Look, let's be honest—Wardogs, the tactical FPS that seemingly came out of nowhere last September to grab a slice of the pie, is already putting up walls. The developer has announced that it is dropping the maximum server ping limit to 175 in a heavy-handed bid to stamp out cheaters. The grand plan is to keep low-ping players cozy in their own backyards, but unsurprisingly, this brilliant stroke of management has gone down like a lead balloon with the local player base in South Korea.

Bulkhead, the studio behind Wardogs, took to its official X account on October 22 to announce that the wheels are finally turning on what it calls "controlling regions." In what the publisher frames as a noble crusade to shield honest players from an influx of dubious traffic originating from regions with a suspiciously high appetite for illicit software, the maximum ping ceiling is getting lopped off down to 175.

As you probably know, ping is the digital leash tying you to the server—the further away the physical tin cans are, the worse it gets. If you are playing alongside neighbours on the same continent, you can usually expect a tidy 10 to 100ms. But try piping a connection all the way from Asia across to North America or Europe, and that number balloons nicely to somewhere between 150 and 200.

In other words, while the studio is playing it coy and dodging the elephant in the room, Bulkhead is effectively slamming the door on specific territories where cheating has run rampant, leaning entirely on latency metrics to police who gets to play.

The developer admitted in a statement: "We are sorry that things had to deteriorate to this point. Ideally, we wanted to give certain regions a fair shake to clean up their act organically. Sadly, things did not pan out the way we hoped, and we will be tightening the screws on cross-region matchmaking moving forward."

Naturally, this announcement has triggered a wave of discontent among South Korean players, who have promptly taken their grievances to Steam user reviews. The general consensus points to a miserable situation on Asian servers, which are apparently being battered by DDoS attacks that crash matches left, right, and centre, alongside an endless parade of utility-abusing players from China. To escape this absolute circus, many had been safely hopping over to North American servers. Now, with the new ping cap in place, even that escape hatch has been bolted shut, leaving local players stranded. The overarching sentiment? It is the developer's bloody job to tackle cheating at the root, or at the very least, give China its own isolated quarantine servers.