payday-2
I just completed Framing Frame on full stealth (difficulty hard). Had to replay Day 3 a few times and I noticed that I can down 2 or 3 guards without any ill effects. (Assuming I answer their pagers and hide the bodies.) But after that additional guards arrive.
When do the guards arrive exactly? How many? Is there a difference between difficulty levels? And, as it seems that some of them leave after a while, how many will stay?
So far, from what I could read online (in this guide and on the wikia, among other sources):
Pay grade
The pay grade for a mission indicates how much cash players can expect to get out of a mission -- source.
Also this thread suggests it can go up to 10 stars.
Day rate
The dayly income rate is a cash reward with a multiplier for the day a heist takes (e.g. 1x in The Bank Heists and 3x in the Rats Heist) -- source.
Contract pay
The contract payment is a flat amount of cash reward based on the number of white stars (pay grade) -- source.
Payday
The overall payday is the sum of the other two cash rewards (pay grade and contract pay) and will be shown on the map if you select a heist -- source.
Yellow bonuses
These bonuses come directly from the difficulty (or "risk") of the mission, pictured by the yellow skulls on this very same screen. Normal = no skull -- overkill = 3 skulls.
Instant cash and bag loot items
The instant cash it the one you loot and put in your pockets directly during the game (jewels, cash bundles, ...) The bags are those heavy packs of money, jewels or even drug you'll have to carry in order to achieve a mission.
Balance
This section contains the sum of all the amounts contained in the Income section ($332,400 in the example given in the question) distributed between two type of accounts: the offshore account and the spending cash.
Offshore account
The offshore account consist of most of the money players steal during the course of their heisting career. The player has no way of interacting with their offshore account and is only used to show off how much the player has stolen -- source.
Since August 30 2013, you can use your offshore account to directly buy specific missions from Crime.net.
Spending cash
The cash you get, finally. In the given example, it's 10% of the total amount, but so far I couldn't find any precise calculation to know if that percentage can vary or not.
This is the offshore account money and 10% of that becomes you spendable cash. -- source.
From The Long Guide by Frankelstner - detailing stealth mechanics analyzed from the extracted game files:
Terms used:
"Cool" refers to the state of person or camera during stealth when he/it has no exclamation mark.
Once the person or camera has an exclamation mark or alarm goes off, there is no going back: The subject can never become cool again. I refer to this state as "uncool". Dead or broken subjects are not included.
Alerts are noise and instantly turn people in hearing range uncool. In the context of this game, alerts mean that neither the orientation of the head nor obstacles make any difference and that the person becomes uncool instantly without becoming suspicious first.
Unless you shoot in the sky, every gunshot ends with a gunshot impact. The noise origin is the impact location. Technically, gunshot impact alerts are of the same type as gunshot alerts. As a result, gunshot impacts may cause alarm on day 1 of Big Oil, but they can also be used together with Control Freak to intimidate civilians.
When your gun has issued a gunshot alert (i.e. you have fired your gun), subsequent gunshot alerts by the gun are blocked for 1.5 seconds, unless the origin of the alert differs by more than 5 meters. Whether you fire your CAR-4 once or 15 times within 1.5 seconds to control civilians with Control Freak, they both issue just a single gunshot alert. There is a separate but pretty much identical block for gunshot impact alerts, where the 5 meters rule has a greater effect.
All player weapons have an alert range of 45 meters with the following exceptions: Brenner, KSP. MG42, R93, Thompson, Queen's Wrath, Lion's Roar, minigun, Lebensauger have an alert range of 40 meters. The Thanatos has a range of 35 meters. The saw also causes gunshot and gunshot impact alerts and has an alert range of 35 meters when not using up the blade (2 m if silenced), else 75 meters (8.5 m if silenced). The flamethrower has an alert range of 300 m. The grenade launchers and RPG do not cause gunshot alerts.
All weapons with an alert range of 45 meters have their alert range reduced to 1 m when silenced (thus their gunshot impacts have a mere 0.25 m range). Weapons with an alert range of 40 meters or less (except saw) have their alert range reduced to 0 when silenced.
Uncool civilians cannot hear anything but gunshots (and gunshot impacts) caused by the players. Control Freak basic fully intimidates civilians when hearing a single gunshot alert. When hearing too many gunshots of players without Control Freak basic in quick succession, untied civilians will stand up no matter their intimidation level (only Dominator aced blocks this). This being said, due to the 1.5 seconds cooldown it is virtually impossible for a single player to make a civilian freak out and flee.
Uncool enemies cannot hear anything but gunshots (and gunshot impacts) caused by the players. Technically, they were supposed to listen to explosions and glass breaking caused by the players as well. However, the function used by HE rounds, hand grenades and the grenade launchers explicitly claim that the cause of the noise is the group of civilians and enemies, but not the players. As a result, any alerts caused by that function are ignored by uncool enemies. Breaking glass also does not work correctly and is ignored by enemies. Thus enemies behave like civilians in that regard and will react to gunshots only (and maybe trip mines). Enemies prefer to target players whose alerts have been heard and may also decide to shoot due to alerts.
There are 4 different ways alarm can be raised:
Basic ECMs disable the first two triggers as long as they are active. With the ECM pager skill, alarm is raised only by map-specific triggers.
There are three ways to figure out if alarm has been raised:
On Big Oil especially, if you are not the person stealthing it, the only reliable method of figuring out if there has been alarm is paying attention to the music, as there is no alarm message and the disappearing exclamation marks might be due deaths. Conversely, as long as you can see a single exclamation mark, you are still in stealth as no alarm has been raised yet.
Excerpts from 'Dispelling Common Misconceptions' Reddit /r/paydaytheheist post by KarateF22:
Best Answer
You are able to kill up to 3 guards without any ill effects. Once you kill the fourth guard, one additional guard will show up. This functions the same way as it does on Framing Frame day 1. I don't know for certain if there are many locations the guard will spawn from, but he does appear from the very bottom of the staircase (the part that isn't accessible).
While stealthed, Bain will announce the arrival of the extra guard. Once he appears, he will inspect the entire place (he follows a similar path to other guards). He is noticeable because he stops to talk into his walkie-talkie and report that things are clear. Once he has inspected the entire place (takes a few minutes), he will leave. Again, this function the same way on day 1.
To the best of my knowledge, this functions the same on all difficulties (although I believe there are less guards to begin with on lower difficulties), but truthfully I've never completed the map on Normal and it has been a long time since I've done anything less than Overkill. Speaking of to the best of my knowledge, this information all comes from hours of playing; however, I haven't played the game in about 6 months, so it may be patched (Overkill don't explicitly mention every change they make in their patch notes unfortunately).
Since this functionality wasn't in the game to begin with, I went through the patch notes but couldn't find much to support any of this unfortunately. Here's all I got:
April 10, 2014: