Introduction

A large portion of the player base has experienced some level of frustration with deathmatch. There is a current divide between players who use deathmatch to warmup and players who use deathmatch as a gamemode to try to win, but regardless of why you play it, it often can feel frustrating to play. Over the past several weeks I have been recording and classifying deaths in an attempt to statistically show why deathmatch is frustrating. There are now 1000 deaths recorded, and I felt that number is sufficient enough to begin sharing results.

Methodology

After polling a friend group I determined 5 ways in which they died that may cause frustration. Any deaths that did not include any of those 5 causes were not as frustrating. I carefully defined each cause of death such that only one "cause" would be selected per death even if there are multiple sources of frustration. Over the course of that past 1000 deaths, I have recorded my deathmatches, rewatched them, and selected the cause of death in a spreadsheet I have created simply for recording data. All of these deaths have occured with the current form of deathmatch (since the reworked spawns). Here are the causes of deaths:

Double Swung: Died in part due to damage contributed by an enemy who enter your line of sight, while you are currently engaged with a different enemy.

Triple+ Swung: Died in part due to damage contribued by two or more enemies who enter your line of sight while you are currently engaged with a different enemy.

Spawn Death: Died within one second of spawn protection wearing off. If something is classified as a spawn death, it is not given any other classifications regardless of how the death occured.

Shot in Back: Died due to an enemy off screen which you had no chance to turn to and return fire.

Cleaned Up: After leaving an engagement but being left with 50 or less health, you are killed by another enemy who's shots do 50-100 damage. If something is classified as "Cleaned Up" it is not given any other classification regardless of how the death occured.

Fair Death: Any death which is not given any of the above five classifications

The deaths are defined in such a way that they are checked in a specific order (i.e. did a spawn death occur? If no, then were you cleaned up? If no, then were you shot in the back? If no, then were you triple swung? If no, then were you double swung? If no, then it was a fair death). This may skew data slightly, but this method was chosen to encapsulate the main cause of the frustration. For example, if you're spawn killed you don't particurly care how it occured.

You might think that some of these deaths are not frustrating, or that someone that dies in these ways needs to "get better" and that their death was still fair, and that is fine. This is only meant to encompass the many ways people CAN BE frustrated.

Results

Here are the raw results:

Only 38.2% of deaths felt that they would be unfrustrating for the majority of the player base. Surprisingly this is higher than I expected it to be, but I feel as though this number should be closer to 50%. Anecdotally, I feel that the current spawns are still part of the issue. There are countless times someone spawns in looking at the back of my head (which is why being shot in the back is such a common occurance). Another issue, is a large portion of the player base utilizing foot steps and only peeking when they have an information advantage. This is not something I think is personally bad (even though I am more of W keyer in deathmatch), but a lot of players are frustrated by others who wait for footsteps or gunfire, and then swing from their hiding spot. This effect without a doubt caused a spike in double or triple+ swings. Those of you who are advocates for getting health immediately after a kill rather than having to pick it up can cite the 10.3% of "Cleaned Up" deaths as evidence for this need.

Another interesting result is to look at the longest streaks each of these types of deaths occured in.

It should be noted that the 9 fair deaths in a row only occured once, 7 in a row was the next highest with 1 occurance, and 6 was the next highest with 1 occurance. Beyond that fair deaths never occured in streaks more than 4. Additionally, spawn deaths and shot in back deaths had a single outlier, and never occured in more than 3 straight occurances outside of their longest streak. Far more interesting was the amount of consecutive deaths that were not "fair." The longest streak was 17 consecutive deaths. There were 22 streaks of at least 5 consecutive deaths that were not classified as "fair."

I am providing this data as a way for you to determine for yourself if deathmatch is good in its current state. If you feel that any of the classifications I have listed are not frustrating and are fair, feel free to add the percentages together to determine the amount of "true" fair deaths in your mind. If there are any more specialized, or different classifications you would like to see, let me know in the comments and maybe I can include those in the next set of data.