WARDOGS Season 2 is live: new prices, ping kicks and how to keep your cash

Season 2 is live, and it is busy

Season 2 went live on 15 October 2026, after a maintenance window BULKHEAD scheduled for 08:00 to 09:30 UTC. When we checked SteamCharts on 16 October it showed a 24-hour peak of 336,202 concurrent players on Steam, which matches the roughly 336,000 our own team saw at the peak. That is a lot of people in one game on a patch day, and it is good news for WARDOGS: more squads, more servers, more fights. It also means full servers, so the habits that get you through a busy lobby matter more this week than they did last. The new guns are in our Season 2 weapons guide and the early reveal is in the press conference recap. This page is the other half: money, builds and connection.

Season 2 new weapons → Season 2 press conference recap →

Who wins and who loses

Mortar and AA builders pay most up front. A mortar is four times the build supplies it was, and a Talon trades a cheaper build (650) for a five second reload and dearer restocks, so a SAM site costs less to place and more to keep firing. The Vanguard CIWS at 1,200 is the one cheap piece of the set. Pilots feel it at the vendor and in the air. The Havoc goes up by $10,000, a Basic Parachute is $500, and parachutes now open slower and need more height, so the old last-second pull is a gamble. The community reaction was blunt but fair: land short of the fight, stage, then go in, instead of dropping on top of it. Spotters lose a little, roughly 30% per spot, with rewards scaling to the value of what you tag. Logistics runners get less per run but gain delivery streaks, so back-to-back runs beat scattered ones. Vehicle hunters come out ahead on paper: the armour you chase now costs the other team $22,000 to $28,000 to field, so each kill takes a bigger bite out of them. The community view is also that a Drill Rig still dies to a handful of rockets or a couple of MAWs, and with 2,000 fuel to start it is dearer to run than to counter.

Vehicle hunting → Supply runs that reach the right FOB →

Ping kicks: what we measured

On launch day we played from Indonesia and were kicked from Asian servers for high ping. We feared the worst. Testing since then says it is less bad than it felt: in our tests the kick threshold sits at around 250 ms. That is our own measurement, not a number BULKHEAD has published, so treat it as a guide. What actually hurt us was local: spikes on our Indonesian connection, not the distance to the server. US servers played fine for us today. What we would do: use a routing tool if your ISP's path to the server is poor, and pick a region where you sit under about 200 ms with headroom for spikes, because it is the spike that gets you kicked, not the average. Treat 250 as the cliff and 200 as the line you plan around. This is feedback, not a complaint. BULKHEAD has built something people are queuing to play, a launch this size stresses every region at once, and we would rather help you get a stable session than ask for anything.

Your first-hour money plan

This is our plan, not a guarantee. 1. Run the free AK74 and keep the $800 you would have spent. The community reaction was that a decent default rifle makes the early game gentler for new players. 2. Spend on survival before vehicles. Armour and ammunition come before a Havoc at $28,000 or an L2A6 at $22,000. 3. Do not buy a parachute you will not use. At $500 it is a real cost; if you ride in with a squad, let the transport do the work. 4. Chain your logistics. Delivery streaks reward back-to-back runs, so pick one route and stay on it. Spot what is worth spotting, because rewards now scale with the value of the target. 5. Save toward one build, not three. Level 20 now takes 111,500 XP instead of 250,000, so the mid-game unlocks arrive sooner. Your cash goes further if you are not rushing to spend it.

Money farming, ranked by risk → Gold bars and market timing →

FOB cost rethink

The door and the mortar tell the story: a door is 80 build supplies instead of 22, and a mortar is 600 instead of 150. Season 2 wants fewer, better placed pieces, not a door at every gate. Three practical changes. Budget the mortar first and treat it as the centrepiece. Count doors by raid route, not by habit. And remember that hammers no longer breach doors or gates; the Halligan does, so the raiders who can break your door are now carrying a specific tool. On the AA side, a Talon at 650 is cheaper to place than before but reloads in 5 seconds and costs more to restock, while the Vanguard CIWS at 1,200 is now the lighter build. Our solo and duo FOB V3 guide was written against the preview prices, so read its costs with the launch numbers above beside it.

Solo and duo FOB V3 → CIWS sunflower → Mortar cover versus firing arc → Mortar fire missions → Place a SAM where it can work →

The comeback discount: buy, do not bail

Teams that are at least 40 points behind second place get 20% off at the vendor. If your team is that far down, that is the moment to restock, not to leave: armour, ammunition and the vehicle your squad actually needs all cost a fifth less than the other team is paying. Leaving is also the wrong move for the scoreboard. Once a team is more than 10 points ahead, a player who joins it cannot switch teams again for 15 minutes, so the late-match swap is harder than it was. Season 2 also adds win bonuses and teamplay multipliers, including the Lonestar experiment on the blue team; BULKHEAD has not published the sizes, so we are not guessing at them.

Coming later: the Wager Vendor

The Wager Vendor is not in at launch. It arrives later in Season 2, with no date yet. From what BULKHEAD has described, you stake in-game cash on your own performance and pick objectives, with harder conditions paying more. It is flagged as experimental, and the developers have said it could be changed or pulled if it proves too exploitable. Do not build your Season 2 economy around it. Treat it as a bonus if it lands.

Where Wing Mait fits

Full servers, high ping and squadmates who do not talk, or do not share your language, are exactly why Wing Mait matters more than ever. It is in beta on Windows: it watches your minimap and speaks contacts with bearing and distance, downed teammates and your own downed state, and it speaks a mortar firing solution from our calculator. It does not read game memory, fix your connection or translate chat, and live in-game mortar screen-reading is not done yet. So think of it as the squadmate who always calls the threat, even when nobody else on comms does. Say what you need from your squad, use the voice for the rest, and spend your attention on the fight.

Wing Mait for WARDOGS →