Wardogs CEO says cash economy is its own best anticheat

Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer thinks Wardogs has a built-in edge against cheaters and exploiters — the game's own cash economy. Speaking to Polygon, he confirmed Wardogs will require hardware-level anticheat protections like secure boot and TPM 2.0, in line with most modern FPS games, but he's more interested in talking about what makes Wardogs specifically harder to exploit.

Every action in Wardogs earns players XP and cash, which they spend on weapons, equipment, and vehicles. Brammer says that economy makes unusual behavior easy to spot. "The nice thing about cash is we can clearly see abnormal behavior," he told Polygon. "What we see is probably very similar to what supermarkets see: people are very predictable in how they both spend and treat their money. So we can quickly start to map out what is an unusual behavior and what isn't." On top of detection, Wardogs also uses diminishing returns — repeat the same action over and over and each repetition pays out less cash, killing the incentive to grind a single exploit loop.

This kind of economy exploitation is a real problem for games in the extraction and looter-shooter space. Arc Raiders, which handles currency and XP differently but shares a similar cash-on-character mechanic, has been fighting duplication glitches throughout its lifespan — patch after patch claims to fix one method, and two more appear. Wardogs is a squad-based FPS from Bulkhead Interactive, published by Team17, and sits in a genre where an exploitable economy can unravel the whole game loop if left unchecked.

Brammer didn't detail every layer of Wardogs' anticheat setup, but the combination of behavioral detection and diminishing returns suggests Bulkhead has thought carefully about the problem before launch. Whether that holds up once players start stress-testing the system remains to be seen.