Season 2 of Wardogs gave the players exactly what they spent Season 1 asking for. Progression is faster. Levels come quicker, unlocks arrive sooner, and the grind that turned so many people off in the early going has been cut down to something reasonable. Credit where it is due: the developers listened, and they delivered the thing the community demanded.

The problem is that faster progression does not fix what is actually broken with this game. It just gets you to the broken part faster.

The gap between Tier 1 gear and Tier 4 gear is not a gap. It is a canyon. A player in Tier 4 armor is, for practical purposes, unkillable by a newer player. You can do everything right: get the drop on him, hold the angle, put rounds where rounds are supposed to go, and it does not matter, because the armor table has already decided the fight before you pulled the trigger. That is not a skill issue and it is not a tactics issue. It is arithmetic, and the arithmetic says the new guy loses.

Speeding up progression was supposed to close that distance. What it actually does is deliver everyone to the imbalance sooner. The players with the hours to burn reach Tier 4 faster than they did in Season 1, and the players without the hours meet them there just as outgunned as before, only now it happens in week one instead of week three. The wall did not move. The road to it got shorter.

Which brings me to my own situation, and I suspect I am not the only one in it. I have a job. I cannot play 30 hours a week, and a game that demands that kind of time to be competitive has made its choice about who it is for. In my low level gear, every serious fight is David and Goliath, except in this version Goliath is wearing armor David’s sling cannot dent, and David knows it by the second round. Season 1, played at the pace of a man with a life, was genuinely fun, because the field was closer to level and fights were decided by players. Season 2, at the same pace, is a recurring appointment to be somebody’s highlight.

It is a shame, because the additions themselves are good. The new vehicles are a real improvement, they change how matches move and they are fun in their own right. The added weather is a nice touch too, the kind of atmosphere this genre lives on, and it makes the same maps feel different from one run to the next. The bones here are good. The developers can clearly build things players want. They built faster progression because players wanted it. What players need, and what nobody seems willing to do, is compress the tiers until gear is an advantage instead of a verdict.

So here is my verdict, and I do not enjoy writing it: Wardogs went from really fun to not so much, and the reason is balance, full stop. An alpha lives or dies on whether its player base sticks around long enough to become a community, and a new player who bounces off Tier 4 armor three fights in a row does not write a forum post. He uninstalls, and he tells his friends why. Players will drop off before this game ever gets out of alpha, and it will not have the staying power of a game like ARMA, which is still alive decades on because its fights were never decided by a spreadsheet before they started.

Fix the tiers, and I am back tomorrow. Leave them, and Season 3 will be played by the few hundred people wearing Tier 4, shooting at each other, wondering where everyone went.