It started as a running joke among the Wardogs community. Then the delayed match starts began. Now players are actively refusing to pick a specific faction — and those who get stuck with it are starting matches already fighting an uphill battle that has nothing to do with the opposing team.
The faction in question is Lonestar, the Western PMC-flavoured blue team in Wardogs, Bulkhead’s breakout military shooter. It has developed a reputation that is doing real damage to the game’s matchmaking.
The Three Factions — and Why Blue Gets All the Blame
In Wardogs, 100 players split across three factions: Lonestar (blue, the Western private military contractor), Valkyra (red, a force seeking to restore a Soviet-era republic), and Manticore (green, the Kingdom of Persia’s shadow army). None of the three factions differ mechanically — same weapons, same vehicles, same economy. Choosing Lonestar does not make you weaker on paper.
The problem is that Lonestar has developed a self-reinforcing reputation as the faction that attracts the newest, least experienced players. The theory most commonly floated in the community is straightforward: it appears first in the selection list, so players who are new to Wardogs and haven’t read up on the meta tend to pick it by default, without realising any stigma exists.
This creates a feedback loop. Veterans avoid Lonestar to dodge bad teammates. That leaves more inexperienced players selecting it. Those matches tend to go badly. The reputation worsens. More veterans avoid it. And so on.
Matches Delayed Because Players Won’t Pick Lonestar
The stigma has moved past online discourse into the actual game. Players on Reddit have reported matches with delayed starts because nobody in the lobby is willing to fill the Lonestar slots. The faction has become so actively avoided by experienced players that some matches simply cannot start — Wardogs requires a minimum player count per faction, and if experienced players refuse to pick blue, the game sits and waits.
Viral clips of Lonestar matches circulating on social media have done nothing to help the faction’s reputation, with some showcasing the kind of chaotic, self-defeating play that becomes common when a team is disproportionately composed of players on their first few sessions.
Lonestar has a stigma of attracting the stupidest players — that’s the blunt assessment circulating across Wardogs forums, subreddits, and community Discords.
In Wardogs, there are moments when Lonestar pulls off an upset — the faction does sometimes win, and community posts celebrating underdog Lonestar victories exist. But the consensus is that these are exceptions, not the rule.
Will Wardogs Do Anything About It?
Bulkhead has not publicly addressed the Lonestar stigma yet, but it is the kind of community-level issue that tends to prompt developer attention once it starts affecting basic matchmaking functionality. Potential solutions discussed by players include randomising faction order in the selection screen, adjusting how new players are introduced to faction choice, or — more dramatically — adding a brief matchmaking protection period for first-time players that assigns them across factions more evenly.
Whether any of that happens remains to be seen. Wardogs is still in early access, having launched on Steam on 10 September 2026 at $39.99 after selling more than a million copies before launch day. The game sits near the top of Steam’s most-played charts, and the positive momentum is considerable — console players will have to wait until 2028 for Xbox and PS5 versions. For now, Bulkhead has every reason to maintain that goodwill, and Lonestar’s reputation is a friction point that affects real players in real matches.
The faction wars in Wardogs were supposed to play out on the Control Zone map. Instead, the most decisive battle is being fought in the team selection screen — and right now, Lonestar is losing it before the match even starts.
Bulkhead is a Derby-based British studio, and the game’s success has been one of the stronger indie shooter stories of 2026. Publisher Team17 is backing the title without the monetisation baggage that has followed other games in the genre. All of that goodwill is easier to maintain when the basic social dynamics of the three factions aren’t actively breaking the matchmaking loop. The Lonestar problem is fixable. The question is how long it takes.
