One day into Wardogs Season 2, Bulkhead Interactive has decided to scrap the bribery plan it announced last week as a way to help convince players to join the Blue team. The problem isn't that the plan didn't work—it actually worked far too well.

"We're removing the Blue XP bonus, the cash bonus. We were wrong," Brammer said. Bulkhead co-founder Howard Philpott added that the studio thought Blue team bonus might work out this way, but said "I don't think we expected it to be this much of a swing."

I can't say I'm terribly surprised by the outcome. I'm not a Wardogs player, but I have been around long enough to know how these things go: If you dangle a competitive edge in front of gamers, they're going to jump for it. Percentage boosts are especially risky because they're performance-based and so much more likely to go spinning out of control, especially in the hands of, as Brammer put it, "tryhards."

And it's not just the extra XP and cash being earned that's a problem: Philpott said the bonus is also "impacting people joining games and starting games," presumably because if they can't be a Blue, they'll leave and try their luck with another game.

' Of course I'm trying hard! Why wouldn't I be? My nephew called me a tryhard once and I told him that maybe if he tried harder he wouldn't get his ass kicked so hard.

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