WARDOGS puts you back on the main screen when you join a server

This is the most reported fault on the site right now, and the answer going round is the wrong one.

One thing to rule out first: this page is for the drop at the join step, on the loading screen or in the first seconds of the map. If you were playing a match and the game removed you partway through it, that is being kicked from a match — the same hotfix names it, and it is the one still happening.

What Bulkhead have actually said

At 02:46 on 5 September, in the WARDOGS Discord announcements channel, Bulkhead said that players were being kicked that morning due to a backend issue, put the share affected at around 5% of players, and said those players should be able to rejoin straight away.

That is the whole answer for that morning. It is a server-side fault, it was known, and it was not caused by anything on your machine.

Why verifying your files is not the fix

The community fix thread for this symptom has been open since 23 August and recommends verifying your game files. It is tagged POTENTIAL FIX rather than CONFIRMED FIX, which is the fix threads' own way of saying nobody has demonstrated it.

The reaction tally on that thread is the part worth reading. Thirty-five people have marked it with a red cross. On the same board, the threads that resolved something carry a thumbs up instead — twenty-nine on the crash thread, forty-five on the AMD driver warning, fifty-six on the Twitch drops answer. The one fix people are being pointed at for this symptom is the one carrying the crosses.

Verify anyway if you like. It is two minutes and it does no harm. Just do not let it become the reason you spend an hour on a fault that is not yours.

What it looks like from here

Our own report feed collected this from four regions in a single evening — EU, Oceania, Asia and North America — inside fourteen hours, in almost identical words. Players describe clicking a server and landing back on the menu, being kicked as the map finishes loading, and in one case the game refusing to open at all afterwards until the PC was restarted.

A fault that arrives in four regions at once, inside the same hour, is not a room full of people who all corrupted their installs on the same evening.

Launch day put a fix behind it

The 5 September answer was "rejoin, it is about 5% of you". On 10 September it stopped being a wave and became one of three named faults in a patch.

Early Access opened at 16:00 UTC to a peak of 337,157 concurrent players, and the reports here carried the same words as the beta ones — removed from the match, kicked mid-game, kicked out after an hour of waiting. At 20:20 UTC Bulkhead shipped Launch Stability Hotfix #1, listing players being unexpectedly kicked from servers during play alongside players unable to join servers and extended login queue times, and said it would be working through the night.

That makes the restart worth doing once, which is not something this page could say before: the build you are being kicked on is the one the hotfix replaces. Everything else here stands — verifying files is still not the fix, and a reinstall is still forty minutes against a fault that has never been yours.

12 September: one server, since launch

Two days in, Bulkhead found a cause for part of this that had nothing to do with load. At 07:21 UTC on 12 September its Discord announcements channel said a single server had been cursed since launch: around 100 of 300,000 players had been sent back to the main menu every time they joined that one game instance. It was taken down the same morning.

That explains a pattern in the reports here that the hotfix never did, which is players who could play on most servers and bounced off one. If that was you, it is fixed. If you are bounced by every server you try, the rest of this page still applies.

If it is still happening for you

Check the strip at the top of this page first. If reports are flat and nobody else is describing it, then it is worth treating as a local problem, and the next pages to read are the ones for a launcher that will not start rather than this one.

If instead you are being refused at the moment you click a server, rather than dropped after loading into one, that is a different code with its own page: error 1628505091.

If being sent back to the menu mid-match has cost you cash, what you lose by design and what counts as a bug are set out in lost money after a crash or disconnect.