MW4 DMZ Bounty System: How to Pay Off Your Bounty

The bounty system is the PvP side of MW4 DMZ. Kill other Operators and a bounty grows on your Dog Tag, other players get a reason to hunt you, and the game starts showing you on their tac map. This guide explains every part of it with our own screenshots: how a bounty grows, what Wanted means, exactly what it costs to pay a bounty off, where the Bounty Stations are, how hunting works and what the leaderboards show.

How bounties work

Every Operator has a Dog Tag, and the Dog Tag shows your bounty and your Operator kills. Kill another Operator and your bounty goes up. Hover your Dog Tag in the loadout screen to see where you stand. Ours read Bounty $100K with 11 Operator kills on an Onyx tag.

The bounty is not reset when a match ends. It stays on your Dog Tag across deployments until you lose it, so a good PvP run can follow you for days. That is the whole idea. Wiping squads makes you worth money to everyone else.

Wanted: what happens when your bounty grows

When your bounty goes up, the game tells you with a banner. At a high enough bounty it becomes Bounty Increased - Wanted, with your bounty amount, a bar of five icons and the line “You will be marked on the tacmap for nearby enemy players.” In our runs the bar showed one icon at $25,000, three at $100,000 and all five at $250,000. Activision says four Operator kills are enough to become Wanted.

Being Wanted has three effects that we saw in our runs:

• Enemy players near you see you on their tac map as a red circle with a skull in the middle. Hunters also get a Wanted Operator Nearby warning with your name and bounty when they come close, and your area turns red on their minimap.
• The banner shows up again at the start of every match while you still have the bounty, and the loadout screen shows a red Wanted bar with your amount before you even deploy.
• Your Dog Tag is worth your bounty to whoever kills you and extracts with it.

How to get rid of your bounty

There are four ways to lose a bounty:

1. Pay it off at a Bounty Station with DMZ Cash. This is the only way to clear it on your own terms. The next section shows exactly what it costs.
2. Die without extracting. If you go down and do not make it out, the bounty is gone.
3. Someone extracts with your Dog Tag. The player who killed you takes the tag, extracts with it and cashes in your bounty.
4. Dismiss the Operator. The bounty sits on that Operator, so dismissing them at the Operators station clears it too. You lose the Operator with it, so this only makes sense for an Operator you were going to replace anyway. Our rescue cost guide covers what a new Operator costs to rescue.

If you would rather run missions in peace, pay it off before the bounty gets big. A high bounty puts a target on your back in every match, and the cost to clear it grows with the bounty.

Paying off a bounty, step by step

Walk up to a Bounty Station and interact with the terminal. The Bounties screen shows Your Bounty Status with your current bounty, a Reduce Bounty button with its price, and the line “Reduce or fully pay off your bounty to avoid being hunted”. Below it is the list of Wanted Players to Hunt in your match.

You do not pay it all at once. Every click on Reduce Bounty costs half of your current bounty and drops it one level. This is what clearing our $100,000 bounty cost:

Bounty before	Cost of this step	Bounty after
$100,000	$50,000	$50,000
$50,000	$25,000	$25,000
$25,000	$12,500	$15,000
$15,000	$7,500	$10,000
$10,000	$5,000	$5,000
$5,000	$2,500	No active bounty
Total	$102,500

The money comes from your bank, so you need the DMZ Cash in your bank, not in your backpack. Our bank went from $147,603 to $45,103. You can also stop halfway. Paying only the first step already halves a $100,000 bounty for $50,000. When the bounty hits zero the station shows No Active Bounty, a Bounty Cleared banner says “Bounty cleared. You are no longer a target.”, and your Dog Tag reads Bounty $0.

Where the Bounty Stations are

Bounty Stations are green military laptops on stacked cases, on Hajin and in X01. On the tac map they are a money bag with a skull, labelled Bounties. These are the ones we have pinned:

Station	Grid	Where
Cheongun Village	F4	On a rooftop on the west side of the village. The one we used.
East of The Grid	H6	By NuriGO East, next to the Extreme threat zone of The Grid.
Deadtown	B7	In the south west of the map.
X01, Main Warehouse	E5	On the Main Warehouse floor of X01, at the west end of Main Warehouse.

All four are on the Bounty Stations layer of our interactive MW4 DMZ map. The X01 one sits on the X01 map, Main Warehouse floor.

Hunting other players’ bounties

The same station works the other way round. The Wanted Players to Hunt list shows the Wanted Operators in your match. When we used it nobody was Wanted, so the list said “There are currently no wanted operators”. On an earlier visit a station listed one Wanted player with a $50,000 bounty, and intel that reveals their position on the tac map cost $12,500.

To claim a bounty you have to finish the job:

1. Find and kill the Wanted player. The game confirms it with Wanted Operator Eliminated, the bounty amount and “Recover Dog Tag to Claim Bounty”. A player with a bounty who is not Wanted yet gives Bounty Operator Eliminated instead, for example $15,000 in one of our runs.
2. Pick up their Dog Tag from the body.
3. Extract with it. The payout is added after a successful exfil. In one of our runs the extraction summary listed a $50,000 bounty payout for a Damascus tag.

Dog Tags you extract with go into the Dog Tag Case at the FOB, which shows who the Operator was and how they died. Upgrading the Dog Tag Case station raises the payout when you claim a bounty. Our FOB guide covers the case and its upgrades.

The Bounty Leaderboards

The Bounty Leaderboards station in the FOB has two boards, each with a Global and a Friends view. They refresh once a week, with a countdown on screen.

• Top 50 Most Wanted: “players with the highest bounties last week”. In the week of November 7 the number one sat at $2,240,000 and twelfth place at $1,440,000. A player who gets eliminated stays on the board, crossed out.
• Top 50 Bounty Hunters: “players who collected the most bounties”, with the number of bounties collected and the total amount.

Bounties in X01

The bounty system also runs in X01, the Season 1 black site. Kills inside the facility raise your bounty, and we got the Wanted Operator Nearby and Wanted Operator Eliminated messages in there. X01 is small and built around PvP. A Wanted player is never far away in there.

X01 has its own Bounty Station, so you do not need a Hajin run to pay off a bounty. It is on the Main Warehouse floor in E5, at the west end of Main Warehouse, and it works the same as the ones on Hajin. The game also reminds you of it in X01 with a Bounty Warning banner: “Killing players increases bounty. Pay off at Bounty Station.”

Wanted players show up on the X01 tac map the same way as on Hajin, as a red circle with a skull. We saw one over Cargo Bay and one at the Deep Vault.

Tips

• Check your Dog Tag before you deploy. If you are Wanted, every squad near you knows where you are.
• Pay off a bounty early. The cost is always about the size of the bounty, so a small one is cheap to clear and a big one is not.
• You do not have to clear it all. One payment already halves the bounty and the amount other players can earn from you.
• Keep the cash in your bank. The station takes it from there, not from your backpack.
• Hunting pays only if you get out. A Dog Tag in your backpack is worth nothing until you extract.

Frequently Asked Questions

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