WARDOGS took 2,053 negative Steam reviews on 22 October, nearly twice as many as on Season 2's launch day. That was the first full day of the 175 ping cap Bulkhead announced on 21 October to keep cheaters out. This piece sets out who the cap shuts out, why ping is the wrong thing to filter on, and what would actually work. It also covers the part the anger has run ahead of: the player count has not collapsed, at least not yet.
| At a glance | |
|---|---|
| The change | 175 maximum ping on official servers, from 21 October |
| Fuller region lock | "In progress on the backend", no date |
| Negative reviews on 22 October | 2,053, against 547 positive |
| Recent review score | 58%, Mixed, down from 63% on 20 October |
| Players on 22 October | Daily peak 178,187, 4% below 21 October |
| Bulkhead's line | Harming "a % of players to protect the larger" |
A day of 2,053 bad reviews
Steam's review histogram, across every language, shows what the announcement did:
| Day (UTC) | Positive | Negative | Share positive |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 October (Season 2) | 1,838 | 1,102 | 63% |
| 18 October | 633 | 930 | 40% |
| 21 October (cap announced) | 461 | 585 | 44% |
| 22 October | 547 | 2,053 | 21% |
| 23 October, part day | 175 | 737 | 19% |
The context matters. Reviews had been running negative since the day after Season 2 launched, mostly over progression. The cap did not start the slide. What it did was more than triple a day's negatives overnight, and drag the 30-day score from 63% to 58% in three days.
These are not drive-by reviews. We read the 1,571 negative English reviews posted from 21 to 23 October. More than four in ten name the ping cap or the region lock, and the median reviewer has 108 hours on record. "Region Lock has killed all the fun for legit players," wrote Davai Lama, at 326 hours. Lordareon put it more simply: "I cannot play with my friends overseas anymore."
Who the 175 cap actually locks out
Anyone far from a busy server. The post named no region, but the reviews and threads do the naming for it. The loudest groups are Southeast Asian, South Asian, South African and Oceanian players, plus anyone with friends on another continent.
Official servers remove a player whose ping stays above the limit, and that player cannot rejoin the same server until the next map, according to GameWatcher (Reported). Players are hitting it at the margins:
- South Africa. 1_Nev_1 sits at 172 ping to friends in Europe and reports nearly hour-long queues for local servers. Gifgat's review is one line: "Don't buy if you are from South Africa."
- Southeast Asia. ShoppingEcstatic8101 played on EU West at about 180 for English-language comms and was kicked at 179 after two minutes.
- South Korea and Asia East. Old-Candidate216 reports DDoS disconnects and roughly nine matches in ten ending early on Asian servers, and says North America was the only way out.
That last point is the trap. Players who left Asian servers to escape cheaters are now sent back to them. "We're locked in here with them," Whitesushii wrote on r/WarDogs, in a thread arguing the cap pushes players from China onto Southeast Asian servers.
Then there is the wording. Bulkhead blamed "regions that are more prone to cheating," and about 70 of those negative reviews call it discrimination or racism. A Steam thread titled "Why is Bulkhead validating xenophobia?" passed 500 comments. Its author's point was that cheating is not geographic. There is a camp on the other side, too: "REGION LOCK CHINA" is a review in itself, and Dave from HELL wants the cap at 130. Bulkhead has managed to upset both.
Ping is not a cheat detector
This is the core problem. A ping cap filters on distance, and distance is a poor proxy for intent.
A player in Johannesburg at 180 is shut out. A cheater 40 km from a Frankfurt data centre plays on. A cheater anywhere with a VPN exit near the server plays on too. Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer has said that VPNs complicate locating players, per GameWatcher (Reported).
The players reporting it agree. "Ping limit has done absolutely nothing to help," wrote Michyboi10 on 23 October, and cheating comes up in about as many of the post-cap negative reviews as the cap itself. One of the week's biggest r/WarDogs threads, at more than 1,100 upvotes, is titled "Cheating is destroying WarDogs, not balancing, not progression."
Then there are the flying cars. On 20 October Bulkhead confirmed a ground-vehicle exploit that lets players "fly" around the map, and promised a server-side hotfix and permanent bans (the flying-cars story). Two days later Physical-Suspect9493 posted their first flying-car encounter on r/WarDogs and noted that the driver's ping was under the cap (Reported). The cap is not built to catch the most visible cheat in the game.
The players have not left yet
The reviews fell off a cliff. The player count did not. If Steam's charts had shown a sudden exodus on 22 October, it would be in the daily peaks, and it is not there:
| Day (UTC) | Daily peak | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 15 October (Season 2) | 336,202 | |
| 18 October | 293,861 | |
| 19 October | 226,884 | −23% |
| 21 October (cap announced) | 185,509 | |
| 22 October | 178,187 | −4% |
The biggest drop came on 19 October, two days before the cap, as the Season 2 bump faded. The 30-day average is now 162,225, down 28% on September, and that slide is the progression story more than the ping one. Players are still above the 124,255 peak of 14 October, the day before Season 2.
That can change. A reviewer with 300 hours is a player who has not yet left. Several threads describe whole squads moving to other games, and a refund thread for players who bought WARDOGS to play across borders is getting replies. Watch the live player count over the weekend, when this would show first.
What Bulkhead has promised
Not much, and no dates. Here is everything on the record:
- 21 October, @WARDOGS: the 175 cap, plus region locking "in progress on the backend" that "is more than a switch". It called the divisions "disappointing" for a game built on its social side, and apologised for letting it "get to this point" (Confirmed).
- 22 October, Joe Brammer: "Also appreciate that we're harming a % of players to protect the larger. We will find a solution, this issue is bigger than wardogs though.. We're working on solutions for global players.. sucks." Quoted by GamingBolt (Reported).
- No Steam post. The announcement was on X only. As of 23 October the Steam news hub has nothing on the cap.
The turnaround is quick. On 13 October Brammer told a player the studio was not "going to apply region locking just yet", according to games.gg, and said ping limits "won't fully fix" cheating. Eight days later the limit arrived, along with the region lock.
What a real fix looks like
The honest answer is that nobody has solved cheating, and Bulkhead is not wrong that "this issue is bigger than wardogs". Still, the fixes that last share a property. They judge what a player does, not where they connect from.
The server has to own what is possible. A ground vehicle cannot fly, and a server that refuses to accept one in the air catches the exploit at any ping. Bulkhead knows this works: in Update 0.1.2 it moved revives to server-side checks to kill a cash exploit, and the flying-car hotfix is server-side too. Every impossible thing the server stops trusting is one less cheat, everywhere.
The anti-cheat has to be seen working. WARDOGS already runs Elytra, a kernel-level anti-cheat, according to its Steam page (what we know about it). Players are not asking for one to exist. They are asking for evidence that it bans people, and Bulkhead has published no ban counts. PUBG had its own "ghost flying cars" era. Its developers wrote code against that specific cheat, went after the people selling it, handed out hardware bans and then explained all of it in public. By 2019 they said the flying cars were gone or much reduced, according to Dexerto. Explaining the fix was part of the fix.
Asia needs servers that stay up. DDoS turns up in 123 of the negative reviews. A Korean player whose matches end early does not need a ping limit, they need a match that finishes.
Friends need a door. Community servers set their own ping limits, so an international squad can still play together on one (Reported). An official opt-in server without a cap, or squad invites that carry a player past the limit, would keep that door open without leaving it to community admins.
What we still do not know
- Which regions Bulkhead means. The post names none, and the studio has not clarified.
- When the full region lock lands, and whether it replaces the ping cap or sits on top of it.
- Whether cheating has dropped. No figures either way.
- What happens to purchases. Bulkhead has said nothing about refunds for players who can no longer reach their friends' servers. Steam's own refund rules still apply.
We will update this page when Bulkhead does. If your region is missing from it, or your experience under the cap differs, tell us.
