $534,000 in one match, most of them with zero or one kill.
BULKHEAD's response on 7 October was short: "known cash & xp exploit abuse will no longer be tolerated. These punishments will stand. This decision is final." I'm not naming the streamer: Brammer has asked people to stop piling on her.
What did I see in the clips?
It just looked organised. I've watched the clips now, and the stream was titled "Money Making Stream", which is how the player breakdown has it too. The only word missing from that title was "exploit".
Their defence later was that it wasn't an exploit: they were just tricking the enemy team. But the understanding I got from what I saw is that their pals were on the enemy team. I could be wrong, and clips can be cherry-picked. It would be very hard to cherry-pick something into looking like this, though, and it doesn't match what people who watched it live said they saw.
One clip posted on 8 October says it better than I can. A squad member says "I'm so getting banned for this" and "I mean, we're kinda exploiting, I don't know." The streamer's answer: "If you believe this is exploiting, I got a door for you right on the left side of there… You walk right out of it."
Then her defence, in her own words: "I'm building a base and letting them cap it and blowing it up. That's not exploiting." That's the money loop, described by the person running it. (Quotes transcribed from the clip on X.)
How long are WARDOGS exploit bans?
The ban this week was seven days. The streamer posted her own ban screen, which the player breakdown quotes: "Reason: Exploit abuse", with 167 hours 58 minutes left.
Brammer says that was lenient: "if anything they were lenient compared to what we had said on Steam."
What they said on Steam was in update 0.1.2 on 30 September, which promised zero tolerance and permanent bans "without warning" for XP and cash exploits and real-money trading. So the official line is permanent, and this week's ban came in well under it.
Is seven days enough?
No. Ban them for longer. Fully get rid of their access, and teach them the price of knowingly exploiting and breaking the rules. The game is $39.99 on Steam, so that's what it would cost them.
Watching the clips didn't change that. If you knowingly do something wrong, you get the hardest punishment there is. Not much gets stolen in Dubai, and I can't think why.
Is the FOB exploit fixed?
For Season 02, yes. Brammer says the exploit "has been fixed for season 2" and that BULKHEAD has "added data tracking for the behaviour and events now." He also said a lot of the players involved immediately turned the cash into gold bars and skins, "so there was no gameplay there, nothing organic, purely a cash loop."
Gold bars carry over into Season 02 when the wipe resets cash and XP, which I've covered in my Season 02 wipe page.
Does exploit money carrying into Season 02 bother me?
No, it doesn't bother me. It's so they can tell their pals: look how slick I am, I've got this skin for this gun because I used gold to buy it. They just leave out the part where they cheated to get it.
It's the same as the bodybuilding influencers who claim to be natural while obviously running more gear than Ronnie Coleman.
Have I seen exploiting in my own matches?
I've never looked into exploiting, because I'm not a loser, and I don't see what you gain from it. But I have seen FOBs placed suspiciously: inside or even outside the play zone, in the gap between teams, with only a couple of players at them.
I don't care enough to drive two kilometres out to see what they're up to. But there's no reason to build there if you're helping your team.
The exploits I actually notice are the ones that hit the players around them straight away. There's one to reload the grenade launcher in the Little Bird helicopter faster, and another that lets it shoot through the front glass. Those affect people immediately.
Why do I hate exploiters?
I hate the exploits that hit everyone else. If you want to farm money and gold, fine, do that. You're just a loser who wants a big number to show your friends without explaining you cheated to get there.
Farming cash doesn't directly affect me, and I don't know that it's winning anyone games. The grind is a bit rough, I'll give them that. But organising 20 people to farm money from a FOB on stream is peak admitting you're a loser.
Can you get banned for teamkilling in WARDOGS?
I haven't seen a ban for it, but I've seen people kicked. My brother got kicked from a server for teamkilling, and it was an accident: someone built a wall in front of his mortar while he was still on it. He wasn't banned. We just had to join a different server.
How do you know if something is an exploit?
My test: if it feels aggressively unintended, I don't do it. Someone in my stream chat told me to animation-cancel the hammer, so you swing it faster and build up quicker. That felt aggressively unintended, and not something to be doing, so I didn't.
The grenade launcher firing through the Little Bird's front glass is the same: it's clearly doing something against what the game loop wants. Brammer's own test for this week's exploit was that it was "obviously not an intended part of the game", and he said it would have been great if the streamer had raised it with them instead.
What gets you banned in WARDOGS?
Cash and XP exploits, and cheating. BULKHEAD has said both are bannable, the bans this week are final, and the FOB exploit is fixed with tracking for Season 02. For cheaters specifically, see is WARDOGS still banning cheaters in Asia.
