Wardogs hit 300,000 players and the login queue lost the firefight

Three hundred thousand concurrent players on day one. For a 100-player milsim from a mid-sized studio, that's not a launch, that's a breach. And like every breach, the first thing to give way was the door.

Wardogs, Bulkhead's large-scale military shooter, went into Steam Early Access on September 10, blew past 300,000 concurrent players and sat on top of Steam's global top-seller chart. A lot of those people spent their first evening staring at a login queue, a "Join Timed Out" error, or both. At one point Bulkhead pulled the servers offline entirely, saying the problem was an issue that "wasn't present in the previous beta". Anyone already mid-match got dumped when things restarted.

That beta line is the part I keep chewing on. Bulkhead ran a series of closed tests, including a final weekend stress test right before launch, and I believe them that it held up. The catch is that a stress test is a rehearsal with the doors half open. The launch crowd isn't a bigger version of the beta crowd, it's a different animal: everyone hits login in the same ten minutes, every hiccup triggers a wave of reconnects, and the retry storm turns into its own load. If you've ever sat through a big ticket drop for a CS Major or a busy Valorant patch day, you know the shape of it.

Then there's the Valve angle. CEO Joe Brammer said the queues were partly down to the studio being rate-limited by Valve, adding that ideally they'd be "on a triple-A tier for some of this stuff, but we're not". Bulkhead says it's working with Valve to get that ceiling raised to what larger titles get. If that's accurate, it's a genuinely interesting admission: the limits a studio runs into on Steam are set before anyone knows how big launch day will be, and nobody had this game pencilled in for these numbers.

Is it fair to hang the whole mess on Valve? No. Queue design, backoff logic and how aggressively your client retries are on the developer, and "an issue that wasn't in the beta" is Bulkhead's own bug by definition. But the rate-limit point isn't an excuse pulled out of thin air either. Later in the day players were told to get ready to download a new client build through Steam, and by the evening servers appeared to be coming back.

For the competitive crowd, though, the queue is the least interesting problem. Queues end. What I actually want to know is what happens once 100 players are inside one server: how the tick rate holds when half the lobby is in the same firefight, whether hit registration stays honest at range, and what the client's 1% lows look like when the whole map is going off at once. None of that shows up in a concurrent-player graph, and none of it gets fixed by Valve bumping a rate limit.

Bulkhead has already proven that a huge number of people want a 100-player milsim. The next couple of weeks decide whether they stick around once the login screen stops being the hardest boss in the game.

Image: Indrajit Das / CC BY-SA 3.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:139_Server_Room_01.jpg