The creators of military shooter Wardogs have announced that they will crack down heavily on players who use exploits and bugs to speedily farm in-game currency and XP, or who spend “more than a few minutes” in servers created for this purpose.

Given that Wardogs advertises itself as a shooter about getting rich – a game in which “cash is king”, with individualised payouts for a bunch of different in-game actions – I do feel like Bulkhead are sending mixed messages, even by the standards of incoherent wargames. Trying to define ‘fairly earned’ in a game that encourages you to be a frenzied, gun-toting plutomaniac is surely plunging headfirst into farce. Mind you, I respect the desire to Maintain The Fun for players who aren’t quite as dollar-driven, and avoid having a community browser slammed with servers called “[EU/DOGF$RM]” or similar.

Wardogs launched in early access last week, reaching an audience of over 400,000 simultaneous Steam players by Sunday. James spent some time in it last week, and returned with many thrilling gigwork anecdotes. The devs have now rolled out a patch aimed at improving the game’s server browser, with a new dedicated feed for community servers.

“Community Servers are the lifeblood of FPS games like ours,” they write on Steam. “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.” In addition to the update, the devs are giving players in community servers an additional 5% End of Match cash bonus by way of apology. “So if you’re looking to grind, we suggest jumping in a community server.”

These heartwarming sentiments about server grinding go hand in hand with a blood-chilling threat against those who create or join servers purely in order to crank out XP by mindlessly repeating actions. “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,” the devs write. “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.”

Players who “abuse cash exploits and bugs” will have their cash and XP reset to zero. You’ll also get a timed ban, depending on previous infractions. People who make “content that tutorialises how to abuse systems, with no regard for reporting the issue” will be treated “as advertising cheats”, and will receive a permanent ban. The wording here is a bit muddy, but it sounds like they’re telling us not to share details about cash/XP exploits, unless we’re genuinely trying to report an issue to the devs. “We are not saying do not post on social media or Discord,” the devs write. “We are saying there is a difference between promoting and alerting.”

And people who launch or make use of XP server farms? For you Bulkhead have unlocked the very lowest echelons of Banhammer Hell. “We track every server you enter, and we are also very aware of which servers are XP farming servers,” they write. “If your account is tracked as joining one of these servers for more than a few minutes, we will ban your account permanently.”

Bulkhead promise that even if you’re currently getting away with abusing a system, they’ll catch up to you eventually. “Effectively, if you find something and you then keep doing it, over and over again, that is abuse of an exploit,” they conclude. “If you figure something out and test it once or twice, no biggy, thanks for helping us QA.”

Bulkhead are hardly unique in wanting people to obsess over an in-game earning loop, but not to the extent that they take the logical next step, game the system, and mess up the experience for other players. The creators of Destiny have had this discussion a billion times over. It just amuses me a bit more in a game that has all this edgelord materialism up front. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there but stop that! Bad dog! You must play by the agreed rules. Anyway: have you spent any time in Wardogs? I don’t know if James plans to keep up his combat taxi-driving career.