My past 10 Deathmatch games have lasted a total of 73.3 minutes. Out of that time, I've died 262 times which has resulted in spending 13.1 minutes waiting to respawn after I die. The percentage of time I spent respawning in my past 10 Deathmatch games was 17.7%.

Hi all,

There is a post DAILY on this sub begging for changes to the Deathmatch system to be made, so I hate to throw more fuel on that fire, but it really does drive me crazy. I'm grateful Riot tossed us a bone and finally gave us DM, but in its current state it can be a very tilting experience and goes against the main concept goal of practicing aim.

I was curious and did some very basic math to determine how much time I spend respawning versus actually practicing my aim. I want to note, I only went as far as using my last ten matches to determine this, so it is by no means a huge sample pool or scientific in anyway. I just thought it was an interesting anecdote.

To give you guys an idea, I am currently Diamond 1 in NA and have peaked around Diamond 3, fluctuating multiple times between D1-D3. I do spend some DMs playing pistol only to practice pistols, which will probably account for games where I spend more time dying (a point that I will touch on again).

The lowest amount of time I spent respawning was my second to last match where I spent 14.7% of the time just respawning (1:18 respawning out of 8:50 of playing).

The most amount of time I spent respawning was was my tenth match where I spent 23.9% of the time just respawning (1:33 respawning out of 6:57 of playing).

Every match I played in the last 10 Deathmatches resulted in at least over a minute of respawning. The lowest amount of time was 1:03 and the highest was 1:33.

I think these stats bring up some important points that I want to expand on a bit:

• 1. Newer players are being PUNISHED for dying more and thus getting LESS TIME to actually practice their aim. IMO, this is the biggest and most important point. I come from a long CS:GO and 1.6 background. The only way I ever got decent at those games was by being a newbie spending hours in DM servers learning how to burst, tap, and spray in infinite situations. In the current Valorant DM system, newer/less-skilled players have less incentive to stay in a server if they are getting steam-rolled by good aimers and are punished by having LESS TIME to actually learn the mechanics of the game. I believe, by far, that DM is the best way to learn to be a good aimer. But if you create a system that makes it miserable to experience that, then you are effectively slowing the growth of the skill cap in this game and creating a huge skill disparity gap between high rank players and low rank players. Granted, this gap will obviously always exist, but if you incentivize new players to enjoy practicing in DM, the game will get better as a whole.
• 2. The current system of Valorant DM defeats the purpose of focusing on aim practice. That being said, of course you have something to gain by playing DM in its current state. But 14-20% of your time practicing aim SHOULD NOT BE SPENT RESPAWNING. It should be spent practicing. That is a huge chunk of time wasted for absolutely no reason. As many people have brought up on this sub before-- playing the warm-up to DM feels more streamlined then playing the actual DM itself. Which makes no sense. DM respawn times should be instant exactly how it is in warm-up. Players shouldn't be incentivized to "win" DM, they should be incentivized to take as many aim duels as possible in the amount of time they choose to play. Players should not be punished for dying. This is especially annoying for people like myself who work full-time and have very little time to actually play the game. I want to spend my time practicing as efficiently as possible so I can have more time to squeeze in comp games. It just makes no sense.
• 3. People wanting to practice pistols have less time to practice per Deathmatch. With pistol rounds be heralded as the most important rounds in the game-- which have potential of completely flipping games-- there is no incentivized way to practice pistols. You can do it in DM, but because you're playing against rifles and ops-- you are punished by dying more frequently and thus getting less time to actually practice. A pistol-only DM would be a huge benefit to this game. I'd even argue a headshot-only DM would be huge as well, but not as crucial as pistol.

I realize that the Range is an answer to a lot of these issues, and that's great. If you prefer practicing in the Range, you do you. It's of my personal opinion that Deathmatch gives you an opportunity to practice against an actual human player-- which creates an infinite amount of situations and aim duels that you can practice to actually apply in-game, which makes you an all-around better and more versatile aimer. This experience would be extremely difficult to replicate with bots, which is why DM is so invaluable IMO.

I left out a bunch of ways to improve DM that smart people bring up on this sub everyday. But I wanted to really focus on how inefficient and counter-productive it is to punish people for dying in a mechanic where dying shouldn't matter. Only aim practice should matter.

I respect Riot and how involved they are in listening to community feedback. I'm sure unrolling DM was no easy feat. BUT, there's so much room for it to get better, to create a better player experience, and to make us all better at the game so we can continue enjoying it.

Thanks for reading!