Blue team reinforcements
- "Lonestar cash and XP bonus. Season 2 only. New Bakurani spawn."
- "We're looking at how we can help the win rate of a certain team." -Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer (via "Road to Season 2" devlog)
Bulkhead wants to boost one team's win rate, and it's willing to bribe its players (with in-game cash) to do it. Despite all three teams starting on equal grounds, many Wardogs players have been avoiding Blue from the start, going so far as to idle on the selection screen for minutes waiting for a slot to open on Green or Red.
The are practical balancing problems that work against Blue team, like their lackluster camouflage and unfavorable spawn points (Season 2 is tackling Bakurani), but the bonuses are meant to counter the other reason Blue sucks, as I covered last month:
"Another, less talked about possibility, is that Blue team's infamy is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Folks have one bad night with Lonestar and decide to believe the reputation, or hear it's the team to avoid, or notice everyone else actively avoiding it, and you end up with a Blue team full of less experienced players."
XP and cash bribes are a drastic move, but should have a real impact. It's unclear how big these boosts will be, but I expect Blue will instantly become the most popular team by a wide margin in Season 2.
I wonder, though, if this problem wasn't slowly sorting itself out already. I've noticed the Blue bias dying down over the past couple weeks—the faction is still mostly losing in the NA West servers I frequent, but they're also scoring points and competing, which is a positive sign. I've even been on a couple of winning Blue teams, if you can believe it.
Wardogs Season 2 is shaping up to be bigger than I expected so soon after release. The October 15 patch also adds new guns, vehicles, rainy weather on all maps, and more to be revealed in the patch notes next week. It also marks the game's first progression wipe—everyone's going back to level 1.
