Anti-cheat9 September 2026 · Updated 14 September 20263 min read
Anti-cheat, and why the devs point at community servers
Two days before launch, BULKHEAD published a dev post about cheating. The advice in it is unusually direct for a studio, and it is worth reading properly if you care who you play with.
From BULKHEAD’s “The 11th Reason NOT to Buy WARDOGS” (8 September 2026): “use the in-game report function on official servers and for the ultimate protection, play on community hosted servers where admins can instantly ban bad actors.”
What they are actually saying
Most studios respond to cheating questions with a sentence about their anti-cheat vendor and nothing else. BULKHEAD did something different: they named the limits of automated detection and pointed players at human moderation as the stronger protection.
That is an honest position, and it matches how these games actually play out. Automated anti-cheat is reactive by nature — it catches a cheat after that cheat is known. A server admin watching a match does not need to wait for a signature update to remove somebody who is snapping through walls.
Official servers vs community servers
WARDOGS ships with both, and the difference is who can act when something goes wrong.
- Official servers. Run by the studio. Your tool is the in-game report function, and enforcement happens on the studio’s timeline — which is to say, not during your match.
- Community hosted servers. Run by a person or a group who rented the box. An admin who is present can remove a cheater immediately, and can ban them from coming back. The trade-off is that the quality of the server is the quality of the people running it.
That trade-off is the real point. A community server with absent admins is worse than an official one. A community server with people who actually play on it is meaningfully better.
The three approved hosting partners
Community servers are not a free-for-all. BULKHEAD named three approved hosting partners in that same announcement: QONZER, BisectHosting and xREALM. Servers ordered through those partners are the supported route for hosting a community server at Early Access launch.
Ours runs on QONZER, one of those three. That does not make us an official or developer-endorsed community — we are an independent South African group renting a box like anyone else — but it does mean the server itself is on the supported path rather than something bolted together.
What good moderation looks like in practice
“Admins can instantly ban bad actors” only helps if the admins are there. Worth asking of any community server before you invest time in it:
- Do the admins play on it? Someone in the match is worth more than someone on call.
- Is there somewhere to report outside the game? A Discord where you can post a clip beats hoping a report was seen.
- Are the rules written down? Vague rules mean inconsistent enforcement.
- Is it busy at your hours? A perfectly moderated empty server is still an empty server.
Ours is a South African community, our admins are in the Discord daily, the house rules are published on the front page, and cheating is a permanent ban with no appeal. That is not a boast — it is the checklist above, answered.
Do the boring thing as well
None of this replaces reporting. Use the in-game report function when you are on official servers, and post clips in your community’s Discord when you are on a community one. Detection improves with evidence, and a clip is evidence.
Our server is South African only, which has a side benefit worth naming: a much smaller pool of players, all on similar ping, all reachable in one Discord. See the South African ping problem for the main reason we do it.
Quotes taken from BULKHEAD’s official Steam announcement dated 8 September 2026.