Wardogs Will Ban Players Who Use Low In-Game Settings On Good PCs

Wardogs Threatens To Ban Players Over In-Game Setting Bulkhead Published Nov 8, 2026, 10:18 AM EST James Lucas is the Lead Photo Editor at TheGamer and has worked in professional journalism since 2018. A Newcastle University graduate with a degree in Journalism, Media, and Culture, they have written hundreds of guides, news stories, and original reports, with bylines in IGN, NME, GaymingMag, and VG247, sourcing interviews with studio heads, legendary industry figures, prominent actors, and more. You can reach them at James.t@thegamer.com I've never been that sweaty about playing competitive shooters. I used to run around in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with an M249 trying to get an ace, or crouch spam in PUBG to try and make friends. But I have played with people who cranked the resolution down to 800x600 to make targets appear stretched and easier to hit, or turned shadows off completely. They're in-game settings, so it's fair game, even if it's a little OTT. Wardogs, bizarrely, disagrees. In a new post outlining its plans for Season 3, developer Bulkhead claimed that lowering in-game settings is now a bannable offense if your computer is good enough to handle higher-end settings. Basically, the team acknowledges that lower settings offer an advantage in competitive play, but only those with lower-end hardware are allowed to use them. It's one thing to go after aimbot and wallhacks, but targeting players for their in-game settings is overreaching a little. Wardogs has an ultra-low 'potato shadows' setting that effectively removes them to improve performance. "In Wardogs we don't allow users to set 'potato shadows' via in-game settings unless we've detected their hardware is min spec," the announcement reads. "In Season 3, we will be forcing a reset of this setting on launch to prevent users who don't need this setting using it. If you force a workaround to this (to be clear, specifically potato shadows NOT potato mode) on higher end hardware than the users it's intended for, we will consider this bannable from Season 3." The Problem With Banning People For An In-Game Setting Via the Steam store page. There are already a few glaring problems with this idea. For one, not everyone will read the patch notes or look at social media, and risk being blindsided by a ban simply for changing their in-game settings—not modifying game files or downloading cheats, changing the in-game settings. There's also the risk of false flags, as computer specs only tell one side of the story. Aged or damaged hardware may no longer run optimally, meaning players need lower settings despite their specs looking good on paper. In-game settings exist so that you can tweak a game to your preference. Risking a ban by changing them breaks a fundamental contract between players and devs: you're supposed to be able to tinker with the settings without worrying about being punished for it. Someone may reduce their graphics simply to achieve a higher framerate, rather than to gain the upper hand. Or maybe they just like how the game looks on lower settings. The reason doesn't matter. If they're in the game, they're fair use. Potato shadows were implemented to allow those with lower-end PCs to play Wardogs, but offering an advantage to one group of players while banning another for using it has drawn flak, and the community is baffled that an in-game setting is now considered an offense. It's a little unusual, to say the least. Systems Released August 10, 2026 Developer(s) Bulkhead Publisher(s) Team17 Multiplayer Online Multiplayer, Online Co-Op Number of Players Single-player Genre(s) First-Person Shooter, Tactical, Action, War & Military, Multiplayer