The fastest ways to make money in WARDOGS

Everything runs through one multiplier

You do not need better aim. We thought we did, and we were wrong about it for most of the alpha.

Nearly every payout here is a small base number multiplied by where you were standing when you earned it. A kill is $300. A headshot, $350. Move that same headshot inside the Hot Zone and you get $3,500 for it.

That is the whole guide, really. Everything below is us showing you where to stand.

At level zero, fly the taxi

You start with nothing worth shooting people with. So move people instead. Transport pays you per passenger delivered, and it is scored on where they get out, which is the part most pilots miss.

Look at that spread again. The same passenger is worth four times as much if you put the skids down in the Hot Zone instead of setting them somewhere sensible on the approach. Fly them into the circle.

The MH-6 seats six, so a full load into the Hot Zone earns you $1,500 a run. The Z20 Lakota seats thirteen and turns the same trip into $3,600. Both pay for themselves in a couple of good runs.

It compounds, too. Your delivery multiplier steps up as the count climbs, which rewards you for committing to the route instead of doing it twice and getting bored.

Then fly home. Returning to the safe zone pays you a Round Trip bonus of $250 for every passenger who is still alive, and it never counts fewer than three of them. So the trip back is worth $750 even when your cabin is empty, and a full Lakota that survived the drop is $3,000 for flying in a straight line.

You will hear that driving is a waste of time. Per passenger it actually pays better, $500 against the $150 you get in a helicopter, so that advice is half wrong.

Fly anyway. Your round trip by road runs two to three times longer, and we have lost count of the squads who walked past our Humvee to wait on a bird. You want full seats at a worse rate. Ground driving has exactly one job, and it is the next section.

The spawn vehicle is free money

One vehicle breaks the rule we just gave you. Drive your faction's spawn vehicle from the HQ into the Control Zone and you are paid $3,000 the moment it arrives, which is the biggest single objective payout we have found.

Park it inside the Control Zone and outside the Hot Zone. That is where the bonus is scored, and it is also where your vehicle survives long enough to earn the rest, because the money does not stop when you climb out:

• $100 per spawn. Every teammate who deploys on it pays you, and on a spawn point nobody has killed yet that runs all match.
• A cut of their kills. The players who spawned on your vehicle earn you a share of what they kill afterwards.
• Driver progression. The same drive levels your Driver role while it pays you.

If you ever see your faction's spawn vehicle sitting unused at the HQ, take it. We cannot think of a version of that drive that loses you money.

Standing in the circle pays rent

Every score tick, once every 22 seconds, the zone pays you for being in it. No kill required. These are the figures we counted off the reward feed through the alpha:

Who holds the zone makes no difference to your rate. Contested, yours, theirs, presence pays the same, so you never need to wait for a tidier moment to walk in.

It is not the fastest money on this page and we would not build a life around it. What it does is pay you for the time you were going to spend there anyway, which makes the Hot Zone the correct place to stand between everything else you are doing.

Long range is the king of money

Now the big one. Your rifle kills get a distance multiplier of their own, and it is savage:

There is a second rule that makes this better than it looks, and it took us a while to notice. A normal kill splits its zone multiplier between where you are standing and where your target is standing. A rifle kill does not. It scores entirely on the target.

So sitting on a hill a kilometre outside the fight costs you nothing. The people you are shooting are in the Hot Zone, you collect the Hot Zone rate, and none of them can reach you. That is why recon out-earns the players actually holding the point.

Kill streaks stack on top of it, adding $50 a kill up to five deep, which is how a quiet fifteen minutes on a good ridge turns into a five figure life. On Bakarani we like the hill past the northern apartment blocks. Sightlines across the valley, and no reason for anybody to walk up it.

Seventy five dollars, bought first

The specialist slot is the cheapest thing you will ever buy and the most useful thing you can carry at level zero. Four items spot enemies. Only two of them tell you how far away the enemy is.

Buy the Binoculars in your first loadout, before anything else. Here is the part we never see anybody mention: all of these earn the same Recon XP. Marking a target is 25 role XP, a target you marked dying is 150, and unlike your cash, that XP ignores where either of you was standing. The $75 pair levels Recon exactly as fast as the $400 one.

So the cheapest item on the shelf is your fastest Recon progression, and it starts working in your first match. Mark everything you can see from the moment you land.

The Range Finder is your upgrade, and you buy it the day you start shooting at range. Nothing else on that list gives you the distance number a scope needs to zero. It also weighs less than the Binoculars and takes half the pack space, so the swap costs you nothing but the $400.

After that, the 6-10x Scope at $1,050 is the one that changes your evening. The magnification is pleasant. The reason we want it is the zero, which reaches a thousand metres, exactly where the ×4 bracket lives.

The Ghillie Body Suit at $3,000 is the luxury pick, and it earns its price in a way the description buries. It removes the death cam for anyone you kill. They never learn where the shot came from, so your hill keeps paying. It hides you from infrared too. Price the whole kit in the loadout planner before you commit to it.

Spotting is the sleeper

Mark everything you look at. Spotting pays you when you press the button and pays you again when the target dies, in both currencies:

Sixteen hundred dollars for pressing a button on somebody else's kill. Sit above a busy Hot Zone and you can mark a dozen enemies a minute and collect on most of them without firing a shot. Helicopters are worth marking for the same reason.

Look at the XP column again. It does not move. Your zone decides your cash, and your Recon levels at the same rate wherever you are standing, which is why we mark on the walk in and from cover and on a quiet flank.

Two limits you should know about. Re-marking the same target pays less each time and stops paying quickly, so sweep for new contacts instead of hammering one player. And if somebody outside your faction gets the kill, your share is halved.

Armor pays, when nobody is carrying a launcher

An uncontested tank is the easiest hundred thousand in the game and every alpha player knows it, which is your problem. Expect launchers in the beta, and expect your lives to be shorter than they were in August.

Hunting vehicles is the version of this that scales, and the numbers get large:

Half of a vehicle kill scores on your position and half on the target's, so a launcher shot taken from the Hot Zone at something over the Hot Zone collects both multipliers. One RPG-7 costs you $2,000, and a single attack helicopter pays that back many times over.

One catch we learned by wasting rockets. A vehicle nobody paid for pays you nothing to destroy. That free ride parked at an enemy HQ is not a target. The bought Havoc circling the point is.

What quietly cuts your pay

Four rules take money back off you, and the game announces none of them:

• The same victim, again. Killing the same player repeatedly cuts about a quarter off each time, four deep. Farming one unlucky opponent stops working faster than you would think.
• They got revived. If a medic picks your kill back up, you keep one percent of it. Kills you drop next to their squad are worth a fraction of what the killfeed suggests.
• Friendly fire. A teamkill is scored at three times a normal kill and taken straight off you. One bad grenade undoes a good run.
• Zone weighting. Everything you do outside the circle is scored at the base rate. Same effort, a fifth of the money.

If you would rather heal than shoot

Medics are paid properly and we do not think most people have noticed. Your revive is scored on where the downed player is lying, so the Hot Zone rate applies to the messiest ones you will ever attempt:

A Hot Zone revive pays you what a good kill pays, puts a whole body back on the tick count, and denies the enemy their kill money at the same time.

Watch who you are picking up, though. The same player pays you about a quarter less every time you bring them back, so the defib that opened at $1,200 comes back nearer $900 on the repeat. Spread it around the squad. The Cash & The Economy chapter has the rest of the teamplay payouts.

A working order

• First $75. Binoculars, in your opening loadout. Mark everything from here on, whatever role you end up playing, and your Recon levels itself while you work through the rest of this list.
• Level zero. Take the helicopter to the vendor, fill it, land in the Hot Zone. Grab the spawn vehicle any time you see it idle.
• At $400. The Range Finder, once you want to shoot past three hundred metres.
• Next. A rifle you can hit with, and a hill outside the zone with a view into it.
• At $1,050. The 6-10x Scope, for the zero that reaches the ×4 bracket.
• At $3,000. The Ghillie Body Suit, so your hill stays yours.

Your cash carries between matches, and a match that ends while you are alive and kitted refunds 90% of the loadout, so that expensive kit is cheaper than it looks. Ammunition is the part you never get back. When the closed beta opens, this is the order we will be earning in, and the early game weapons guide covers what to spend it on.