How to Stop Ratting Without Killing PvP in Extraction Shooters

Section 1: Why Oppose Ratting?

Extraction shooters are inherently dangerous. Ambushes, stealth, stalking, patient marksmanship, and choosing favorable engagements are all legitimate forms of PvP. A player who hunts other players, steals their gear, or waits for an advantageous moment to attack is still participating in the core risk-and-reward loop of an extraction shooter.

This proposal is not opposed to that kind of PvP.

"Ratting" is a broad term, and players use it to describe everything from cautious ambushes to prolonged camping. The problem this proposal is concerned with is more specific: static, low-participation ratting, where a player minimizes their involvement in the rest of the match and waits for other players to create a profitable opportunity.

This can take several forms. A player might camp a known extraction point, sit at a chokepoint, wait near a valuable objective, or position themselves along a predictable route between an objective and extraction. The common element is not simply that the player is hiding. It is that the player can spend much of the match avoiding its risks and objectives while waiting for other players to generate the opportunity they want.

In many extraction games, extraction points are effectively ungated: anyone can leave at any time, regardless of whether they completed a map objective, cleared an AI enclave, collected valuable items, or otherwise contributed to the match. This creates an opportunity for a player to ignore much of the game's intended gameplay and still potentially walk away with some of its best rewards.

The distinction is important:

• Active or mobile PvP: A player moves through the map, hunts other players, chooses when and where to engage, takes risks, gathers information, and has to survive the consequences of those decisions. They may deliberately avoid PvE objectives, but they are still actively participating in the match.
• Static ratting: A player minimizes engagement with the map and its objectives, settles into a strategically advantageous position, and waits for other players to come to them or create the opportunity for an ambush. The player is relying on the game's predictable reward pipeline rather than actively participating in most of the match.

The objection, therefore, is not that PvP players are stealing from other players. Stealing from other players is part of the extraction-shooter premise. The objection is to a strategy where the player can avoid most of the game's risks and activities, then attempt to convert the work of other players into a reward at a predictable point in the match.

This creates three problems:

• Zero-contribution parasitism: The rat can allow other players to perform the work, accept the risks, and spend the resources required to progress the match, then attempt to take the rewards at the end of the process.
• Economic inversion: Standard game design generally rewards greater effort and risk with greater rewards. Static ratting can reverse that relationship: avoiding the game's major risks can become one of the most efficient ways to obtain high-value gear.
• Damage to the match ecosystem: If static ratting becomes a highly effective strategy, it can discourage players from engaging with objectives at all. Players who actually participate in the game's core loops may begin to feel that they are simply generating opportunities for players who are waiting for them.

The goal of this proposal is therefore not to eliminate ratting, ambushes, stealth, or PvP. It is to make static, low-participation ratting an unreliable and inefficient strategy.

A player who wants to hunt other players should still be able to do so. They can stalk another squad, ambush them at a POI, intercept them on a route, steal their Units, or attack them on the way to extraction. Those are all legitimate forms of PvP because the player is still moving through the match, making decisions, taking risks, and exposing themselves to counterattack.

What should not be the dominant strategy is simply finding the endpoint of the reward pipeline, sitting there for most of the match, and waiting for everyone else to do the game for you.

The design objective is to force the rat to participate in the match rather than allowing the rat to make the match participate for them.

Extraction: Who Decides When It Happens?

For this proposal, extraction is controlled by a third party called The Corporation. The Corporation provides extraction based on its own operational requirements and financial return on investment (ROI).

This framing provides a simple justification for why extraction is not automatically available. The Corporation will not spend the resources necessary to extract players unless the match has generated enough value to justify doing so.

Minimum Mission Objectives: The Quota

Suppose an extraction match begins with 10 players.

The Corporation establishes a minimum operational requirement: for example, 5 Units of quest items must be recovered across the surviving players. This minimum is the Quota.

The Corporation will not commit to an extraction when the return on investment is too low. Once the Quota has been met, the total number of Units recovered determines the size of the eventual payout.

The important part is that the Units are treated as a shared mission resource, rather than something that must be personally carried by every player who wants to extract.

Dynamic Voting and Extraction Activation

Players carrying Units can vote to activate extraction by using a Unit from their inventory.

• Each Unit can be used as a vote only once.
• If a Unit is destroyed, its associated vote is also lost.
• Once the number of active votes reaches or exceeds the Quota, extraction is initiated.

For a five-Unit Quota, this means that five active votes are required to trigger extraction.

Tying extraction activation directly to Unit possession addresses ratting at its foundation:

• No ungated exits: Players who ignore the map's objectives and acquire no Units have no voting power. They cannot initiate extraction on their own.
• No pre-camping: Extraction locations are not predetermined at the beginning of the match. They only appear after a successful vote, preventing players from simply running to a known extraction point at minute one and hiding there.
• Silent activation: Voting happens silently through the player interface. A map-wide extraction alert is not broadcast until the voting threshold has already been reached. Passive players therefore do not receive advance information about where active players are heading.
• Active-player agency: Players who have acquired Units control when the vote occurs. If they believe non-contributing players are camping nearby, they can withhold their votes and delay Extraction so that passive players are encouraged to acquire Units of their own.

Extraction Resolution

Once extraction arrives, possibly after a hostile area has to be secured, The Corporation requires two conditions to complete the extraction:

1. The total number of Units carried by players inside the Landing Zone (LZ) must meet or exceed the Quota.
2. All non-downed players currently carrying Units must be inside the LZ.

The second condition prevents active players from being penalized for carrying the mission objectives. It also creates an interesting tactical decision when someone carrying a Unit is outside the extraction zone.

The remaining players could:

• hold the LZ and defend it against AI enemies;
• push out to rescue the missing Unit carrier and preserve a larger payout; or
• eliminate the carrier, destroying their Unit, if the remaining Units are still sufficient to meet the Quota.

Griefing Edge Case

These mechanics cannot completely eliminate a determined griefer who intentionally refuses to enter the extraction zone and attempts to hold the match hostage.

However, the remaining players still retain agency. They can abandon the match, denying everyone, including the griefer, a payout, and report the behavior through the game's reporting system.

That may be preferable to introducing complicated algorithms intended to determine whether a player's behavior constitutes intentional griefing. Player reporting is imperfect, but trying to automatically infer intent can create its own set of problems.

Carrying Units: Additional Friction Against Ratting

How Units are carried provides additional design levers. These mechanics can make ratting less efficient without eliminating organic PvP. Importantly, PvP for gear or other advantages remains completely valid. These systems are intended specifically to discourage passive play that bypasses the game's core objectives.

Option A: The Gear Tax

Inventory Trade-Offs

Under this model, Units occupy significant inventory space or use dedicated equipment slots.

The mechanic: Carrying one Unit is normal, but each additional Unit replaces one piece of equipped gear.

Impact on ratting: A rat can still attempt to steal other players' gear, but there is a practical limit to how much they can carry while remaining properly equipped for extraction.

The rat has avoided much of the risk associated with acquiring Units, but now faces a different risk: reduced equipment while attempting to survive long enough to extract.

Option B: Fragile Units

Risk of Quota Deficit

Under this model, Units can potentially be destroyed when their carrier is downed.

The mechanic: At its simplest, each Unit could have a percentage chance of being destroyed when its carrier is downed.

Impact on ratting: Rats can still engage in PvP for loot or attempt to reduce the number of survivors and increase their eventual share of the payout. However, they may now have to acquire enough Units themselves to ensure that the Quota can still be met.

In other words, they have not actually avoided playing the game.

Note on Individual Mandatory Units: On paper, requiring every player to carry a Fragile Unit seems like a silver bullet, but enforcing "participation" is deceptively complex. If participation is tied to killing a boss or looting an enclave, it either penalizes non-combat support roles (like medics or recon) or simply shifts ratting to objective arenas—where bandits let active teams do the work before ambushing them for the drop. A shared, pooled quota avoids these edge cases by measuring squad-level progression without mandating who or how the inventory is acquired.

Mission Rewards

The endgame of an extraction shooter is where PvP tension naturally peaks. How rewards are calculated and divided can strongly influence whether players cooperate, take calculated risks, or simply pursue reckless banditry.

Equal Survivor Split: Code Efficiency and Support Viability

Rather than attempting to calculate each player's individual contribution, the total match payout is divided equally among all surviving players who successfully extract.

The payout is determined by the total value of Units recovered beyond the minimum Quota.

[ Total Unit Value ] ÷ [ Surviving Extracting Players ] = [ Individual Payout ]

This avoids the need for complicated and potentially bug-prone contribution tracking. Developers would not need to build systems capable of determining the value of every individual action, such as combat healing, suppressive fire, intelligence gathering, overwatch, or carrying additional cargo.

If a player survives and extracts, they receive an equal share.

Built-In Role Utility

This also protects support-focused playstyles. A medic who spends the raid treating teammates, or a scout providing overwatch, receives the same reward as the frontline player or dedicated mule player carrying multiple Units. No special contribution-tracking system is required.

Organic Endgame PvP Tension

Equal division creates an interesting economic effect: the fewer players who survive, the larger each survivor's individual payout becomes.

This creates a natural high-stakes decision at the extraction zone.

The Greed Dilemma

Players must decide whether to extract peacefully with the entire group or eliminate non-teammates to increase their personal share of the payout.

This creates PvP tension without requiring the game to artificially declare one player the "winner" of the extraction encounter.

Dealing with Freeloaders

The shared extraction system also creates a potential problem: a player who contributed almost nothing to the match could simply arrive at the extraction zone and receive an equal share.

Because that player has no Units, the players who actually completed the objectives have little reason to consider them indispensable. Ideally, players carrying Units would be clearly identifiable in some way.

Even if the extraction zone contains NPC enemies intended to keep everyone active, some players could still perform the minimum necessary work and then hide in cover until extraction.

There is no perfectly clean solution for players who want the game to automatically calculate merit-based rewards. The proposal deliberately favors a simple equal-payout system over complicated contribution telemetry.

As a last resort, Unit carriers can refuse to extract, abandon the match, and cause the extraction to fail if the remaining players no longer meet the Quota. They can then report players who deliberately remained inactive (in other games this would be similar to joining group content and going AFK until the rest of the group completed the instance, then simply collect rewards).

The Quota Check on Greed

The Quota also places a natural limit on endgame greed.

If a squad eliminates other players at the LZ but damages or fails to recover their Units, the total value available for extraction can fall. If it drops below the Quota, everyone is locked out of extraction.

Players therefore have to balance the potential benefit of eliminating rivals against the risk of destroying the very resources required to complete the mission.

Corporate Greed: Casualty Thresholds and POI Dynamics

The mechanics above reduce ordinary ratting, but one particularly dangerous form can still remain:

End-game hijacking.

This occurs when active players perform essentially all of the work gathering Units, only to be ambushed and eliminated at the extraction point by another player or group that intends to claim the resulting payout.

This could be especially problematic if large premade groups are able to queue into the same matches and they queue with the intention of this form of play.

To limit this last-minute form of freeloading, developers could introduce a Casualty Threshold, or "Acceptable Losses."

The Casualty Threshold acts as a systemic backstop against endgame hijacking. More importantly, it can influence player behavior throughout the entire match, not just at extraction.

The Asset Recovery Override

During the extraction phase, the game monitors total lobby casualties.

If casualties cross a developer-defined threshold, such as more than 7 out of 10 total players being killed or downed, The Corporation switches from Standard Extraction to Asset Recovery Only.

Under this system:

• Asset collection: The Corporation secures the physical Units present in the extraction zone.
• Contractor write-off: Player extraction is denied. Any surviving players are left stranded in the match.

For narrative coherence, the extraction could simply fail to complete while The Corporation waits for the remaining players to be eliminated by NPC hostiles. The Corporation could just be greedy and not want to pay anyone; or have no reason to trust the small group of survivors after catastrophic mission casualties.

How the Casualty Threshold Changes the Match

Although the system is designed primarily to stop endgame hijacking, it would also discourage passive play much earlier in the match.

Encouraging Early and Mid-Game POI Encounters

If waiting until extraction to steal Units carries a significant risk of triggering the casualty threshold because too many active players died trying to secure Units, players have a stronger incentive to acquire Units themselves.

This encourages extraction to be triggered while more of the lobby is still alive, concentrating player activity and potential PvP action around active quest objectives rather than empty extraction zones.

Instead of everyone converging on the extraction point for the final ambush, firefights are more likely to occur at the places where Units are actually being earned.

Managing Lobby Survival

Squads hunting Units at points of interest must balance aggression against lobby survival.

Wiping every team they encounter may seem advantageous, but if their own members are also being downed, excessive aggression can push the server toward the casualty threshold.

Friendly Fire and Trigger Discipline

High casualty counts create a collective cost.

Reckless area-of-effect attacks, explosive spam, and careless friendly fire do not merely threaten individual teammates. They also move the entire lobby closer to the Asset Recovery threshold.

This gives players an additional reason to exercise discipline during intense fights.

Systemic Limitation: The Premade Group

The Casualty Threshold has an important weakness in lobbies that mix solo players with large premade groups.

A premade group could represent a significant portion of the server. If that group simply remains inactive while solo players eliminate one another at points of interest, the remaining deaths during a final ambush might not be enough to trigger the threshold.

That could allow ratting to evolve from an individual strategy into a premade-group strategy.

For this reason, the Casualty Threshold is not sufficient on its own. It is practically designed against a specific contingency (premade groups with the intention to rat).

Combined with the Quota, Gear Tax, and Fragile Unit systems, however, it can serve as a final backstop. The overall goal is to preserve PvP as a tense and viable part of extraction gameplay without allowing endgame hijacking to become the dominant strategy.

Putting the Mechanics Together

None of these systems necessarily needs to be implemented simultaneously.

The central mechanic is the Quota-based extraction system: players must contribute Units to make extraction possible, while the extraction point itself does not exist until the required votes have been cast.

The other mechanics are additional tools that can be used to close specific loopholes:

• Quota: Prevents players with zero contribution from initiating extraction.
• Dynamic extraction locations: Prevents players from camping a known extraction point from the beginning of the match.
• Gear Tax: Makes carrying large numbers of Units a meaningful equipment trade-off.
• Fragile Units: Makes Units vulnerable to being lost and can force players to acquire additional Units.
• Equal Survivor Split: Keeps the reward system simple while preserving the value of support roles.
• Casualty Threshold: Acts as a backstop against large-scale endgame hijacking.

Implementing every mechanic at once could potentially discourage PvP too much. But even a couple of these systems could be enough to make Ratting a poor strategy for success.

The objective is not to make extraction shooters safer or less competitive. It is to make sure that playing the game remains more rewarding than waiting for someone else to play it for you.