What the HWID lock actually does
The loader reads a handful of stable machine identifiers on first activation (motherboard, disk serials, a couple more) and hashes them into a single fingerprint. Your key is bound to that fingerprint. From then on, only that machine can load. If the hash changes materially, say a new motherboard or a big BIOS shift, the loader stops recognising the key and asks for a reset before it will run again.
The lock is what keeps a shared or leaked key from being used on ten other rigs. It also means you can’t hand your key to a friend for the weekend and take it back on Monday.
Reset policy
You get two free resets per license cycle. Cycle length matches your key: a daily key gets two resets per day, a weekly key two per week, a monthly key two per month. The counter rolls over when the cycle does.
To request a reset:
- Open a ticket in the Discord ops channel, or
- Use the reset button on your account page.
Both routes land in the same queue. Turnaround is under 15 minutes during ops hours, longer overnight. The reply carries a confirmation and your activation slot is open the moment you see it.
If you burn through both resets in one cycle and still need another, ops can grant a courtesy reset for something genuinely out of your hands, like a dead drive or a bad Windows update. Chargebacks, key-sharing, and “I just want to lend it out” are a hard no.
Moving to a new PC
The path is the same as any other reset. Request one from the old machine (or from the account page if the old rig is already dead), pick up the loader on the new PC, activate once. That new fingerprint becomes the lock. The old machine can’t run the key any more without another reset.
Do the reset before you decommission the old box if you can. If the drive is already gone, ops can still push a reset from our side; mention it in the ticket so we know why we’re not seeing an inbound release. For a clean install workflow on the new machine, the install guide walks each step.
Where a HWID spoofer fits
This one is worth being blunt about. Our HWID lock is a licensing check, not an anti-detection layer. If Wardogs itself hardware-bans your rig, meaning EAC flags the machine rather than just the Steam account, no amount of resets on our side will get you back into the game. That is a game-side ban, and EAC will keep refusing that fingerprint no matter what loader is running.
A HWID spoofer sits between the game and your hardware and rewrites the identifiers EAC reads. Combined with a fresh Steam account, the game sees a fresh machine and lets you queue again. That is the only situation where a spoofer helps: post-hardware-ban recovery.
The Wardogs product doesn’t ship a spoofer bundled, and we don’t resell one. Several reputable public options exist; buy from a provider with a real update history and their own EAC track record. If you’re weighing whether the risk warrants one, the safety guide covers what a hardware ban actually looks like.
Once a spoofer is running, request a HWID reset from ops before you re-activate the loader, so the new spoofed fingerprint becomes a clean fresh lock rather than colliding with your previous one.