WARDOGS

Server Browser Improvements & Community Server Discoverability It's time we own up. Community Servers have been underserved and the server browser experience as a whole has been poor. It is clear to us that we have not put the same amount of care and passion into Community Servers that we have into the rest of the game. As a result, we worked through the night to pull together an update that will start the process of improving the server browser in favour of community servers. Community Servers are the lifeblood of FPS games like ours. We want to make sure we actively create technology in and out of the game that supports the growth and fostering of communities. We have failed to do that by rushing our Community Server strategy. As we've always said, when we're wrong, we'll hold our hands up. We got this bit wrong. Below we will discuss the immediate changes to the server browser that we have made to better surface community servers. On top of which, by way of apology, for the next week community servers will offer a bonus 5% End of Match cash bonus. So if you're looking to grind, we suggest jumping in a community server. - Split front end into two browsers, Community and Official A game with this many players realistically should be using matchmaking, and server browsers aren't massively fit for purpose, but we don't want Community admins and hosts to suffer. They're the lifeblood of the community who keep a game running well beyond its peak player days. As a result we have added an option for players. - Removed unnecessary filtering from Official Servers In its current state, filtering is not necessary for Official Servers as we do not have Official modified game modes. Filters have been removed from the Official browser. - Improved reliability of filtering in Community Servers - Added text based search to Community Servers - Community Server IDs now persist between matches and restarts Community Server IDs were previously wiped on map change and restart. They will now persist, and each server will have its own unique ID so players can join via ID. However the number will be much longer for security reasons. - Added Show Empty/Full to browser quick bar - Updated Host button to direct to the correct location - Server name ordering and naming We have enforced new requirements on servers to make them alphabetical regardless of special characters and numbers. You will no longer be allowed to use more than one space at a time. Upcoming Features We are still working on a list of features we have seen requested from communities as a priority. This doesn't affect the content we're working on for Season 2, but we are heavily focused on reactive quality of life feedback for the very short term. These features are not yet ready but are in the pipeline. FEATURE Community server favouriting Tiered priority queues for Community servers Message of The Day Prompt Improved Warmup Activities AFK kicking during seeding disabling Team Switching Controls Other Fixes - Various cash exploits have been fixed - More GPU crashes addressed Increased Capacity in Asia We have increased the server capacity in the Asian region to support the interest coming from that region. Thank you to our players across Asia who have shown interest and continued to play the game. We will be putting more focus into supporting Asia as an important part of the worldwide Wardogs playerbase. Our Stance on Economy Abuse The economy of WARDOGS interlinks all players together into one shared universe and experience, even more so when we bring the meta into the game. As an early access game, we're not perfect, and we never will be. But if you do find something and take advantage of it, we have decided to come down hard. These players will be dealt with in the following ways: • Abusing cash exploits and bugs We will respond with a timed ban, the length of which will be determined based on any previously applied bans. We will reset your cash and XP to 0. • Creating content that tutorialises economy exploits and bugs We will treat creating content that tutorialises how to abuse systems, with no regard for reporting the issue, as advertising cheats. This will result in a permanent ban. There are easy ways to get things in front of us. We are not saying do not post on social media or Discord. We are saying there is a difference between promoting and alerting. • XP farming This will result in the most serious bans. We track every server you enter, and we are also very aware of which servers are XP farming servers. If your account is tracked as joining one of these servers for more than a few minutes, we will ban your account permanently. In the very early stages of finding these issues you may find yourself getting away with it, but it doesn't take long for our backend data to flag abusers. Effectively, if you find something and you then keep doing it, over and over again, that is abuse of an exploit. If you figure something out and test it once or twice, no biggy, thanks for helping us QA. Let us know on socials and in the comments if you agree with our stance or if you think we should be adjusting it.