Improving Cashout Mode in Season 3
2024.09.24
Hello Finalists!
I’m Matt, Design Director of THE FINALS.
During Season 3 we made a series of changes to Cashout mode, in World Tour, as part of a push to improve the mode and make it a better experience for all players, as well as preparing it for a return to Ranked play. Our goal was to address some of the most common feedback and concerns we’ve received about the mode, with the aim of improving it for both casual and competitive play. From the 3.6 VOLPE Championship onwards, we took the opportunity to test some of those changes in the live game and get your input on them.
In this blog, I want to discuss our goals with these changes, what we found from testing them with you, the community, and what we’ll be doing next to continue to make the mode the best it can be.
Friction Points
Let’s start with the main friction points players experienced in Cashout mode.
We gather feedback from players in a large variety of ways. These include comments on YouTube, Discord, Reddit or Steam, through data gathered directly from matches, as well as player surveys, focus tests and of course our own observations when playing the game. When it comes to Cashout mode, the most common complaint we’ve received during the first few seasons of THE FINALS has been related to ‘third-party’ fights.
For those who may not be familiar with the term, a ‘third-party’ fight is a scenario where two teams are engaged in a team fight with each other, but before that fight concludes a third (or even fourth!) team arrives, takes advantage of the chaos and wipes one or both of the teams involved in the initial engagement.
These fights often lead to a lot of frustration for players for several reasons:
They frequently lead to Cashouts being stolen by the third-party, just before they cashout, making the other teams (especially the one that started the cashout) feel like all their effort was for nothing
They can often lead to protracted ‘midfield’ fights that aren’t fun. These are fights that occur away from objectives, where the third-party might camp on the statues of fallen enemies and prevent revives of the team for an extended period of time, or until the team is wiped. These slow down the game and don’t feel that fun for the team that is being ‘blocked’ from playing
They add a lot of chaos to fights, making it hard to coordinate with teammates, to understand where enemies are coming from and so on. These types of fights are especially punishing for players who are new to the game
It’s important to note here that we’ve never seen third-party fights as being an entirely bad thing. We primarily designed THE FINALS around three and four team game modes precisely because we believe that, with the right frequency and in the right moments, third-party fights can add variety, depth and a change of pace to the game that helps to give it longevity. But we never really intended them to become as prevalent, impactful and frustrating as they have been during our first few seasons, and so during Season 3 we set out to address some of the worst elements of these third-party fights.
Let’s talk through what we tried and what we learned, but first, let’s briefly talk about our balancing process and how we try to tackle challenges like these.
Balancing Process
I’d like to take a brief moment to explain our approach to balancing, making changes to the game and then iterating on those changes. This is something we’ve not discussed much in the past and we think it’ll offer important context as to why we make the changes we do.
Day-to-day we are constantly reviewing how the game is performing and the feedback we are receiving from players. As mentioned in the previous section, we do this using a number of sources of feedback, from social media and surveys, through to focus groups and analytics. This broad range of data gives us a multitude of different ways to see how the game is performing and what impact that is having on the experience for players.
This feedback also allows us to drill down into the specific experiences different types of players are having, for example, we have three main groups of players we’re always especially keen to support:
New players
A not insignificant number of the game’s daily players are brand new players that installed the game for the first time that day. Making sure they have a good experience is an important part of helping the game grow
Regular players
These players make up the majority of our daily players. They play the game about 2-3 hours a week and play a wide variety of game modes
Competitive players
These are our more hardcore players and make up around a sixth of our DAU, they play many hours a week and tend to prefer the ranked or more competitive modes
All of these players are important to running successful games and a thriving community, so when it comes to balancing, it’s important we try to give each of them the best experience possible.
Whenever we’ve identified a particular issue with the game based on data and/or player sentiment we’ve received, the balancing process proceeds as follows:
We identify the issue in question and which types of players it’s affecting
We establish some theories and hypotheses for how we can address the issue, then turn these into goals. Sometimes these ideas come direct from community feedback, sometimes they don’t
We make the changes needed to achieve that goal, be that new functionality, balance changes, etc.
We test these changes within the studio to measure their impact and see if they work
If we’re happy with the changes, we deploy them to test them with the community
We monitor how the changes perform on the live game and start the process again if there is data or sentiment that suggests it still needs more work
Step 5 is key, because the community is able to test much more and more quickly than we ever can as a dev team, there are millions of you and not very many of us devs, so it’s critical we test ‘in the real world’ before we consider any issue or balance change ‘solved.’
The process of balancing is never done. The game changes regularly with new updates, the meta moves and adapts, and so this balancing loop is a constant and ongoing process.
Now that you better understand our process, let’s look at how we approached the ‘third-party’ problem and the changes we made.
Third-party Fights - Initial Vaults
The first place where we tried to address third-party fights was those that occur at the first Vaults that spawn in each round of Cashout. We chose these specifically because, as the first team versus team fights in a round, they’re the ones we have most control over as our game rules decide where the teams spawn, where the Vaults spawn and where the Cashout Stations spawn. That meant we had the most leverage points we could adjust to get a better experience.
We knew from our data that only around 40% to 60% of the team fights that occurred around the first Vaults involved just two teams, meaning the remaining 40% to 60% involved either one, three or four teams at each Vault. We wanted that number to be much higher in this first wave of Vaults, so the intensity of a match is slightly lower at the start of the round. We were much more willing to see third-party fights towards the end of a round, where the focus tends to move towards one final cashout in overtime.
To try to address these early third-party fights, in 3.6 we rolled out a change that reconfigured how we place initial team and Vault spawns. The change ensures each team is much closer to one Vault than another and that the Vaults are quite far apart, making it much more obvious which Vault is the best one for players to approach first and hopefully equally distributing the teams between the Vaults.
What the chart above shows is the rate of team versus team (TvT) fights near the first wave of Vaults, across several releases of the game. The orange ‘Before 3.6’ bars show the 40% to 60% TvT rate prior to our 3.6 patch. The blue bars show that, between the 3.6 and 3.8 patches, when our new spawn locations went live, the TvT rate increased to around 80% meaning we now had way fewer third-party fights at these Vaults. We kept the change live in the World Tour for the rest of Season 3 and you can see in the green bars, that the TvT rate in the first wave finally settled at around 85% to 90%.
So in this particular scenario, our changes seemed to have worked and the third-party rate at the start of Cashout matches has dropped as a result, leading to more TvT fights that are less hectic and where teamplay and coordination are easier.
But this change only really impacts fights at the initial Vaults. Looking at the same data for the second wave and third wave of Vaults spawns in a round, we can see that that change doesn’t really persist throughout the match. This makes sense, as objective and team re-spawns are much more dynamic during the later parts of a round.
Third-party Fights - Incentives - Team Wipe Penalties
The next area we focused on when it came to addressing the rate of third-party fights was incentives. There are a lot of places in Cashout where we give little incentives to players, via scoring, objectives or other systems, to optimise their play or chances of winning and sometimes those incentives prompt behaviour we didn’t really intend. One of those areas in Cashout is team wipe penalties.
We originally added team wipe penalties, where teams lose 30% of their collected cash if all three team members die at the same time, as a catch-up mechanic. A way for teams that might be in 3rd or 4th place to catch-up and overtake those in 1st or 2nd place.
This was a good goal, but over time we’ve come to realise that this rule also acts as an incentive for teams to always go after team wipes whenever they can, including camping statues in those prolonged ‘midfield’ fights mentioned previously and in third-party scenarios.
This raised the question, do we really need team wipe penalties for teams to catch up? And if we adjust the rules, could we have players focus more on objectives and less on team wipes than they do now? We felt this last question was especially important. Cashout is at its heart a ‘capture and hold’ game mode where objectives are supposed to be the focus. Wiping teams should be a means to an end, completing the objective, not the actual objective themselves.
When looking at our data, we noticed that team wipes happened much more frequently to the teams already in 3rd place or 4th place, and they happened least often to teams already in 1st place, so they didn’t seem to be acting as a catch-up mechanic as often as we thought, but more as a mechanic that allowed the best players to keep ‘punching down’. So in patch 3.6 we decided to run some new rules where we removed some of these incentives while adding some new ones, then we measured the impact.
First, we removed the team wipe penalties to cash. Teams who were wiped would only lose time to being dead, any cash they’d cashed out already was protected. This made chasing team wipes far less valuable.
Second, we switched to rewarding around 30% of a cashbox’s value when the box was deposited, rather than awarding all of it on cashout completion. This made depositing a considerably more valuable action to perform versus third-partying, while also diminishing the value of third-partying existing in-progress cashouts.
The data above shows the impact of those changes, showing which teams most frequently experienced wipes. Between patches 3.6 and 3.8, when the new rules were active, we can see that team wipes became more balanced between the different placed teams compared to prior to 3.6. We believe this was because killing became a less optimal strategy in that scenario, as cashouts became by far the best way to earn cash that could win you the match. As a result, the best teams focused less on beating up on 3rd and 4th placed teams and more on objectives, pushing all the team wipe rates closer together.
Rightly, the change we made to remove team wipe penalties did generate a lot of feedback from you the players though. You felt you’d lost one possible way to get back into a match when you were in 3rd or 4th place and even if team wipes predominantly happened to the losing teams, it’s still true that sometimes losing teams came back because of leading teams being wiped.
All that said, despite team wipes being removed, our data showed that Cashout matches actually became much closer.
The table above shows the average standard deviation of team scores in Cashout matches prior to 3.6, between 3.6 and 3.8 and then after 3.8, after which point we re-instated team wipe cash penalties but at a lower 10% than the previous 30%. Here, the lower the number the closer the teams’ cash totals were on average and as you can see, between 3.6 and 3.8, when we had no team wipe penalty, matches did become closer overall.
Of course, close is not the same as allowing more comebacks, but we do believe that for a lot of players it was leading to more exciting matches. This is why for the remainder of Season 3 we retained the 10% penalties in World Tour, as we felt they gave the best balance of the approaches we’d tested.
Third-party Fights - Incentives - Steal Late or Defend First?
As mentioned above, another bad incentive we identified that we felt encouraged third-party fights and led to a lot of frustration for teams was that almost all the cash value in the mode came from completing Cashouts. This type of scoring encouraged many teams to deliberately seek out a third-party attack on objective defenders late in the cashout process, with the goal of swooping in and taking advantage of several weakened teams to steal all the cash.
Over time, this led to starting the cashout by depositing the Cash Box being one of the weaker strategies, which should really not be the case in a ‘capture and hold’ focused game mode.
So as previously stated, we moved to immediately awarding ~30% of the Cashbox value to the depositing team when they started the cashout, to incentivize starting them over stealing them.
In patch 3.10 we added an additional benefit to also incentivize depositing, the Defender Bonus. This gives the team currently owning the in-progress cashout a shorter time until they can spend a coin to respawn, with the goal of helping them protect the cashout more easily and thus making it more desirable to start a cashout. The chart below shows the impact these changes had.
Prior to patch 3.6, around 38.77% of cashouts completed without ever changing owner, 14.64% were stolen but then recovered by the defending team before the cashout completed, but 46.59% of them were stolen and cashed out by another team. That’s not a great incentive to start a cashout, if almost half the time you will never get the rewards for that work and worse, your efforts are worth 0 cash. Our target has always been that the steal rate on cashouts should only be around 30% to 40%, so that ‘capturing and holding’ the objective is the most desirable activity and achievable.
What the chart above shows is that after the 3.10 patch, what we’ve seen in World Tour cashout is that the steal rate has dropped from close to 47% down to approximately 42%. This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s close to a 10% improvement compared to before 3.6 for defending teams, making starting the cashout a much more desirable move. This data excludes the benefits already gotten from now receiving ~30% of the cash total on delivery of the Cash Box.
The impact of these changes should be clear, the value of third-party fights at cashouts has decreased compared to what it once was. Starting the cashout is a much more viable strategy now.
Third-party Fights - Incentives - Killing versus Delivering
One change we made in patch 3.6, to try and offset the removal of team wipe penalties and still allow some ability to catch up when losing, was to increase the amount of cash awarded for kills, by increasing them to $500. This sounds like a lot, jumping up from $250 per kill, but in reality the value of kills versus delivering or completing cashouts was still quite small. To earn the same cash as a final phase cashout completion you’d need to record 30 kills, for example.
That was not the perception of players though and we received a lot of feedback that this was encouraging more of a focus on combat, not less, and that did show up in some of our data, as a small shift in the average number of kills per Cashout match as seen here.
So to figure out if being combat focused had now become the new optimal strategy in Cashout mode, we dug into the data and the chart below is one example of what we found.
Here we show a scatter plot of a large number of Season 3 World Tour matches played between patches 3.6 and 3.8. The color denotes if the dot represents a winning or losing team, the opacity represents the frequency of this result type, but most importantly the Y axis tells you the number of objectives that team achieved in the match (i.e. cashouts, deposits, Vault openings, etc.) and the X axis represents the number of kills the team had combined.
What the shift from mostly red in the bottom-left to mostly blue in the top-right shows is that the optimal strategy in Cashout modes, as of patch 3.6 and beyond, is always one focused on completing objectives, while achieving a good number of kills. In fact a good number of teams win Cashout matches by completing a lot of objectives despite getting perhaps only 10-15 kills combined, whereas teams that get 30+ kills as a group but complete only 3-4 objectives really struggled to win during that period.
Ultimately, this is the sort of dynamic we want to see in THE FINALS, as it has always been our goal to make an objective-based shooter, where decisions and strategy matter just as much as your aim. So overall, we felt the improved cash per kill didn’t seem to be damaging that experience, but it is one we’ll continue to monitor to see how the meta evolves over time.
So, what does all this mean?
Overall, we feel the data and experiments we tried in Season 3 show us a few things.
We do believe that the changes we’ve made have gone some way to reducing the amount of actual third-party fights that occur in Cashout modes, especially during the first wave of objectives, where that is fairly easy to measure.
We also feel we’ve removed a lot of the negative incentives that promoted third-party combat in the first place, by moving much of the strategic value in Cashout mode towards completing objectives, rather than pursuing kills and team wipes. We believe this too reduces the third-party rate to some extent.
But there is one area that remains, where we see regular issues, and that’s our spawn system that places teams when they respawn after a team wipe. Too often during our previous seasons, this system could put teams in locations that naturally incentivized them to enter a third-party fight simply because they moved towards the nearest relevant objective, and we feel the game can help players avoid these scenarios by being smarter in where it places these teams.
So, during Season 3, the team has been working hard on a smarter and more intelligent respawn system that gives us a much greater degree of control when balancing. In patch 3.14, this system is active in World Tour mode to allow us to do some final real-world testing of its impact and all being well, this system will go live fully in Season 4. The hope is this further reduces the number of third-party fights mid-match, so that they become the exception rather than the rule.
Conclusion
In summary, we hope this blog has given you a clearer idea of the results of the rule changes we tried within Cashout mode in Season 3 and how your playing of World Tour has helped shape some of the changes we’ve been making and continue to make. We believe these changes set up Season 4’s World Tour and returning Ranked Tournaments to be the best possible Cashout experience they can be, regardless of you being a competitive, casual or even first time player. As always we’ll continue to monitor your feedback and our own data to ensure that’s the case, adjusting, adapting and balancing where we need to to continue to make THE FINALS its best self.
Thank you for reading, we’ll see you in Season 4!
