The Numbers Mason!?!

There is quite a bit of unnecessary confusion surrounding the math in major cash out modes, and although I have made guides like this before, the numbers have changed a lot since 5.8 altered the plug meta. Now there are much tighter margins for error and considerations to be made when deciding which cash out to go for and why. This guide is meant as a illustration of the cash mechanic and how to utilize it to your best interest.

THE BREAKDOWN

You get $500 per kill. You get $1000 per Vault Touch You get $1000 per Cashout Theft

In Act 1 you get $2000 for Inserting the Box to a Cash Out Station. In Act 2 you get $3000 In Act 3 you get $4000

In Act 1 Cashout Complete gets you $8000 In Act 2 you get $12000 In Act 3 you get $16000

You receive 2 Tokens in Round 1 and gain one additional Token each Round for a total of four.

In Ranked you will lose 15% of your cash for team wipes. This does not apply to World Tour.

LOW VALUE ASSETS The first section of the breakdown above covers low value assets. These are actions which give you a very low point swing and don't necessarily give you a strategic advantage for obtaining. That extra thousand or so can absolutely change your placement or give you an edge, but in general these are not point values you want to chase.

A phrase that you want to have stuck in your head when playing Cashout would be "Time is Money". If it takes a lot of time, it better be worth money. Low value assets are not worth expending time on.

Touch the vault if you can, but don't put your team in danger of initiating an engagement on another teams terms. In general, the last team to arrive dictates the course of the fight. By setting up for them to arrive instead of prioritizing the touch, you can often swing the upcoming fight in your favor.

It's always worth wiping a team when you have a Cashout to fight over. But fighting over vaults or just with a random team you bumped into on the street is costly in time and gives you very little reward. An exception would be any act 3 vault, but even in that scenario time management is very crucial and you should be checking the clock often.

R.I.P. PLUG META? "The Plug" or Insert Bonus that you get when a Cashbox is placed in a Cashout Station has been changed by the 5.8 update. Because of this, the plug is no longer worth fighting over for cash value until Act 3. You can always fight over the Cashout and you will get about as much between the Steal Bonus and the Team Wipe anyways, so it doesn't represent a significant point swing worth losing time over.

However in Act 3 this becomes much more crucial and complex. Keep the Plug Value of $4K in mind.

POLE POSITION Your placement during the last two Vaults is the most important thing to fully comprehend in the Cashout modes. You not only need to understand your position, but the point swing between those positions in order to guarantee your success or even lock out other teams from qualifying.

If you are in first place, you want to get at least one plug, and you want to force it to double. If you do this, you are basically guaranteed to qualify no matter what.

The only way for another team to break that is if they either overtake your score during the last Cashout (Not including the value of the Cashout mind you, that doesn't matter to your victory) Or if you get team wiped and lose enough value to fall behind. If your team is aware of this, it is basically impossible to lose that qualification. No matter who gets that Cashout, it's doubled and so there is only one possible point swing. Whoever moves into first place will bump you down to second, and you will qualify.

This is not the case if there are two "Split" Cashouts. The only time you want to Split Cashouts while you are in the lead is if you have a lead by 25,000 over third place. That point swing will be impossible for them if the Cashouts are split, same for fourth place below them, meaning that the only position for contention becomes 2nd place, encouraging the two other teams to 3v6 against the 2nd place teams chosen objective.

If you don't have that 25K lead, you put yourself in danger by splitting, because it is then possible for two teams to manage that point swing, and 2nd place is likely easily in spitting distance of your score already. That means two teams now have the potential to overtake you. This is why doubling is usually a guarantee, and splitting is not.

Inversely, from second place, you will usually want a split, since that means you will probably have to fight less teams to guarantee your qualification by securing a cashout. If you are within 4K of getting first, you want to get the plug on a double no matter what to secure that first place qualification guarentee.

Third or fourth place it depends on the swing needed to get you into second. If you are within 20K of getting second or first place, a split means you probably only have to fight a team or two for a cashout. If it's by more than that, you need to fight the entire lobby for a double in order to qualify.

There are few exceptions to these rules. They are very rare, but there ARE exceptions. Good game sense and time practicing these situations will give you the game sense to quickly intuit your best course of action at the end of a round. In general you can't screw up by following these rules though, since the point swing is nearly impossible to change after the Cashouts have started at the end of the match.

INSERT TOKEN Most people don't see tokens as having a cash value. But they are incredibly valuable to your point swing and understanding that is key to knowing when to use, or not use your tokens.

In ranked there's a bit more to consider with the 15% cash value loss on team wipes, but this is rarely a major point swing until the end of the match when you might lose between 4K and 10K for a team wipe.

In general, it is never worth using a token on the Act 1 Cashouts. They just simply do not cause enough of a change in the point swing to be worth using a respawn.

Throughout the whole match you have to remember that coming back into a fight as a whole team will usually take about 30 seconds after you die. But it takes about the same amount of time for a single player to go in from spawn and Rez their entire team with two Mediums running defib and no counter action from the enemy team. That's a ridiculous number of what-ifs to spend a valuable token on. Usually it's just better to team wipe and come back coordinated and fresh.

You might have a good reason to token on the second Cashouts, but in general this is only worth it if you are confident that the point swing from you doing so will put your team in that Act 3 first place position. Since that position is a guaranteed qualify, and allows you to generally control the rest of the game with little effort, it's worth it to token for a Act 2 cash out.

You could also do it to avoid the last place double cashout requirement, but that's iffy, and might weaken you for what is likely a very difficult upcoming engagement.

Act 3 it's pretty much always worth it if you are fighting over a cash out that you need control of to qualify. If you are in first place by alot it's better not to since your qualify is already guarenteed, naturally. But pretty much anyone else could make a good case for keeping the pressure high by using a token or two on that last push.

In the Final Round there's no penalties or bonuses, so it's usually better to token as frequently as you can. It will be difficult at this point to use more than 2 Tokens just because of time constraints, but 3 or 4 is nice to have available and keeps your teams pressure high. Nothing says war of attrition like a team that has no tokens available by the final round.

And that covers the numbers of Cashout modes in the Finals. Feel free to ask me any additional questions about the minutia, I did my best to keep it simple and clear, but everyone learns in different ways. I hope you found it helpful. Have an obligatory Potato 🥔