Bulkhead is going to ban the alt accounts of banned WARDOGS cheaters, and it says it can trace them back to a main account too. On episode 2 of The Hotzone, its official podcast, the studio says a banned player only has to play "a little bit" on a new account before their hardware ID gives them away (Confirmed). The 58-minute episode, posted on 10 November, also goes further into the 185,000-account ban wave than the Road to Season 3 devlog did, and sets out how a planned trust score would work.
Bulkhead's lead core tech programmer, its creative director and its UX lead are on the episode. The studio describes the bans as "a gamble". It says close to 5% of everyone who has bought WARDOGS is being banned, which is more people than have reviewed the game on Steam.
What happens to alt accounts?
They get banned too. Bulkhead says it can already detect smurf accounts but has done nothing with that information until now (Confirmed). That changes: once one account is banned, the studio says it can work out quickly who is behind a new one from the hardware ID. It also says it will go the other way. If you are caught cheating on an alt, it will find and ban the main account. The team calls this your "digital bloodline".
Someone on the episode joked "no more family computers". Bulkhead has not said how it will handle people who share a PC with a banned player (Unconfirmed). If that is you, keep your own Steam account and do not play on a machine someone else has been banned on until the studio says more.
How does Bulkhead decide someone is cheating?
By building a case, not by acting on one signal. The team describes a "rap sheet" for each suspect. Several kinds of evidence go into it (all Confirmed):
| Evidence | What Bulkhead says it shows |
|---|---|
| Session playback | The team can replay any player's session, and has had this since about the start of Season 2 |
| Hardware mouse input vs the server | Raw mouse input is laid over what the server recorded as hits and kills, to check the two match |
| Accuracy history | Whether a player's numbers moved over time, for example someone who "dialled in" a cheat to look less obvious |
| Player reports | Reports do not ban anyone, but they flag a player for a closer look |
| Behaviour | Things a real player rarely does, like reloading while facing a wall or putting a pre-fire into the ground before an enemy crests a hill |
Before a detection rule goes live, the team runs it as a simulated ban and watches the replays of the players it would have caught. Bulkhead says its confidence on these bans sits in the 99.8th to 99.9th percentile. The playback tool did not exist in Season 1, because the studio needed the first wave of players' data to learn what normal play looks like.
Will an auto clicker get you banned?
Not on its own, Bulkhead says, but it counts against you. The team says it can detect auto clickers and does not ban for one alone (Confirmed). Some players use one to grab a team slot when joining a server. An auto-clicker flag still goes on the case file, though, and if two or three other suspicious things show up next to it, the studio will ban. Its advice to legitimate players is simply not to use one. The written rules have not changed either: Bulkhead's enforcement page still lists macros as bannable. What the rules say about macros →
The team said "it's just an auto clicker" is one of the most common excuses it gets from banned players. In the example it went through on air, the player's replays showed a triggerbot.
How common are cheaters, and where?
Bulkhead says about 10,000 accounts were banned in Season 1 out of roughly 4 million players. It says it held back because it was nervous about false positives. Cheaters who were hitting 80% headshots early in Season 1 have since tuned their cheats down to roughly 24% to 36%. The studio says even the best players it has looked at on Twitch sit at about 12%.
By region, Bulkhead says the highest rate was in Africa, where 12% of copies sold went to players it flagged as cheaters, followed by South America at about 8%, then Europe, then China (Confirmed). Europe and China account for most cheaters in absolute numbers, because that is where most copies went. North American players cheated less than the team expected. The studio also says the idea that WARDOGS cheaters are mostly Chinese is wrong.
What about gold farmers?
They are being wiped and banned permanently. Bulkhead says it could see farming from XP and gold earnings all along, but did not act on it straight away (Confirmed). The episode shows the team joining a farming server: Chinese-named but hosted in the EU, with "staff" telling players which faction to pick and where to stand. Farmers will lose their cash, unlocks, gold bars and XP, and Bulkhead says that at this point their bans are permanent.
What is the trust score?
A score attached to your account that decides which servers you can join. Bulkhead compares it to a credit rating (Confirmed as planned). In the studio's example everyone starts at 100. Server admins, and Bulkhead itself, would set a minimum score for each server, so some servers would be high-trust and some low-trust. There could also be no-trust servers, and in future the studio might lower a cheater's score to send them there instead of banning them.
You would raise your score by turning on PC security features such as TPM and Secure Boot, or by verifying your identity through PlaySafe ID, a third-party service. With PlaySafe ID, the company checks your ID and Bulkhead only receives a token saying you passed. Bulkhead says it will never make anyone verify their ID, and doubts it will force TPM either. It does plan to make players it already suspects turn those features on before they can play.
The Road to Season 3 devlog put the trust score in 2027. The podcast gives no date. The trust score explained →
Why not just use a stricter anti-cheat?
Bulkhead says it uses three main anti-cheat providers but would not name them. It says switching anti-cheat would not fix anything on its own: about 80% of the cheats it sees get past TPM and Secure Boot anyway. It also says that if it turned on Valorant-level requirements tomorrow, it would lose about 60% of its players.
The team says it made a mistake in Season 1 by running too much on the client to keep server costs down, and is moving those checks to the server. It also thinks WARDOGS being a sandbox helps: a cheater who uses aim assistance and then tries a mortar cheat leaves evidence in both places.
What did Bulkhead say about AI?
The studio says it uses AI in programming and in the anti-cheat tools and dashboards that pull its data together. It says it does not use generative AI for art, animation or voiceovers (Confirmed). Its argument is that cheat makers already use AI to write aim hacks and mortar tools, so studios have to use it too to keep up.
Banned and want to appeal?
Bulkhead says it will not usually tell banned players why, because each explanation becomes an excuse other cheaters copy. Appeals still go through the WARDOGS Support bot on the official Discord. How to read the ban screen and appeal → · How WARDOGS anti-cheat catches cheaters →