The team behind Wardogs has confirmed that Lonestar, the blue team, loses more often than other teams and is making significant changes in Season 2 to address the issue.
Since Wardogs launched in early September, there have been no shortage of memes mocking the game’s blue team, Lonestar. For whatever reason, Lonestar tends to lose a lot, with numerous videos showing players crashing helicopters at base and embarrassing themselves.
Speaking exclusively with IGN, Bulkhead confirmed that Lonestar’s win percentage is lower than other teams in Wardogs, though it has actually increased over time. The blue team’s win rate was roughly 10% during the game’s alpha but has risen to around 20% in recent weeks.
Bulkhead co-founder Howard Philpott noted this is partially a result of players choosing to support Lonestar because they see it as an underdog challenge. He joked that the blue team’s reputation was “a bit of a PR issue.”
“So originally, and this is key to not misquote, it was like 10% in the alpha,” he said. “So that then led to the perception: blue is bad, don’t join blue. And then everyone tries to click on green and click on red because they’re competitive and they want to win. So they’re going on the better team. More recently, it’s closer to 15 to 20%. It’s probably closer to 20% right now, where people have actively been joining blue team to try and make them win, which is quite entertaining to watch. But it’s undeniable, they are losing more than the other two teams because of that perception.”
Bulkhead is taking steps to remedy this with the launch of Season 2 next week. The biggest change involves adjusting spawns and rebuilding bases for all teams on the map Bakurani. Senior producer Kane Allard noted that blue team’s reputation may have been compounded by the fact that they were losing significantly more on Bakurani, possibly due to map issues.
“We’ve moved all three spawns, so it’s not just blue team have moved,” said Allard. “It’s blue, red, and green. They’ve all moved. The actual hot zone of Bakurani hasn’t been changed. It’s just the spawn zones. It’s kind of revitalized the map, and we’ve seen from a data standpoint with our internal tests that it has evened it out. But yeah, as Howard said, there is a genuine PR issue with Lonestar, and there are a few extra things that we’re going to be doing to hopefully help turn the tide of that, as well.”
Some of those “few extra things” include changing the saturation on Lonestar’s uniforms so they can blend in better, cash and XP bonuses for playing and winning as Lonestar, and even posters in other teams’ spawns encouraging players to switch to blue team.
“Yeah, we are doing some fun stuff,” said Philpott. “We’re even putting posters like ‘Lonestar needs you,’ in the other teams’ spawns. So yeah, it should be good fun.”
In a press conference, Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer joked that “if you’re not playing blue team, you are in fact, a puy.” Wardogs Season 2 launches on October 15.
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