The Game Shipped Without a Ranked Mode. So We Built One.
WARDOGS ships on Steam Early Access this week with no ranked mode and no skill-based matchmaking. Bulkhead Interactive built it as a throwback: a traditional server browser, community servers, 100-player chaos. We love that. But 650,000+ wishlists and a 16,000-player playtest peak told us players would want something to climb. So we built one.
HOWL is the competitive ranked platform for WARDOGS: placements, a seasonal ladder, tiers from Stray to Alpha, full match history, and a Discord bot living where the community already is. We built it in four weeks, then deleted a third of it in a single day.
Start with the rating problem
WARDOGS is a three-faction game. VALKYRA, LONESTAR and MANTICORE fight to 100 zone points per match, and classic Elo only understands "beat" and "lost to". We needed an engine that rates first, second and third place as first-class outcomes.
We landed on OpenSkill's PlackettLuce model, the Weng-Lin system. Each player carries a hidden mu/sigma pair. Your visible HOWL Rating is 60 × (mu − 3σ): a conservative estimate of your skill that rises as the system gains confidence in you. Ten placement games per mode. Miss days and your uncertainty inflates, but your skill estimate never decays. Seasons run about three months with a soft reset.
Before trusting the JavaScript implementation, we validated it against the Python reference with replayable test vectors. Worst relative error: 1.6e-16, machine precision. When someone loses rating on a technicality, the math is beyond argument.
Three ways to compete
- Pack Arena. 8v8v8, guns-only, best-of-5 rounds on a fixed per-life budget. Twenty to thirty minutes at full rating weight. The core ladder.
- Warfare Ranked. Organized 99-player ops (33v33v33) with the full vanilla economy and vehicles. Scheduled and weighted lower, so the ladder rewards consistency over hero games.
- Pack Skirmish. 4v4v4 for the off-hours, and the feeder into the bigger modes.
Each mode has its own ladder. Shotcalling a 99-player Warfare op and fragging in Arena are different skills.
The pivot: building the queue, then deleting it
Our first design was Discord-native. Link your Steam account, queue in Discord, get drafted into three-way squads, and let captains report results with a countersign window and evidence screenshots. We built all of it: ready checks, no-show cooldowns, disputes, appeals with uphold and overturn buttons.
Two days before Early Access, Bulkhead released an official RCON tool for community servers. It exposes live player lists with SteamIDs, factions, K/D and ping. Within a day we ripped the queue, parties and manual reporting out of all three codebases and replaced them with passive rating.
You no longer sign up at all. Join the HOWL community server from the in-game browser and play. Our API polls the server over RCON. A deterministic match tracker watches for a faction hitting 100 points or a map change, then rates the match. Your profile exists from the moment you spawn, built from your SteamID. Signing in with Steam claims a profile that already has games on it.
Under the hood
The stack stays boring where it counts: a Fastify API in TypeScript, PostgreSQL, a React web app, and a Discord bot that talks to the API over HTTP only. The bot has no database access, so a compromised bot can't touch your data.
The bot handles the community side: /verify to link accounts, /leaderboard, /pack for clan rankings (a pack is rated by its five best members), and /appeal for moderation. Server admins run one /setup command and get each tier role with the right colors.
Built to stay lean
Deployment is git push. Every change runs through lint, typecheck, tests and a build before it ships, and each deploy finishes with a live health check, so a bad release fails the pipeline in the open instead of reaching players.
The web server prerenders each route and injects per-profile Open Graph tags. Paste your HOWL profile into Discord and the unfurl shows your name, tier and rating on a branded card. Databases back up off-site every night with a 30-day retention. Total infrastructure cost lands around what a couple of rented game servers would run, which matters for a two-project indie studio before the game has even launched.
What happens next
Season 0 is live now and runs until the end of November. Everything until this point was building the arena. On Thursday, WARDOGS players fill it. We'll watch the ladder, break things, and ship fixes, in that order.
Come find your pack at playhowl.com, or join the Paz Studios Discord to follow the launch.