Bulkhead has permanently banned 185,000 players from its shooter Wardogs for offences including cheating and trading, according to Gamer.no. The studio disclosed the figure in a 14-minute developer video published earlier this week, which also previewed the game's third season. The banned accounts can no longer operate their own servers and are locked out of the game for good.
Wardogs arrived in early access on 10 September and quickly became a major hit on Steam. The game is now heading into its third season only a couple of months after launch, a pace that reflects how fast the player base has grown.
Why it matters
The ban wave is a large one by any measure, and it signals that Bulkhead is treating cheating and trading as problems worth addressing publicly rather than quietly. Removing 185,000 accounts also has a practical side: players who ran their own servers lose that ability along with their access to the game.
For a title still in early access, the disclosure doubles as a statement of intent. Gamer.no reports that a substantial portion of the developer video was devoted to explaining how the team goes about detecting and removing offenders, which suggests the studio wants the process to be visible to its community.
A new map and a stripped-back mode
The season three preview introduced Sabatulo, a map set in a modern city centre that Gamer.no describes as built for close-range firefights. Alongside it comes a time-limited mode that reduces the weapons and vehicles available to each team, making the battlefield easier to read.
Both additions were shown in the video, which Gamer.no cites via Eurogamer. The mode's restrictions are the kind of design choice that tends to shift how matches play out, though Bulkhead has not indicated how long the mode will remain available beyond describing it as time-limited.
Praise for a shooter that rewards cooperation
Wardogs drew strong words from Gamer.no's own Gøran Solbakken earlier this year. In his first impressions, he wrote that the game is inventive in a way shooters rarely are now — not because it reinvents shooting, but because it offers an incentive that gets a hundred strangers working together. He singled out the fact that every role, combat-focused or not, contributes to the final result.
That assessment lines up with the game's rapid rise on Steam since its early access debut. A title that can hold a large audience while pushing out seasonal content at this cadence is unusual, and the ban announcement shows the studio is willing to spend effort on keeping that audience clean.
What to watch next: Bulkhead has not given a date for season three's start, so the timing of Sabatulo and the new mode remains open. Further ban waves are also a possibility, given how much of the developer video was spent on the subject.
