Wardogs, Why Bulkhead Is Wiping Season 2 Early and What It Means for Progression

Video: WARDOGS Season 2 Is Wiping Early... Is This The Right Call?

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Oct 24, 2026 · based on the channel Sir Pigeon

Wardogs Season 2 is being wiped early because progression moved far faster than Bulkhead planned: within days of the season start, players had already reached Level 4 armour, thermal optics, the AMR50 rifle and high-tier vehicles. The developer's decision resets the seasonal economy rather than letting the endgame dominate for the rest of the season. Whether that is the right call depends on which player you ask, but the underlying problem — hardcore grinders versus people with a few evenings a week — is the one Bulkhead actually has to solve.

What happened in Wardogs Season 2

Season 2 launched with accelerated XP and money gains, and the top of the progression tree arrived almost immediately. The pattern is familiar from extraction shooters and large-scale PvP sandboxes: a small share of players treat a new season as a race, and the moment they unlock the strongest gear, everyone else plays in a different game. Level 4 armour, thermals and the AMR50 are not small upgrades — they change what a fight looks like before a shot is fired. Reports from the first day describe tanks rolling around within hours of the wipe, while most players had nothing in their loadout that could answer them.

Bulkhead's response was to pull the season back and reset progression early, then dial the gains down. The stated reason is that the curve was never meant to be finished in a week; the practical effect is that everyone who invested time in the first days loses that progress.

Why an early wipe is controversial

The case for wiping is straightforward: a season where the top gear is already common has no curve left, and the developer would rather fix a broken economy in week one than in week six. The case against is equally simple — the players who lost progress are not only the no-lifers. Someone who drives cargo for a living in-game, or who spent their only free evening pushing a tier, sees that work erased by a decision made above their heads. And the fix may not even work: if the XP rate is cut, the same grinders still reach the ceiling first, while the counters that casual players need to fight endgame vehicles take longer to unlock.

Staggered progression: the fix Sir Pigeon proposes

Sir Pigeon's suggestion in the breakdown is staggered seasonal progression, and it is the idea that has travelled furthest in the community. Instead of one continuous unlock tree, the season is divided into phases:

1. Early Game — basic armour, standard rifles and light vehicles for the opening stretch of the season.
2. Mid Game — tier 3 armour, better optics and heavier weapons unlock in the second phase.
3. Late Game — Level 4 armour, thermals, the AMR50 and top-tier vehicles arrive only in the final phase.

The appeal is that it does not stop anyone from grinding. It simply means the grind cannot skip the part of the season where fights are decided by positioning and aim rather than by who owns the best optic. The known downside, raised by players of other phase-locked games, is the dead zone at the end of each phase: once you have everything available, there is nothing to chase until the next unlock window.

Alternative ideas players keep raising

Several softer mechanisms could achieve a similar result without hard locks. A rested-XP system, borrowed from MMO design, would bank bonus progression for players who log off and spend it when they return, letting a weekend-only player close part of the gap. A weekly loop — a high XP multiplier at the start of each week that decays the more you play — would compress the difference between a four-hour player and a forty-hour player. Indexed XP works in the other direction: killing a higher-level opponent grants more, killing a lower-level one grants less, so stomping beginners is a poor way to level. A rubber-band multiplier that slowly rises across the season would do the same job from the other end. None of these are mutually exclusive, and all of them are cheaper to test than a full redesign.

How Bulkhead is balancing grinders against casual players

Wardogs is in Early Access, and that framing matters. Seasons in this state are experiments, not contracts, and Bulkhead has been explicit that numbers will move. The tension is structural: a hardcore extraction shooter needs a meaningful long grind to retain its most committed players, but its matchmaking and map design put those same players in the same raids as someone on their first session of the week. Prim servers, restricted to early- and mid-game gear and planned for roughly halfway through a season, are one attempt to separate those populations. The early wipe is another, blunter one.

What this means for Season 2 going forward

The practical consequences for anyone still playing the season:

• Expect slower XP and money gains than the opening days of Season 2.
• Treat the first week of any future season as a sprint that may be reset; do not build a plan around a single expensive purchase early.
• Watch for gear-restricted servers as the more reliable place for players without daily playtime.
• Assume the balance pass is not final — Early Access seasons are the test bed, and a second adjustment is likely if the curve still breaks.

The verdict on wiping early

An early wipe is a defensible emergency measure, not a progression system. It fixes a season that has already broken without answering why it broke, and it costs the developer goodwill with exactly the players who were progressing at the intended pace. Staggered unlocks, rested XP or a decaying weekly multiplier address the cause rather than the symptom, and any of them can be trialled for a single season with far less disruption. Sir Pigeon lays out the full argument, including the case for shorter seasons, in the video breakdown on the channel — and the discussion is worth having now, while Wardogs is still in Early Access and the design is still soft.

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