At 22:26 UTC on 12 September Bulkhead scheduled the first maintenance window of Early Access. The servers come down at 08:00 UTC on Monday 14 September for approximately an hour, and Patch 0.11 goes in while they are off. The post opens on a new number, 400,000 peak concurrent users by the studio's count, and spends most of its length apologising for how community servers have been treated.
When WARDOGS goes offline
| Where | Monday 14 September |
|---|---|
| Los Angeles (PDT) | 01:00 |
| Mexico City | 02:00 |
| Chicago (CDT) | 03:00 |
| New York (EDT) | 04:00 |
| Brasília | 05:00 |
| UTC | 08:00 |
| London, Lisbon | 09:00 |
| Berlin, Paris, Madrid (CEST) | 10:00 |
| Moscow, Istanbul | 11:00 |
| Bangkok, Jakarta | 15:00 |
| Beijing, Taipei | 16:00 |
| Seoul, Tokyo | 17:00 |
| Sydney (AEST) | 18:00 |
| Auckland (NZST) | 20:00 |
"Cannot connect" inside that hour is the patch going in, not an outage. The status tracker carries the window at the top of the page until the servers are back, and if you still cannot get in well after 09:00 UTC, it is where to find out whether it is you or everyone.
The server browser, rebuilt around community servers
Bulkhead's framing is blunt: We got this bit wrong.
The patch is described as the start of
the work rather than the end of it, and nearly all of it is about finding a community server.
- Two browsers. The front end splits into Community and Official.
- No filters on Official. There are no official modified game modes, so the filters are gone from that tab entirely.
- Filters and search on Community. Filtering there is more reliable, and there is now a text search.
- Server IDs that stick. A community server's ID used to be wiped on every map change and restart. It now persists, every server gets its own, and you can join by ID. Expect a much longer number than before, which Bulkhead says is for security.
- Show Empty/Full moves onto the browser's quick bar.
- The Host button goes to the right place.
- Server names sort alphabetically whatever character they start with, and a name can no longer use more than one space in a row.
A week of bonus cash on community servers
By way of apology, community servers pay a 5% bonus on end-of-match cash for the next week. The post gives no start or finish time beyond that. Bulkhead's own advice to anyone grinding for an unlock is to play on a community server while it lasts; how the cash economy pays covers what that 5% is 5% of.
Economy abuse is now a ban
The same post sets out what happens to players who abuse the economy, and it is the hardest line Bulkhead has drawn:
- Using a cash exploit or bug: a timed ban, longer for anyone banned before, and cash and XP reset to 0.
- Making content that teaches an exploit without reporting it: treated as advertising cheats, and a permanent ban. Posting about a bug is fine; the line is between alerting and promoting.
- XP farming: the most serious tier. Bulkhead says it tracks every server each account enters and knows which ones are farming servers. Joining one for more than a few minutes is a permanent ban.
Testing a bug once or twice is explicitly allowed. Doing it over and over is abuse. The detail is in the FAQ on exploit bans.
Also in 0.11
Various cash exploits are fixed, more GPU crashes are addressed, and Asia gets more server capacity. Next on the list, not ready yet and separate from the Season 2 work: community server favourites, tiered priority queues for community servers, a message-of-the-day prompt, better warm-up activities, a way to stop AFK kicks while a server is seeding, and team-switching controls.
What it does not cover
Neither of the two faults most reported on our tracker since launch is named: being kicked partway through a match, and the 1147405308 login loop that often follows it. Both pages carry what is known so far. Every line of the official notes, with our TL;DR, is on the patch notes page.