The team behind Wardogs has confirmed that Lonestar, AKA the blue team, loses more than other team, and is making big changes in Season 2 to fix that.
Since Wardogs launched in early September, there have been no shortage of memes mocking the game’s blue team, Lonestar. For whatever reason, Lonestar tends to lose a lot, and there are a plethora of videos showing Lonestar players crashing helicopters at base and making fools of themselves.
Speaking exclusively with IGN, Bulkhead confirmed that Lonestar’s win percentage is lower than other teams in Wardogs, but it has actually increased over time. Lonestar’s win rate was roughly 10% during the game’s alpha, but has risen to 20% in recent weeks. Bulkhead co-founder Howard Philpott noted that this is partially a result of players choosing to support Lonestar because they see it as an underdog challenge. He even joked that blue team’s reputation was a bit of a PR issue.
“So originally, and this is key to not misquote, it was like 10% in the alpha,” he said. “So that then led to the perception: blue is bad, don’t join blue. And then everyone tries to click on green and click on red because they’re competitive and they want to win. So they’re going on the better team. More recently, it’s closer to 15 to 20%. It’s probably closer to 20% right now, where people have actively been joining blue team to try and make them win, which is quite entertaining to watch. But it’s undeniable, they are losing more than the other two teams because of that perception.”
Bulkhead is taking steps to remedy this with the launch of Season 2 next week. The biggest change is that they are adjusting spawns and rebuilding bases for all teams on the map Bakurani. Senior producer Kane Allard noted that blue team’s reputation may have been compounded by the fact that they were losing significantly more on Bakurani, possibly due to map issues. As a result, they’ve chosen to shake up all of the spawns.
“We’ve moved all three spawns, so it’s not just blue team have moved,” said Allard. “It’s blue, red, and green. They’ve all moved. The actual hot zone of Bakurani hasn’t been changed. It’s just the spawn zones. It’s kind of revitalized the map, and we’ve seen from a data standpoint with our internal tests that it has evened it out. But yeah, as Howard said, there is a genuine PR issue with Lonestar, and there are a few extra things that we’re going to be doing to hopefully help turn the tide of that, as well.”
Some of those “few extra things” include changing the saturation on Lonestar’s uniforms so they can blend in better, cash and XP bonuses for playing and winning as Lonestar, and even posters in the other teams’ spawns encouraging other players to switch to blue team.
“Yeah, we are doing some fun stuff,” said Philpott. “We’re even putting posters like ‘Lonestar needs you,’ in the other teams’ spawns. So yeah, it should be good fun.”
In a press conference, Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer joked that, “if you’re not playing blue team, you are in fact, a pu**y.” So with that said, it is now up to the players to take these buffs and changes to try and change the perception of Lonestar.
Wardogs Season 2 launches on October 15.
Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN’s news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.