For as gripping as the FPS underdog really is, I must admit that I find the standoff that happens at the start of every WARDOGS match truly vexing. Everybody spam-clicks on the teams tab, hoping to end up as either Manticore (the green guys) or Valkyra (the red guys), all while Lonestar (the blue guys) sits half empty. Much like in life, it seems that nobody who plays WARDOGS wants to be blue.
Morgan Park at PC Gamer was the first to put this community sentiment on the page, and I haven't been able to get that piece out of my head since, because it seems totally true. I've been playing since the last of the code-closed betas, and somewhere around thirty hours later, I can attest that Manticore and Valkyra close matches out at rates Lonestar doesn't match—not nearly. But nobody seems to agree on whether Lonestar is truly, actually, materially disadvantaged either, and I find that fascinating—especially when believing that to be true might have become the real disadvantage after all.
While first documenting the standoff, Park floated several theories about why the Blue team seems to be so troubled. The first was cosmetic: Lonestar's blue pants and patches make its players easier to spot in forested terrain, and I want to back that up before taking it somewhere else. First, though, an admission — in certain FPS circles, I would be called a Bush-Wookie — which means I spend matches lying in foliage trying to remove heads at whatever range the map allows with any one of WARDOGS snipers. Yes, I am proud of it.
Particularly because, in this case, the habit has given me a detailed sense of what each faction looks like from four hundred meters away, and I feel pretty confident saying that these teams are not created equal, at least not as much as they maybe should be. As a member of the lean, mean, green team, I have managed five to ten unsuppressed Mosin kills from inside a hundred meters playing as a recon, out of a bush of unremarkable size; palying as Valkyra or Lonestar, that just doesn't seem to work the same way. But navy against terrain is no worse than black, so I'd posit that the primary color may be doing Lonestar a small favor—the real problem is that, depending on the appearance you draw, Lonestar players have bare forearms under a flesh-toned helmet that reads as a human head, even at a distance.
It's a small shift in focus from blue to a pinkish hue, but the distinction is important, because every experienced FPS player runs a constant background scan for human-shaped, human-colored objects in the scenery, even when running and gunning as an assault. What's nice about this theory is that it's one Bulkhead can adjust much more easily. But it doesn't really account for how totally outmatched Lonestar seems to be across most WARDOGS matches, so it's worth exploring a bit further.
The second common theory is geographic. Lonestar usually starts in the southernmost corners of maps while Manticore and Valkyra start west and east, which supposedly sets blue up for a permanent two-front war. I think Park and certain players online are right that the headquarters aren't spaced evenly degrees-wise, but that geometry hardly translates into anything tangible, and there's more material evidence to be found on the map POI's like towers.
For one, when I checked my own game time against the community mapping resource MetaForge, I didn't really feel the sandwich problem works out. On Bakurani, Lonestar can open with more effective progress toward two towers—towers 1 and 5—than anyone else, and those sit close enough together that splitting to hold them costs Lonestar less effort than Manticore's pair, though one seems harder to hold. Zestafona does seem to have a noticeable Manticore advantage, but the asymmetry seems evenly split between the red and blue teams in practice.
The third common theory is a bit more heady, and I do mean that literally. It follows that players think that the Blue team is bad, or gets a bad deal, so they actively avoid it, which causes a sort of snowball effect, leading to an eventual loss comprised of newer WARDOGS players or those who don't know the stereotype. That's certainly the most fun answer, though it's more than a bit more complex, and potentially a bit gaslight-y, so I put it to the test.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://gamerant.com/wardogs-multiplayer-lonestar-blue-team-balance-problem/
