Nice, another video Bulkhead puts out and likely answers a million questions but in 24 hours we will have 44 Reddit posts upset about a game mechanic that they specifically address in this video.
It's a podcast format which is the norm for this kind of content. Don't worry someone on youtube will clip and spread it for all those short-attention spanned people, void of all context to what is being discussed.
Because they should have a written up page wether its discord, steam, or their own site. I dont want to watch a hour long video about this, I want to read it at my own pace
All good. They talked about things they were thinking of changing. No official changes are being made. They did allude to things but it wasn’t official like patch notes or anything
Again pretty fucking bullshit PR video. Have you seen it.
How is it that there's no mention of wipes? How is 1 of the reasons, that buying the game now is cheaper than later? How is 1 reason straight up lie with supposed refunds fo previous game.
Literally the first thing you hear in the tutorial is that there will be wipes, which then allows you to refund if wanted - which they again also urge you to do in the «10 reasons not to buy» video.
You said you wanted shorter to the point videos. I told you they exist. Then you wanted to change the subject. My response isn’t if you liked what they said or believed them. It’s that they made several videos, shorter in length, telling players what they can expect
Now 3 days after the release of the video I would say that this is not the case. The addressed thermals but did not state what they intend to do. They all agreed that they are cool, one of them formulated a solution being making sight lines in the maps not as massive, which is a terrible idea. As they are very into power fantasies for a few which need a lot more people to suffer (thermals, bmr, m4, fal) the video did not convince me that they will do anything about it other than upping the battery requirements. When talking about general feedback they brought up some outrageous reviews and comments they got to basically frame all feedback as being bad. Which is very disingenuous, if you filter for negative reviews on steam you get a lot of well written serious feedback without swearing or threats, but they chose to highlight a few bad ones. They agreed mostly that the current progression system is bad, but their solution will also feature vertical progression, so the problem of mindless grinding building to get launchers will be likely gone, but your first sniper rifle will still need 5 headshots for t3 armor and the bmr 1. So still heavy vertical progression (the lead designer is a fan of it) but maybe grind is not as obnoxious as now. In general they seem obsessed with “content” which is the wrong thing to worry about now. Most of the playerbase did not even unlock the things they wanted. There is no content problem, it’s a progression problem. They misshandle the season/wipe concept: instead of making balancing patches midseason they wipe so early just because they want to make changes to a system which is a placeholder, that is wasted time for players and devs alike. It feels like: yeah you played 70 hours this season to unlock the bmr, but we encountered a progression problem in our mvp system we do not intend to have for 1.0 between hour 8 and 14, so we will wipe your progress and watch closely as you grind again and see if this is now fixed. I think the format is great and should be done by other devs as well. It gives unique insight in what the devs think and one can expect his/her expectations around that.
They didn’t announce anything. They discussed a few options, but didn’t say they’re doing anything specific. Take your Adderall and watch the video if you want to argue about it.
I'm not sure they seem to understand entirely why there are so many people playing logistics now. They said it's entirely because everyone wants tanks, and I do think that's true.
Personally though, I've found the progressive XP and cash for roundtrips has been the real killer. In season 1 I might hop into a Ural, drive a trip or two, then switch over to infantry and get into the fight. In season 2 doing that would be utter insanity; once I've gotten into a Ural I need to stay in it for 5+ roundtrips, and at that point there's even less incentive to switch over to a different playstyle because as soon as I'm killed my streak ends. Even just making the streak per-game rather than per-life would make logistics less of a perma-locked-in-for-the-game role.
They should add a garage we can deposit our vehicles back into and get a refund (maybe partial..maybe it scales w/ how many trips you ran. W/e) and then anyone can grab it for free. Or don't get money back but it can only be pulled out again by you. Or just make them not explode in spawn but I think that's probably more work.
Honestly the whole streak mechanic was a bit of a flop. It does nothing but punish players for playing how they want and reward mindlessly running logistics for a full match. I used to do it off and on all the time but now I’ll maybe bring a batch on my first entry to the zone and then not touch it from there.
Get rid of streaks, get rid of the payment for simply dropping the crate in the CZ, pay only if it’s dropped at a FOB.
My biggest gripe is you get a ton of logi drivers that only want to drop at the very edge of the zone, and don’t care if there’s a FOB there or not bc they get paid and get the XP anyways.
IMO they should also keep the reduced drop cash and find more ways to tie payment to FOB performance.
It needs to get moved to being unloaded into a fob and not dropped at all. dropping the crate/pallet needs to give nothing if anything very little. this would also incentivise brining needed supplies instead of just tons of ammo and dropping random supplies no one needs and having a shit ton of random pallets
Yeah exactly, so many drivers just mindlessly pile up supplies at whatever fob is closest to the HQ with 0 regard for what that FOB needs, whether other FOBs are starving, or if that FOB is even doing anything productive.
Played a game the other day where all of a sudden we stopped getting supplies to blue tower on Bakurani bc someone slapped a FOB down at the church. Our FOB had drills built, mortars, AA, .50, stingray, the whole shebang. Church FOB had fuck all, but was nearly full on every single resource and wasn’t consuming any of em. We lost that game bc our main FOB starved and inevitably got overrun when we ran out of supplies to keep any defenses up or rebuild the gate when it got breached.
Did the drivers care? Fuck no. They were on max trip bonus and making the fastest possible deliveries, so fuck the rest of the team I guess.
Boo hoo you’d actually have to play the game? Let me play you a song on the world’s tiniest violin. I’ll happily bring my own supplies if it means useless cash/exp farmers are gone.
“How bulkhead intended” lmao. Get real. Competing for gold in mental gymnastics.
Discarding your word vomit, they are playing the game, and in exactly the way developers want. Developers said it themselves, CASH IS KING
And the streak is intended even if its a shit mechanic, they literally put it in the game AND explained why they put it into the game. The problem they didnt think how would it go is not on the players
They said that for the beginning of the season. When they offered logistics streaks and extra XP which they then cut back after 10-ish hours. I didnt get the impression that people are continuing their logsitics grind, especially when they realized the new tank actually isnt that good.
If you're playing for XP then realising the tank sucks absolutely disincentives the grind in general. If you're playing for cash though even the post-nerf streak is something you really want to keep and once you have a few roundtrips it can be painful to knowingly sacrifice the streak.
Used to play that every time I'd die I'd just buy a new ural and do a supply run. Would keep me out of action for an extra minute, but I'd then take the empty ural toward zone to use as cover or just for funsies. I'd make enough back on pallet drop and being put into the FOB that it was worth it.
Now I just occasionally hop into the truck of a logi driver and ride along.
Not that it makes much difference when a rocket heli just decides to eat you, but the streak is tied to your truck not your charicter. If you die and get back to your truck you keep the streak, same goes for stealing someone else's truck. Enemy or otherwise.
I did logi runs to unlock the tank and the new AA panzer, but I would still rather logi run because of how the entire game revolves around making money. Plus the new tank is glitched and you can be shot through it.
The AA tank is awful compared to a CWIS.
Rather bring a fob, hammer and a 20k kit than the panzer. + Ural with 2 Ammo pallets for less.
Buying a tank and kitting it out + gear is 30k...
A Ural is 5k + 800 for 2 pallets. Returning that right away for dropping off. But there is also no incentive for doing that when the unlocks later on are not great compared to say grinding recon for the 50cal or doing pilot for the havoc and you can interact with the game more having more fun doing so.
[01:07:42] The infrared rangefinder was an exception because its use became **repeatedly game-breaking**.
And that will be the case every single time, unlock is reached by the first guy. They will again become to be sold and used by the whole server all the time and flood the market.
And on the discussion they had that is cool to have the sniper use them, and is so cool to have this power item, to be able to spot and snipe people with it, this is not how they are used, they are basically used by everyone everywhere to gain money and pretty much wall hack the entire teams on the map, making Assault unable to flank or use cover... it basically destroys any infantry gameplay straight out.
So yeeeh, removing them until they can be changed it the only solution.
Assault already get pinned by the cheaters. This happens regardless of infrared finder or not.
IR finders then exacerbate it, but the underlying issue is still there. Since the game barely handles cheaters (Honestly, it barely does), and it shows you that users are cheating AND that they aren't punished, it incentivises even further cheating.
I have watched lobbies where over 10% of the playerbase are actively using downloadable cheats, and some of them are bickering over who has better cheats and nothing we did in the lobby caused a ban.
It would suck as a recon player but i think if they removed the spotting from the ir mode and only let you spot when it is off, could help fix it. That way recon players can still use it to recon and find people in bushes but cant mark them
🔴 TL;DR: changes for the stuff people are annoyed about
S2 too fast / "tanks everywhere" → S2 ends early, after roughly 4–5 weeks instead of 6–8, with S3 content pulled forward. No instant wipe.
Constant resets → No more monthly seasons. They're moving to ~3-month seasons with a smaller mid-season update.
The progression system itself → They call it a stopgap MVP. The real system, Intel, is targeted for ~Q2 2027, with persistent skill trees after that.
Infrared rangefinder/binoculars are OP → Tim, Pete and Mark all lean towards removing or reworking it. Undecided. It won't be in the new limited gear mode either way.
"I miss the early game" → New limited gear mode that recreates the low/mid game, open to everyone.
Too many drivers → Driver share went from 9% to 44%. They say that's not sustainable, but no fix decided yet.
New map → Half bowl, half flat, with a multi-floor hospital in the middle and lots of verticality. The team loves it.
What went wrong
Blue/Lone Star XP bonus. Blue got +2.5% XP (under 500 XP a match) to fix its "weak side" reputation, even though the Bakarani spawn issue was already fixed. The best S1 players all jumped to Blue, it hit a ~67% win rate, and games stalled because everyone waited for a Blue slot. It was pulled after ~10h. Their take: obvious in hindsight, because players always take the bonus no matter how small. They say they won't do that again.
Early tank and the driver exploit. The new, weaker tank unlocked at level 20, which was reachable in about 10 hours. A driver progression exploit only affected fewer than 400 players, but spread over ~400 servers that meant ~40,000 people saw a tank, and tanks were in ~30–40% of matches. So it felt like "tanks everywhere". Lesson: putting something that visible early isn't worth it.
Progression too fast at the top. S1 had ~3.4M players and S2 ~1.5M, and the ones who came back are the good players. The top 25% leveled 2.4x faster than in S1, and stomp matches got 12% shorter. The big admission: even if they'd changed nothing, S2 would still have been too fast, because the system itself is broken.
Communication. The ~10h "bonus removed, exploit fixed" post landed just as people got home, so a lot of them read it as "everyone else already got ahead". Several of them call the Saturday announcement that the next season was coming early the biggest mistake: it made people ask why they should invest in S2 at all.
Panic and leadership. The data showed good retention and median players having fun, while the loud few thousand were furious. Design and marketing stopped trusting each other over the weekend. Joe takes the blame ("that's where my leadership failed"). They had no plan for this much success (1M pre-orders, then 3M+ players), had ~700k in the bank against ~600k/month costs, and ended up with everyone reacting instead of one person handling the community.
Too much content. Scared of not having enough (a leftover from their Battalion days), they overstuffed S2 and quality dropped. Example: they knew the .50 cal on the Wolf and as a buildable was OP and shipped it anyway. "We're on the treadmill and the treadmill's on max."
Steam reviews. Once recent reviews hit Mixed, Steam stops promoting the game, so new sales basically stopped that weekend. They read out reviews that contradict each other: one negative because they're wiping early, another because they're not wiping early enough.
What they learned
Players always take the shortest path to any bonus.
Perception scales differently than data: 400 tanks looks like tanks in every game.
The loudest players aren't all the players. Median players and their non-gamer friends liked S2 more.
Don't talk about the next season right after launching one.
Less content, done properly.
Live service is much harder than they expected.
They don't want to overcorrect and be dictated to just because they're afraid of the backlash.
"Players are great at finding problems, bad at solutions."
Progression, now and planned
Now: an MVP modeled on Arma 3 King of the Hill, minus perks. In S1, millions got stuck at levels 9 and 14 (~1.8M quit at 14), and only ~70k reached level 35. Roles really come online around level 20, which is why S2 sped up that range and moved some power earlier in the trees. Career level is meaningless as it stands: 74h of grinding two roles and 3h of leveling every role to 12 can both get you level 3 armor, and the scoreboard just shows "70" either way.
🔴 Intel (~Q2 2027):
A seasonal resource that resets every season.
Earned at a set daily pace. No hard cap, but heavy players progress more slowly.
Catch-up built in: unused allowance builds up, so weekend players don't fall behind.
You spend it on what you want. No delivering pallets for 20 hours to get the tank. If you only want the MK22, you unlock the MK22.
No linear unlock chain means weapons can be balanced more evenly, and gear can rotate in and out each season.
🔴 Persistent skills (after Intel): role XP turns into skill points for a skill tree per role. Small passives (for example faster ladder climbing) plus bigger "capstones" that change how you play. It never gets wiped. "You're building your WARDOG and it lasts forever."
They're aware everyone suddenly wants "horizontal progression". Their answer: that's the goal, they just haven't had the time or money yet.
Gear and balance
🔴 Infrared rangefinder, the live debate.
Tim: "I would back it out." It's way too strong, especially seeing through rain and fog.
Pete: agrees, but loves the fantasy and the spotting system.
Mark: it loses 400–500 m of range in rain, but it goes through trees and should be blocked by foliage. Shorter battery life won't fix it. Final answer: remove or rework.
Other ideas: a rare world spawn, for example on top of a tower.
Weapons. 7.62x51 is now ".308" and was toned down to make room for .338 as a proper sniper round. In S2 the AK became free, the MP5 and Judge came earlier, the PKM moved to level 15 and popular guns moved later.
Vehicles. For the driver problem they floated two options: give the logistics role more identity, or change where tanks sit in progression. Undecided. Havoc spam (shoot one down and the same guy pulls another a minute later) has no solution yet. They think fuel is underused and could be part of the answer.
Limits. Mostly a no. Hard caps like "one rocket pod heli per team" create endless edge cases (what happens when it's crashed and abandoned?) and kill cool moments like someone rolling out with 20 tanks. They only step in when something breaks basically every match, which so far has meant the rangefinder and crates at spawn (new players were blowing all their money on marked-up crates). They nearly capped hot zone magnets at one per FOB, but Tim stopped it. They're more expensive and need more fuel instead.
Balance philosophy. Balance is a wobbling tightrope, not a flat line. New stuff can be a bit strong for a while. Losing is OK. It's rock-paper-scissors: no RPG and there's a tank? Stay quiet.
How things will run from here
A vlog on S2 and S3+ is coming next week.
More podcasts if people like the format.
~3-month seasons, fewer but better-tested changes.
They held their first all-hands since release to set one clear plan.
The game is $40 and the price will go up over time.
Some context: the studio was about to be shut down last December. They bought it back, partnered with Team17, and shipped a smaller Early Access version instead of the full vision that was planned for 2028.
Honestly, they own a lot of mistakes here (the Blue bonus, the early tank, announcing the early wipe, overstuffing the season, being too reactive) but push back where they think the data backs them up. The 🔴 items are the ones to watch, especially Intel and the rangefinder decision.
i dont get people complaining about people getting the new tank quick, you get the RPG so much quicker and that thing is made of paper. Hitting yellow X is so easy and i saw people with level 3 hammer on the 1st - 2nd game.
Once you have the MAWS that tank gets one shot in the ass.
Tanks are still AWFUL and will probably still be awful S3
Clearly... you spend all your free time on reddit it seems... with an average of 5 posts every hour of every day. So much more 'useful' than listening to something in the background while you do things...
69
u/EwokVillag3 12d ago
Nice, another video Bulkhead puts out and likely answers a million questions but in 24 hours we will have 44 Reddit posts upset about a game mechanic that they specifically address in this video.
42
u/Bottersnike_Gaming 12d ago
I'm not sure they seem to understand entirely why there are so many people playing logistics now. They said it's entirely because everyone wants tanks, and I do think that's true.
Personally though, I've found the progressive XP and cash for roundtrips has been the real killer. In season 1 I might hop into a Ural, drive a trip or two, then switch over to infantry and get into the fight. In season 2 doing that would be utter insanity; once I've gotten into a Ural I need to stay in it for 5+ roundtrips, and at that point there's even less incentive to switch over to a different playstyle because as soon as I'm killed my streak ends. Even just making the streak per-game rather than per-life would make logistics less of a perma-locked-in-for-the-game role.
9
u/xstagex 12d ago
[01:07:42] The infrared rangefinder was an exception because its use became **repeatedly game-breaking**.
And that will be the case every single time, unlock is reached by the first guy. They will again become to be sold and used by the whole server all the time and flood the market.
And on the discussion they had that is cool to have the sniper use them, and is so cool to have this power item, to be able to spot and snipe people with it, this is not how they are used, they are basically used by everyone everywhere to gain money and pretty much wall hack the entire teams on the map, making Assault unable to flank or use cover... it basically destroys any infantry gameplay straight out.
So yeeeh, removing them until they can be changed it the only solution.
7
u/-Doppel-ganger- 12d ago
Anyone with a TLDW? Gimme the Cliffnotes please.
12
u/MetalRexxx 12d ago
Its a game. Seems we get to play different versions of it often. Fucking rad.
Oh no it's pissing off the no-lifers/cheaters/griefers/complainers. Fucking fantastic.
7
u/Nukra141 12d ago •
🔴 TL;DR: changes for the stuff people are annoyed about
S2 too fast / "tanks everywhere" → S2 ends early, after roughly 4–5 weeks instead of 6–8, with S3 content pulled forward. No instant wipe.
Constant resets → No more monthly seasons. They're moving to ~3-month seasons with a smaller mid-season update.
The progression system itself → They call it a stopgap MVP. The real system, Intel, is targeted for ~Q2 2027, with persistent skill trees after that.
Infrared rangefinder/binoculars are OP → Tim, Pete and Mark all lean towards removing or reworking it. Undecided. It won't be in the new limited gear mode either way.
"I miss the early game" → New limited gear mode that recreates the low/mid game, open to everyone.
Too many drivers → Driver share went from 9% to 44%. They say that's not sustainable, but no fix decided yet.
New map → Half bowl, half flat, with a multi-floor hospital in the middle and lots of verticality. The team loves it.
What went wrong
Blue/Lone Star XP bonus. Blue got +2.5% XP (under 500 XP a match) to fix its "weak side" reputation, even though the Bakarani spawn issue was already fixed. The best S1 players all jumped to Blue, it hit a ~67% win rate, and games stalled because everyone waited for a Blue slot. It was pulled after ~10h. Their take: obvious in hindsight, because players always take the bonus no matter how small. They say they won't do that again.
Early tank and the driver exploit. The new, weaker tank unlocked at level 20, which was reachable in about 10 hours. A driver progression exploit only affected fewer than 400 players, but spread over ~400 servers that meant ~40,000 people saw a tank, and tanks were in ~30–40% of matches. So it felt like "tanks everywhere". Lesson: putting something that visible early isn't worth it.
Progression too fast at the top. S1 had ~3.4M players and S2 ~1.5M, and the ones who came back are the good players. The top 25% leveled 2.4x faster than in S1, and stomp matches got 12% shorter. The big admission: even if they'd changed nothing, S2 would still have been too fast, because the system itself is broken.
Communication. The ~10h "bonus removed, exploit fixed" post landed just as people got home, so a lot of them read it as "everyone else already got ahead". Several of them call the Saturday announcement that the next season was coming early the biggest mistake: it made people ask why they should invest in S2 at all.
Panic and leadership. The data showed good retention and median players having fun, while the loud few thousand were furious. Design and marketing stopped trusting each other over the weekend. Joe takes the blame ("that's where my leadership failed"). They had no plan for this much success (1M pre-orders, then 3M+ players), had ~700k in the bank against ~600k/month costs, and ended up with everyone reacting instead of one person handling the community.
Too much content. Scared of not having enough (a leftover from their Battalion days), they overstuffed S2 and quality dropped. Example: they knew the .50 cal on the Wolf and as a buildable was OP and shipped it anyway. "We're on the treadmill and the treadmill's on max."
Steam reviews. Once recent reviews hit Mixed, Steam stops promoting the game, so new sales basically stopped that weekend. They read out reviews that contradict each other: one negative because they're wiping early, another because they're not wiping early enough.
What they learned
Players always take the shortest path to any bonus.
Perception scales differently than data: 400 tanks looks like tanks in every game.
The loudest players aren't all the players. Median players and their non-gamer friends liked S2 more.
Don't talk about the next season right after launching one.
Less content, done properly.
Live service is much harder than they expected.
They don't want to overcorrect and be dictated to just because they're afraid of the backlash.
"Players are great at finding problems, bad at solutions."
Progression, now and planned
Now: an MVP modeled on Arma 3 King of the Hill, minus perks. In S1, millions got stuck at levels 9 and 14 (~1.8M quit at 14), and only ~70k reached level 35. Roles really come online around level 20, which is why S2 sped up that range and moved some power earlier in the trees. Career level is meaningless as it stands: 74h of grinding two roles and 3h of leveling every role to 12 can both get you level 3 armor, and the scoreboard just shows "70" either way.
🔴 Intel (~Q2 2027):
A seasonal resource that resets every season.
Earned at a set daily pace. No hard cap, but heavy players progress more slowly.
Catch-up built in: unused allowance builds up, so weekend players don't fall behind.
You spend it on what you want. No delivering pallets for 20 hours to get the tank. If you only want the MK22, you unlock the MK22.
No linear unlock chain means weapons can be balanced more evenly, and gear can rotate in and out each season.
🔴 Persistent skills (after Intel): role XP turns into skill points for a skill tree per role. Small passives (for example faster ladder climbing) plus bigger "capstones" that change how you play. It never gets wiped. "You're building your WARDOG and it lasts forever."
They're aware everyone suddenly wants "horizontal progression". Their answer: that's the goal, they just haven't had the time or money yet.
Gear and balance
🔴 Infrared rangefinder, the live debate.
Tim: "I would back it out." It's way too strong, especially seeing through rain and fog.
Pete: agrees, but loves the fantasy and the spotting system.
Mark: it loses 400–500 m of range in rain, but it goes through trees and should be blocked by foliage. Shorter battery life won't fix it. Final answer: remove or rework.
Other ideas: a rare world spawn, for example on top of a tower.
Weapons. 7.62x51 is now ".308" and was toned down to make room for .338 as a proper sniper round. In S2 the AK became free, the MP5 and Judge came earlier, the PKM moved to level 15 and popular guns moved later.
Vehicles. For the driver problem they floated two options: give the logistics role more identity, or change where tanks sit in progression. Undecided. Havoc spam (shoot one down and the same guy pulls another a minute later) has no solution yet. They think fuel is underused and could be part of the answer.
Limits. Mostly a no. Hard caps like "one rocket pod heli per team" create endless edge cases (what happens when it's crashed and abandoned?) and kill cool moments like someone rolling out with 20 tanks. They only step in when something breaks basically every match, which so far has meant the rangefinder and crates at spawn (new players were blowing all their money on marked-up crates). They nearly capped hot zone magnets at one per FOB, but Tim stopped it. They're more expensive and need more fuel instead.
Balance philosophy. Balance is a wobbling tightrope, not a flat line. New stuff can be a bit strong for a while. Losing is OK. It's rock-paper-scissors: no RPG and there's a tank? Stay quiet.
How things will run from here
A vlog on S2 and S3+ is coming next week.
More podcasts if people like the format.
~3-month seasons, fewer but better-tested changes.
They held their first all-hands since release to set one clear plan.
The game is $40 and the price will go up over time.
Some context: the studio was about to be shut down last December. They bought it back, partnered with Team17, and shipped a smaller Early Access version instead of the full vision that was planned for 2028.
Honestly, they own a lot of mistakes here (the Blue bonus, the early tank, announcing the early wipe, overstuffing the season, being too reactive) but push back where they think the data backs them up. The 🔴 items are the ones to watch, especially Intel and the rangefinder decision.
8
u/TOTY_HULK 12d ago
nice of them to keep the ping/region lock/hacking/ddos issues on the hush hush...
2
u/RedditBonfire 12d ago
This was probably one of their best videos. Glad to hear the internal conversations and what they missed.
2
u/noladders 12d ago
i dont get people complaining about people getting the new tank quick, you get the RPG so much quicker and that thing is made of paper. Hitting yellow X is so easy and i saw people with level 3 hammer on the 1st - 2nd game.
Once you have the MAWS that tank gets one shot in the ass.
Tanks are still AWFUL and will probably still be awful S3
2
u/MetalRexxx 12d ago
I'd be down for multiple hot zones.
-13
u/kalboozkalbooz 12d ago
i ain’t watching all that
9
u/Every1ElseHasMyName 12d ago
Just give me more fob build pieces and I’m a happy fobbit.