WARDOGS Patch 0.11 and the Season 1 Economy: What Bulkhead Actually Changed

WARDOGS has been out for four days. In that time Bulkhead published a Season 1 changelog on 9 September, a launch trailer and a stability hotfix on the 10th, a sales post on the 11th, and Patch 0.11 on the 12th. Between them they reported 1.25 million copies sold and a peak of 400,000 concurrent players.

Here is the part that matters for anything on this site: not one weapon figure changed. No damage value, no rate of fire, no vendor price. Everything that moved was the economy around the guns, which in a game that charges you for dying is arguably the bigger edit.

The XP curve got much slower past level 10

Bulkhead's own framing in the Season 1 changelog is that they wanted the median player, at 20 to 25 hours, to sit around level 20, and the top 5 percent to grind for the big items. The numbers they published to get there are steep. Below level 6 is unchanged. Level 10 went from 25,000 to 35,000, which they call 40.0 percent slower. Level 15 went from 54,750 to 110,000, 100.9 percent slower. Level 20 went from 111,500 to 250,000, which is 124.2 percent slower.

From level 25 the brake eases off: 69.3 percent at 25, 36.2 percent at 30, 20.0 percent at 35, and roughly 16 to 19 percent the rest of the way to 50. So the wall is not at the top of the track, it is in the middle of it, exactly where a new player runs into it.

That reframes every purchase decision on this site. The argument for a cheap primary was already strong on cash alone. It is stronger now that the levels which gate the expensive toys take roughly twice as long to reach.

Vehicles moved, and one gun unlock moved with them

Most of the Season 1 economy edits are vehicles and structures rather than weapons. A Forward Operating Base went from $2,500 to $7,500. The Large Hammer went from $1,600 to $2,400, and its Support unlock moved from level 7 to 8. The Artillery Tank went from $400,000 to $500,000 and from Career level 55 to 90. The Heavy Tank moved out of Career entirely, to Driver level 35. Recon scopes went up: the 6-10x MRAD from $25,000 to $40,000, the MOA from $30,000 to $45,000.

Not everything got worse. The Z20 Lakota dropped from $50,000 to $35,000, the URAL from $50,000 to $35,000, the Dune Buggy from $35,000 to $25,000, and a Music Tape moved from Pilot level 28 to Driver 23.

The one entry on that list a gun buyer cares about: the Deagle unlock moved from Career level 90 to 85. It is recorded at $900 and hits for 49, 3 shots on an unarmoured 100 HP target. Deagle sits at C on our list, placed by 4 of 5 sources. Five levels earlier on a curve that just got 124 percent steeper at 20 is a smaller gift than it looks.

Selling junk to the vendor stopped being a strategy

Two changes close the same loop. Selling a supply crate item under $75 now pays 1 XP instead of 25. And the supply crate purchase curve was rescaled from a 25 to 250 range down to 1 to 200, which Bulkhead describes as pricing low value items sensibly so they cannot be abused.

Patch 0.11 then took the same problem seriously enough to write a policy about it. Abusing a cash exploit gets a timed ban plus a reset of your cash and XP to zero. Publishing a tutorial on how to abuse one is treated as advertising cheats and gets a permanent ban. XP farming servers get the harshest treatment: Bulkhead says they track every server you join, they know which ones are farms, and more than a few minutes on one is a permanent ban. Their own softener is that testing something once or twice is fine and reporting it is welcome.

Read next to the XP changes above, that is one decision with two halves. Making the curve longer only works if the shortcuts are closed, and Bulkhead closed them in the same week.

The rest of Patch 0.11

The patch itself is mostly the server browser, which Bulkhead opened by saying they rushed their community server strategy and got it wrong. The browser is now split into Community and Official, filtering was removed from Official, text search was added to Community, and community server IDs persist between matches and restarts instead of being wiped on map change. As an apology, community servers pay a bonus 5 percent end of match cash for a week.

Also in there: various cash exploits fixed, more GPU crashes addressed, and increased server capacity in Asia. Bulkhead named community server favouriting, tiered priority queues, a message of the day prompt, better warmup activities, AFK kicking during seeding, and team switching controls as in the pipeline and not yet ready, and said none of it affects what they are building for Season 2.

What this means for the numbers on this site

Nothing moved, and we checked rather than assumed. Every recorded vendor price on our weapon pages still matches what the live databases publish. Our tier list re-ranked slightly this week, but that is sources revising their opinions rather than the game changing under them, and the list says which build each source was reading: Closed Beta 1 to Early Access, 4 of 5 sources still pre-launch.

Quick answers

Did Patch 0.11 nerf any weapon? No. Neither Patch 0.11 nor the Season 1 changelog changed a single weapon's damage, rate of fire or price.

How much slower is levelling in Season 1? Bulkhead's own figures: 40.0 percent slower at level 10, 100.9 percent at 15, 124.2 percent at 20, easing to roughly 16 to 20 percent from level 35 up.

Will I get banned for a cash exploit? Bulkhead says yes, with your cash and XP reset to zero, and permanently if you publish a tutorial for one or sit on an XP farm server.

How many people are playing? Bulkhead reported 1.25 million copies sold on 11 September and a 400,000 concurrent peak on the 12th.

Community-recorded from Closed Alpha and Closed Beta vendor screens, cross-checked across independent databases. Bulkhead publishes no official weapon figures, and Early Access can retune any of them. Tier placements are read live from our own list, which is built from 5 attributed published rankings rather than from telemetry, so they move as that list does. Statistical data is based on external APIs and publicly available information. It may differ from official data.